Communication

Remote work has a reputation for causing poor communication. The common belief is that since workers aren’t in the same room, they don’t feel connected, communicate less often and more poorly, and then get out of sync. Managers especially worry about this and see it has the primary negative of remote work.

But poor communication doesn’t only happen on distributed teams. People misunderstand things all the time when working together in an office. Even in a one-room-startup where the entire group sits together, even when everyone can hear literally every conversation happening within the group, there are still misunderstandings, confusion, and people moving in different directions.

Coordinating intricate work without sitting nearby is not an impossible problem; people pull it off every day. Think of large-scale projects like the development of the space shuttle, the creation of big-budget movies, or the development of the open-source software powering the Internet’s infrastructure. Was the entire team of people sitting within earshot of each other? Were they asking each other constant questions multiple times a day or sitting together going through their daily updates and discussing every project detail? No, and I doubt their manager got status updates by walking around and chatting with people over a cubicle wall.

Great work can happen on any team, and distributed teams can communicate better than co-located teams. In some cases, all it takes is a few workers that are excellent communicators to shift the team towards a more effective process. This chapter will focus on what an individual can do to improve their communication.

A Well-Run Team Communicates

Imagine a competent team that maintains a happy and professional office environment in a large section of an open office. The group likes working together, and they get results. This team has a reputation as excellent communicators because they feel that they can freely exchange status information, share bad news, and allow the best ideas to flourish in meetings. A daily in-person standup meeting allows everyone to stay in-step about obstacles and progress across the team, and a weekly team meeting addresses any planning issues. The manager walks around and checks in on each staff member, and pulls people together to huddle up as needed for unexpected problems. Interpersonal issues, coordination gaps, priority changes, or disagreements can be course-corrected quickly. Status information and tactical discussions can happen when needed.

Because they all sit together, there is also a great deal of ambient communication that occurs: little social graces such as smiles, holding the door, awkward high-fives, and inside jokes let everyone know that they probably aren’t going to get yelled at today and that their teammates have trust in them. Multiple communication styles are working well together on this team. At the most basic level, they exchange information verbally and in-person. Each member knows the other team member’s tone, body language, and personal style well enough that it is rare that someone has trouble being understood.

Now let’s imagine that this team is going to shift work to a remote environment. Each worker will need to develop new skills and methods to make up for the gaps that can occur when you can’t read body language or easily confirm what you heard by reading someone’s posture. Let’s find some of the individual skills and methods each worker will need to keep communication healthy.

Communication Techniques

Specific techniques can help replace in-person, real-time communication. A few people on a team mastering these practices can transform a team’s behavior and adjust appropriately to a remote work setup.

Push, Don’t Pull

First, the minimum requirements are different on a remote team. In an office, by being present, you remove any doubt that you have met the most basic rule of doing a job: showing up. In an office, your manager and those who sit around you see you come in early, argue passionately, stay late, concentrate deeply, or get frustrated just by being around. They might also detect when you are struggling, excited, confused, frustrated, working extra hours, or procrastinating based on these same signals. When working remotely, you can’t just work hard and count on any form of passive visibility or goodwill; you no longer get anything for free. Because being out of sight can turn into mistrust quickly, you need to change your communication methods from pull (you tell your manager or coworkers status when asked) to push (you tell them without being asked). Take full responsibility for letting everyone know how things are progressing; don’t assume your manager knows anything. Over-communication is the better evil when working from home; do not wait to be asked to provide information such as:

What your last few accomplishments were.
What you are currently working on, and what is next.
If you have to work extra hours just to meet an expectation or estimate.
What obstacles or information could delay your current workflow in the next day.
How excited, challenged, and motivated you are about the task list.
How to reach you to get further information.

As a professional, you should have this information ready to share with an audience. Many tools make this dead simple: Google Docs, Jira, Workflowy, Asana, Trello, Basecamp, or just Microsoft Word all allow you to keep track of this vital information and share it upon request. Publish weekly accomplishments, provide advice to improve processes, and send questions to your manager and team without hesitation.

It isn’t just your status reports that require some extra pushiness. Be transparent and even aggressive with communication, rather than quiet, secretive, and hopeful that someone will ask you how it is going or what you need. It doesn’t matter if they don’t ask for information; you send information until they tell you to please stop. If you have to fall off both ends to find the middle, start by over-communicating until someone tells you to communicate less. Even if nobody else reads it or your coworkers don’t also send their information, having it at your fingertips can’t hurt you and help you stay organized.

There is less room for interpretation when you communicate from a distance. Be uncomfortably honest in your reports; they will become empty paperwork if you don’t. When you end your day, and a friend or family member asks you how your day went, your status report should be close to how you answer. Pretty frustrating: I can’t figure out something that needs to be done, or I’m behind but don’t feel that I’ve fully understood what I need to do stressing me out. Tell people if you are stuck or frustrated or confused.

Playback and Rephrase

When you are in the same room together, you learn to read small reactions, and you can adjust if you feel that people aren’t understanding. You might rephrase something you said if you see looks of confusion or repeat something if you saw someone getting distracted. You might have done this in the past without even realizing it. When discussing how to move forward, you noticed who was on board with the plan and who had questions just by who had their arms crossed, had a confused look on their face, or seemed like they were about to speak but stopped. All of these subtle signals are gone when you aren’t in the same room.

Thanks for better bandwidth; audio and video have come a long way. However, the small changes in tone that might be communicated and interpreted correctly as skepticism about a plan could be lost over the phone or not seen by all parties on a video chat. Coworkers that are easy to understand suddenly confuse you, and you them. The rules have changed. Think of a live and in-person meeting as a play, and a distributed meeting as the script. The script has to include language, punctuation, and notes that spell out the characters’ emotional state. To survive in a remote setting, learn to pull all the extra information from your coworkers.

It starts with how we communicate, and then moves to how we listen. Subtle differences in phrasing can encourage people to seek clarification from you. For example, presenters sometimes ask Any questions? during or after their presentation, but peppering in a few Who has a question? while explaining something complex gives those that are confused a safe way to catch up without feeling like they are interrupting, looking foolish, or disrupting the discussion. You want to use the opposite of sales tactics here, only ask questions without a Yes answer; assume and encourage them to stop you to clarify tricky points. Here are some quick alternative safe phrases to do this:

What questions do we have so far?
I’ll stop here to answer your questions.
What did you hear: can you repeat that back to me to make sure I was clear?
Where did that not make sense?

To improve your ability to listen, take responsibility for absolute clarity. Within a meeting, volunteer to take notes. You can then ask questions directly like Did you get that right - I heard the following…? or Can I play back my notes on that point and make sure I understood it?.

Use this technique to dig into language that seems straightforward. For example, let’s say you are working with someone, and you need a task done by them before you can move forward on your part. They say it will be done tomorrow. I’ve seen this phrase mean any of the following:

I’ll be done tomorrow.
I’m actually done, but I just want to check over my work one more time.
I’ll be done tomorrow, unless I take the day off to use my hang-gliding Groupon.
I think I’ll be done tomorrow, given my limited and fragile understanding of the task and time itself.
I’ll be done tomorrow, but don’t hold me to it; I’m a rampant optimist.
By saying tomorrow, I’m letting you know I’m 60% done and am excited about finishing sometime next week.
Every day is some yesterday’s tomorrow, so I’ll complete it in some undefined future tomorrow.
I’ll have an exciting update tomorrow.
I haven’t started, but feel that it will take me about a day. I’m going to go back to my desk now and not start immediately.

In these situations, there is no harm in asking What level of confidence do you have that it will be done by tomorrow? or Help me understand the things that could happen to make you miss tomorrow.

When it comes to coordination, for greater clarity regarding who is doing what, meet We should talk to Gary with To be clear, are you talking to Gary or should I?. Also, don’t be afraid to ask who Gary is if you don’t know. Seek absolute clarity regarding Gary.

After you get clarity, conclude conversations and online discussions with simple summary statements that are acknowledged and agreed upon. If all this feels like extra friction, yes, it can make for longer but clearer meetings. Much like the phrase from carpentry: Measure Twice, Cut Once, a slightly longer meeting that results in everyone sharing understanding can save time overall as everyone will not need follow-up or clarification.

Distributed Meetings

Meetings are more expensive when you aren’t together physically. When the team all sat together, the boss could easily grab a small group and chat in the open office about a particular issue, debate it, consider a few options, draw a diagram on a nearby whiteboard, and then make a decision. The cost of all these actions has now increased because the whiteboard isn’t as easy to set up, the key people aren’t all in the same time zone, and the rest of the team won’t be half-listening and able to jump in when they hear something that is wrong.

There will always be situations where you need real-time collaboration that can only come from a group being in the same place discussing the same thing. Meetings are expensive and terrible by default, and bad ones even more so since they kill morale. On a distributed team, meetings can get worse if you don’t change the way they work. The only way to make a meeting attended by a dozen people worse is to make three of these people dial in from the other side of the world.

If you are one of the remote people attending a primarily in-person meeting, there are steps you can take to minimize the friction, and if you are on an entirely distributed team, there are ways to manage sessions that keep them productive. First, make sure that you get invited to the meetings you need to be in and that you can keep up with what is happening in the room. You might need to be more forceful to accomplish this. Ask for someone in the room to be your advocate, and speak up and be heard. The worst reputation you can build as the remote person is to agree with everything and have your influence slowly evaporate until you aren’t included in the meetings anymore. Force them to listen to you by chatting after you dial in and interjecting and interrupting as needed.

Without your body language, you can’t provide simple cues that you are keeping up, so you need to make sure you give your feedback. Asking someone on the far side of the room to speak up or repeat themselves is not rude, but can feel like it highlights the fact that you aren’t there. Speaking up is simple professionalism. Natural shyness can prevent you from speaking up when something happens that affects the audio quality or somehow highlights the fact that you are remote. Speak up, and do so with soft language. For example, say “we” instead of “I” to shift the tone when someone can’t be heard. “We can’t hear whoever is now talking as well as before” sounds better than “I can’t hear you anymore”. In addition, if there is sudden noise on the line because someone is not muted, use indirect language; instead of saying “Someone needs to mute their phone”, which sounds like the start of an accusation, just describe the noise, and the situation will resolve itself. In the past, I’ve had to say “We hear chewing”, “We hear running water” (a graceful euphemism for what was really happening), “We hear a car horn”, “We hear an argument between two people”, etc.

Every group has collaborative meetings. Your company might call these brainstorming, whiteboarding, or a huddle. No matter what you call them, the rapid-fire, someone is drawing, ideas are flowing, casual style of idea session has to happen on any creative team. For these types of meetings, push for the right tools and practices and don’t settle for just dialing into the room where the action is happening.

For meetings that require very real-time coordination and might involve someone drawing or other in-the-room items, you will need to encourage the use of new tools to allow everyone to participate fully.

Here are some practices that don’t work:

Using a single speakerphone in the middle of a conference room that seats 20+.
Pointing a camera at a whiteboard.
Writing on the whiteboard and taking a picture of it to send to the remote folks after the meeting is over.

Instead of a camera pointed at something, share a screen and draw on it using a paint program or diagramming tool. Using modern conferencing software such as Zoom, you can draw on a virtual whiteboard from one computer and have others see it and respond. You probably do not need a $10,000 magic whiteboard. Sometimes you can get away with a shared document you edit so everyone can see it vs. a drawing. Part of moving to tools that work better for a distributed team is building the understanding that a small amount of fidelity to those people in the room needs to be sacrificed to create a consistent experience for those not in the room. Instead of an amazing presentation that has lights and sounds and smells, it just needs to be a functional presentation that everybody can see no matter where they are. Imagine that instead of being in a conference room, you are instead at a restaurant and decide to draw your idea on a napkin to show everyone; have these same expectations. You just need to communicate your point to everyone and allow them to respond.

There are always tool updates in this area as more and more companies shift to distributed collaboration. Be an advocate for simple tools to make remote collaboration better, even if you aren’t in charge. In this space, a simple tool that works will be adopted quickly. Try tools like drawing tablets such as those made by Remarkable [1], which can replace whiteboards or collaboration tools for specific use cases such as a collaborative tool like LucidChart [2]. There are also virtual presence solutions such as Double Robotics roving iPad-on-a-stick [3] and Owl [4], a 360 camera that lives in the middle of the table and highlights the video of whoever is speaking. If you have a mixed team, a digital whiteboard [5] can help the remote workers see the meeting.

Video can help greatly here. Rather than using one conference phone, suggest that you join a video meeting and encourage the remote folks to have their webcams turned on. For an entirely remote team, this will make the meeting more natural and reduce people talking at the same time. It also reduces multitasking and feels more like everyone is sitting at the same table. Just being able to see everyone’s faces can also allow a great interpretation of reactions. “John, you look like you are confused; what questions do you have?” works better than “John does silence mean you agree?”. For the people in the room, it feels much more natural to look at John’s face and say “John did you get all that?” than to have to remember that John is dialed into the little Star Trek looking phone in the middle of the large table even though no noise has come from it for the last twenty minutes.

Even if you aren’t in charge, you need to be aware that for remote teams, large meetings almost never work. This is true, especially if the meeting is designed to plan, make a decision, or figure something out. If you are dialing into twenty people on a video chat, you might be attending a poorly designed meeting. For decisions that might need a large group to more fully discuss, encourage the use of writing rather than discussion by having people write up their views on a complex subject before the meeting. Since everyone will have read the positions and viewpoints, the time spent together will get to the meat of the matter more quickly. You might recognize this method from the Supreme Court or Congressional committees, but don’t let its slower-moving company scare you away from it. One typical reaction to this method of working is to say that the things you get together to hash out aren’t as involved and don’t need people to write out arguments and debate them. Well, then why are you meeting? If it’s easy, pick one person to figure it out and have people respond to that plan instead. If you can, handle small things through online communication, and save meetings for the tough stuff.

Be An Effective Meeting Attendee

If you raise the bar for when a meeting takes place, you also raise the bar for what is expected of attendees. If you aren’t in person, be more prepared than the people who are. Showing up to a meeting and improvising your way through might work for those in the office, but the lack of preparation will show more clearly because of the extra space and delays in your interactions.

Make a point of joining 10 minutes early to avoid any updates to plugins, confusion over the conference number, and other technical issues. Over-prepare. Always read over the agenda, ask for one if there isn’t one before the meeting starts, have prepared opinions and questions, and to try to state them early rather than later in the meeting. If your company never sends an agenda, and you don’t have the power to refuse to come to meetings without them, then volunteer to write up the agenda for an upcoming meeting. Be heard. Speak early to warm up, ask questions quickly, don’t hesitate. You might need to speak up more than you are comfortable with at first, but it is on you to make your voice heard and make sure that your views aren’t an afterthought for “those on the phone”.

Do not multitask during a meeting just because you can, and they can’t. Make it a point to try to stay focused and involved in meetings as if you were there because if the conversation suddenly moves towards you and you have lost track of the meeting as you worked on other things, the assumption will be that you are playing video games or at the golf course.

Close the meeting well. If they don’t send out notes, share yours. If something isn’t buttoned-up in your mind, ask questions until it is. If after the meeting someone comes by and says What did you think of that meeting then something wasn’t clear, and you should clear it up. There shouldn’t be after-meetings to discuss what happened in a meeting. If you feel the need to interpret what was said, then the meeting was not a good one; clear everything up when everyone is engaged.

Improve Your Writing

All the clarity-seeking might seem like it would make every meeting tedious and more time-consuming. But the good news is that once you get comfortable with the techniques, you will realize that much of the discussion and diagramming that happens in meetings can happen in writing instead. What was once reliance on constant in-person verbal communication within an ad-hoc hallway meeting can now take the form of written text.

Moving what used to be a meeting into a document or discussion software offers many advantages. It means that the discussion is archived somewhere for others to search later. For small discussions, it allows the more introverted members of the team to shine as they might be more comfortable responding in writing rather than speaking up in a large group. In the case of a discussion, it means that people think out their points a bit more versus responding immediately; the deep thinkers can be heard equally.

Once you move some of your communication into written form, you might find that many of your meetings can go away. If you have ever attended a meeting where you didn’t say anything but received a lot of new information, you could have just been reading a document. There are a lot of good uses for meetings, but simple information sharing doesn’t always have to be a meeting. Writing down your thoughts before a meeting, preparing agendas, and taking notes on what was discussed are all critical on distributed teams.

Even when you still need to meet, more documentation can help. Here are some simple ways that documentation can make different types of meetings more efficient:

Meeting	Documentation Uses
Project Status Check	Everyone submits status via document, the discussion can happen in a document or outside doc for critical real-time needs
Group debate is needed to make a decision	Write out arguments and counters in a document before the meeting, then the meeting is further discussion and the making and documentation of the decision

Brainstorming session	Need to have a meeting, but write down ideas discussed
Announcements / All-Hands	Write out announcements, have the meeting be Q+A

To survive in this new world, you will have to write more. Don’t be intimidated; in school, writing is not always fun or useful, but at work, it can be a superpower. There are some myths to overcome that will not serve you well on a distributed team:

Writing has to be formal and impressive.
Your grammar and spelling matter a great deal.
It takes a long time to read and write things.

These ideas will not help you, and unless you work with a retired New Yorker editor, nobody will be pouring over your writing and stop listening if they find a missing diaeresis [6]; they just want to hear your point of view. For most business communication and social interaction, you simply want to avoid glaring mistakes that might distract a reader. Services like the built-in spell check in most text editing software and something like Grammarly[7] can help remove the type of errors that might confuse your point.

Likewise, your writing does not have to be fancy or dense to come across as well-thought-out. When you are making a point in a packed conference room, nobody expects you to speak like a visiting professor. They want you to express your ideas using words they understand. Your writing on status boards and emails should be more organized than your verbal communication but have the same tone. Imagine that you were being asked questions in an interview format, and instead of just answering verbally, you got an extra few minutes to edit your responses. It should be in your voice, but with less duplication, wrong turns, and terrible metaphors. Don’t overthink it.

The third myth is that you can’t communicate complex ideas in writing. For teams that use shared systems for things like strategy or design discussions, it can feel odd to stare at a “wall of text” when you are used to small updates. Just because work systems are built using social media principles doesn’t mean that you should treat them this way. Complex ideas can be expressed clearly using the written word, and I point to all of recorded history and our fundamental understanding of the universe, recorded and passed along in writing, as proof. Get used to reading more online, and get used to writing short, clear paragraphs providing status updates on your projects and clear direction to your team. Remember: the more clearly you write, the less you have to meet.

If you are looking to improve your writing, there are some simple ways to do this:

Write the first draft quickly.
Edit, so the second draft is dramatically shorter.
Avoid complexity when it isn’t needed.

This list might sound short and straightforward, but simplicity improves writing more than any other method.

Communication Protocols and Expectations

Without the usual pace of an office environment, a remote worker needs to set clear expectations on the best ways to communicate with them and the expected response time. It would be insulting to ignore a direct question from someone who walked over to your cubicle, but you might consider it perfectly reasonable to not answer a direct message in your company’s chat program for 30 minutes. Your coworker might have a different view, and this friction accompanied by the lack of face-to-face interaction can breed distrust.

To make it clear to your coworkers, publicize your preferred rhythm and tools for communication. First, agree on what types of communication should be synchronous and what can be asynchronous. These terms simply mean “right now” or “when you get to it”. Tennis is synchronous; chess can be asynchronous. Walking up to someone, calling them on the phone, and text messaging are synchronous methods because a near-immediate reply of some form is expected, even if it is “I can’t talk right now”. Asynchronous methods are like sending an email or a letter: you don’t expect any immediate acknowledgment, they can be ignored for some window of time, but a reply is expected within a reasonable time frame.

A distributed team that works all over the map will work primarily in an async mode in which coworkers leave each other messages in some shared tool. The general expectation might be to receive a reply within a few hours or a business day, depending on the time zone difference. A team that works together in the same building might expect an immediate answer to any phone calls, an hour delay to messages sent via a chat tool, and a one-business-day email response time.

Make clear what works best for your work: many concentration-based tasks like computer programming, writing, or data analysis might benefit from long blocks of time in which you trust that you won’t be interrupted. In this case, make it clear that messages will be read and responded to after your block finishes, and many collaboration tools allow you to set a status that can provide communication that you are heads-down and will answer when you get a chance. For real emergencies, create a second communication line and make clear that this is for actual emergencies. For example, perhaps you mute notifications in Slack in the mornings but always answer the phone. In this case, your coworkers need to know that calling your phone means there is something urgent and should only be used if they need to reach you, and other methods have failed.

You should also know which tools are best for you under certain circumstances. For example, if you are chatting with a coworker for more than a few minutes and not understanding each other, suggest that you share your screen. If a picture isn’t working, then start a video chat. If a video chat doesn’t work, perhaps one of you should go off and write up a document with diagrams and then talk about it later after you have reviewed it and thought it over. Having a set path of escalation can help you move into the right tool rather than trying to explain something within the confines of a tool that isn’t working for everyone.

Use Chat Systems Carefully

Adding to this point, don’t overuse real-time chat systems. In 2020 Slack and Microsoft Teams seem to have taken over as the tool of choice for distributed communication, but this doesn’t mean they work as well as advertised. These systems are robust, vital, yet dangerous to remote teams. They are tricky because they formalize all the distractions of an office. These systems are interrupt-based and can be worse than a coworker stopping by your desk every ten minutes with a question. If you are constantly chatting about work progress, planning, status, and issues in a real-time chat system, you are ruining the asynchronous benefits of distributed work and not allowing workers to take long blocks of time to focus. Chatting feels like work, but it isn’t. Remote workers can be among the worst overuse offenders of these tools as they use them to try to bond with remote coworkers, catch up on gossip, or simply show that they are actively working. To reduce distractions, only use the chat system for two purposes: emergency communication and non-work chatter. These two purposes are essential to overall team health, and these chat systems are great for offering “can’t ignore” messages to your phone, and for muting messages by category to read later all at once.

If you needed to get in touch with Gary, a coworker, and raced to their office to find them absent, what would you do? You would assume they are in the bathroom or a meeting. You wouldn’t assume they were playing Call of Duty, napping, or playing golf. But when they work from home, you might, even though this isn’t logical.

There will always be emergencies, and shifting to asynchronous and out-of-sight communication makes people very nervous about emergency response situations. But a real-time synchronous chat system, if used carefully, can make sure everyone still trusts that they can reach people when they need to. Because these systems are built to interrupt people, they can be seen from mobile phones and used for pager-style essential communications.

Chat systems can also help in building social trust on a team that is typically formed just by chatting in the hallway or breakroom. Don’t discount the value of tiny little human interactions that occur in an office. For example, when you see your boss in the hallway, you notice that he does not frown at you; in fact, he seems happy to be there and happy to see you. Perhaps you talk about some meaningless aspects of daily life: the weather, local news, sports, the National Spelling Bee, how kids behave in the darnedest ways. All of this creates goodwill that can smooth over rough communication or collaboration patches down the road.

This doesn’t mean that you have to share your personal life with your coworkers, but you should be civil and have grace with each other. A real-time chat system is a great way to do this outside of physical presence as it serves as a socially acceptable place for small talk and learning about each other. Create groups in your chat system for activities and specific interests and direct discussions there. Even if you aren’t in charge of what is considered normal “work-talk” over a chat system, you can suggest and discourage violations. If a group of people continuously talk about food after lunch, could they take this up in a new #foodie channel to explore this shared interest? This #foodie channel can help the team get to know each other outside of typical work conversations during breaks in their blocks of work. And those not interested can mute this channel if you like.

Build Rapport with Your Teammates

Your goal is to build trust with your teammates, not necessarily friendships. Trust means that what you say gets done; that your word is good and that your behavior is civil and consistent. Grace on a team means that they will cut you some slack if you are late or need to take a morning off. Both trust and grace are grown on a co-located team by the subtle social interactions and small talk that happen in the breakroom, at lunch, and in team meetings. You will need to work to replace these items manually.

On my team, we currently have a daily video standup meeting in which we go through the traditional three daily questions:

What you did yesterday?
What are you doing today?
Do you have any obstacles in your way?

We also have a fourth optional question that has arisen organically over time: “Did you consume anything interesting yesterday: watch a movie, read a book, play a new game?” We informally call these updates consumption updates.

This simple, consistent daily question leads to everyone on the team knowing the likes and dislikes of everyone else on the team. It has allowed those with shared interests to have follow-up conversations and to build trust and grace outside of work.

Although it is awkward, saying “good morning” over the chat system or “just got back from lunch: great new BBQ place” can replace some of the natural social graces of in-person communication. Even though it might feel awkward, initiating a simple conversation is normally welcomed.

By changing our tactics and tools, we can adjust to working with teammates that we rarely see in person. Another important group that requires special handling is the people that we will suddenly see much more of in-person: those we live with.