WFA Leader Fridays: Improve Your Team Communication
A Not So Obvious Way You Can Optimize Your Team’s Remote Communication
Thanks for reading! Fridays are dedicated to leaders in the Work From Anywhere world. But these tips can help you be successful, even if you are not a leader yet
Leading in a remote environment is not easy. Aside having the desire to lead, you also have to develop your leadership style and adapt that to a new way of thinking about how to lead.
One area where you can immediately improve yourself, and your team, is communication. This also happens to have the highest return: a good rule of thumb for remote work is it’s 60% communication, 30% your job responsibility, and 10% doing crazy new things. In a remote start up, this is especially true.
So in this post, we’ll take a look at a not so obvious way to optimize your remote team communication.
I say not so obvious because we won’t be talking about:
Having your camera on or off in a zoom meeting
Preparing an agenda
Taking notes in meetings
Asynchronous communication (as a general concept)
These have all been written about a lot and will feel obvious to any remote leader who’s been in their role for a while.
Instead, we’ll be looking at….
Documenting Communication Norms
What is it?
Everyone has unspoken expectations about how communication should work. Things like whether it’s okay to interrupt or not, how much talking is necessary, and how to gather feedback, amongst other things. Most of us choose to leave these things unspoken.
This leads to all kinds of problems: a feeling of being disrespected by fellow teammates, certain critical voices in the team not being heard, and often, a sense from some team members that they just don’t belong.
Documenting norms is the process of having an open discussion about HOW you as a team want to communicate, and what rules you will follow in your communication (norms).
How does it work?
Here’s a list of simple steps to document norms:
Organize a meeting where everyone comes together for 45 minutes-1.5 hours. I suggest setting aside at least 1 hour. It’s okay if it ends early.
1 person must act as the facilitator. If you are the team lead, that should be you unless you can find someone outside the team to do it.
The facilitator uses a tool like Miro or Mural to collect everyone’s insights throughout the process.
At the start, the facilitator asks everyone to answer the question “In the best team you were ever part of, how did everyone communicate?”
The team lists out, either in speaking or in writing on the collaboration tool, all the ways that the team communicated. If the participants choose to speak, the facilitator should make sure they go 1 by 1. Once everyone has full expressed their ideas (usually 8-10 minutes) the facilitator should move to the next step.
Any spoken communication should be noted down on the collaboration tool by the facilitator
Next the facilitator asks “What communication practices have you witnessed on teams that were NOT effective?” Again, the facilitator should capture spoken feedback and all the team to also use the collaboration tool.
Finally, the facilitator should ask the team to come together and make a list of communication “rules” or norms. The facilitator should give as much time as needed for the team to generate the list.
Where norms contradict each other, the facilitator will ask the group to vote. For example, if your team wrote both interrupt others if you have a key point OR you should never interrupt, then the team will need to vote for how to deal with interrupting.
Once you have voted on and decided on all norms, a new document must be created! This document is something the whole team should feel comfortable referencing at any time in conversations with each other. The team should also agree, with the help of the facilitator, on how to enforce norms. The goal here is not to be forceful but to have a method for accountability.
And that’s it! This exercise has the power to raise awareness about different opinions around communication and create standards for communication that can really help make sure it’s done well.
If you found this interesting, please leave a like. Next week we’ll look at an unconventional way to make sure your best team members never want to leave.