How to enable effective communication in remote environments

I’ve been working remotely for a long time—read: long before COVID. One of my first jobs involved managing a globally distributed team, that worked during my night time. Fast forward a few years, and the pandemic made remote work the new norm, especially in tech.

Working remotely across multiple companies —and running a World of Warcraft guild, but that’s a story for another time—helped me identify some key components of effective communication in remote environments. I’ve learned that it boils down to three things: knowledge management, asynchronicity, and communication guidelines.

Working in public

Access to information is key. Ensuring everyone has access to the right information when needed, will empower collaborators to be more autonomous. To achieve this, information should be as public as possible. Decisions, for instance, should be documented in public meeting notes, or shared in a public channel.

Having a shared knowledge base like Notion is a must. It doesn’t have to be perfect or exhaustive, but it should be a somewhat accurate picture of how teams do things (processes) and why they do it (objectives). Public Slack channels or email groups allow for easy information sharing, don’t hide things intentionally.

Making async work the default

It’s a common pain point for workers to spend too much time in meetings and not enough time actually working. But too often, instant messaging apps like Slack just turn into a day-long meeting. There are too many workplaces where the expectation is that someone should always answer messages ASAP.

When people know where to find what they need, they can work independently without unnecessary bottlenecks. You avoid losing time in asynchronous requests for information, and everyone saves time. Autonomy starts with transparency, and transparency begins with writing things down for everyone to see.

Setting communication expectations

To avoid the pitfalls of turning Slack into a day-long meeting, it’s crucial to define clear communication guidelines:

• What’s considered urgent, and what isn’t?
• Which tools should be used for which type of communication?
• Who’s opinion is consultative? Who’s validation is needed, and blocking?

When working in public, you want to avoid the opposite situation, where everyone has to stay on top of everything. So define your expectations clearly, so that your collaborators know when their input is needed.

Wrapping up

In their recent newsletter about how product management, PostHog shared a graph of their communication tier list. As expected for a distributed company, the public communication channels are all at the top and the private ones at the bottom.

I love that they literally have carrier pigeons, fax machines, and emails being preferred communication means than tapping someone on the shoulder. (Don’t do that.)

More seriously, I think this is a good way of summarizing the communication expectations in a company. It’s a great resource to share with newcomers to help learn your team’s principles to make remote work not only possible, but sustainable.

Cover photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash