Communication is the backbone of any well functioning team.
Over the years, we’ve seen a proliferation of digital communication tools open up numerous channels for sending and receiving messages. As a result, we are communicating and collaborating more than ever before.
But at what expense? As we bounce between emails, instant messages and calls at a higher frequency, we’ve got less time for our important work.
One solution to this hyper communication is establishing communication guidelines that everyone on your team can buy into. By setting expectations for everyone to follow, you can ease communication anxiety, improve overall collaboration, and get more of the important stuff done.
Let’s talk about how to establish these norms.
The Challenges of Always Being ‘Available’
We can all agree that a higher level of communication and collaboration within a team is great, until it isn’t. There is a threshold where more communication is doing more harm than good for your team.
There are a couple of things I’ve observed over the years.
With the rapid increase of new communication tools and channels, the friction for communication has been reduced to nearly zero. Sending a Slack message or firing off an email takes almost no effort compared to picking up the phone or walking over to someone’s desk to chat about something.
As a result, we send more messages (even when we don’t need to).
More so, most teams don’t take the time to set expectations for communication. If a Slack message comes in, do I need to answer it right away or is it OK if I wait until tomorrow? If an email comes in, do I need to respond within the hour or can I put it off until next week? If someone sends me a meeting request, can I say no or am I obligated to accept every invite that comes through? 🤔
When we don’t set expectations, we default to faster, more frequent communication because that’s what gets praised in the workplace. When you become the person who ‘responds quickly’ and ‘always gets back to people right away’ you get a pat on the back, but you also get more messages.
As a result, we never get any quality work done.
How to Establish Workplace Norms
While we can’t do much about the near-zero friction with today’s communication (unless we choose to forego some communication channels), we can take some time to set proper expectations for our team to make it clear how and when to use different modes of communication.
At Crossrope, we went through the following exercise:
Step 1: Make a list of your communication channels
Every company uses different communication channels. Take a moment to list out all the ones that apply to your organization. These may include:
- Slack (or other instant messaging platforms)
- Zoom (or other video call platforms)
- Loom (or other asynchronous video platforms)
- Phone calls & texts
Step 2: Identify primary uses and expectations
Create a sheet with three columns:
- Channel
- Primary uses
- Expectations
Let’s take a look at an example of a channel like Slack.
Primary uses:
- Asking quick questions that require a quick response time
- Sharing quick status updates or links to interesting articles
- Giving praise or acknowledgement (eg. birthday wishes)
- Flagging urgent issues (eg. website issues, customer issues)
- Social conversations in the appropriate channels
Expectations:
- Respond within 4 hours unless outside of work hours
- Use appropriate channel
- Reply using threads to answer specific questions
- Keep your status updated
- Pause notifications when in focus block to minimize distractions
The purpose of these guidelines is to help guide individuals in making communication decisions. If a Slack messages comes outside of work hours, there’s no expectation to respond until the next day. That’s outlined in the guidelines. This alleviates any anxiety or feelings of needing to respond right away.
The goal is to write out the primary use cases and expectations for each one of your key communication channels. Depending on the size and dynamics of your organization, you can either have the leadership team do this exercise or you can enroll your entire team to participate. Whatever works for you.
Ultimately, these will be your communication guidelines.
Step 3: Share and enforce with your team
Once you’ve created your communication guidelines for each channel, share and discuss them with your team. It’s important that you’re all on the same page with the intent of the guidelines and importance of using them.
It’s imperative that everyone on the team abides by the communication guidelines as best as possible and that there’s no praise given to those that break them. As soon as people notice they can get ahead or stand out by breaking the norms, the guidelines will become irrelevant.
Look for opportunities to refer and enforce the guidelines regularly. This will take some time to weave itself through the corporate culture and DNA, but ultimately it will help your team communicate more effectively.
Step 4: Iterate
This is not a set-it-and-forget-it initiative. This is a living document.
As your team grows and evolves (particularly across time zones), new communication channels become available, and hybrid work becomes more commonplace, it’s important to tweak and iterate your guidelines.
You and your team should be coming back to review the guidelines at least once a quarter to ensure everything still lines up.
Main takeaways
Communication and collaboration is imperative in every thriving organization, but it can also derail your team’s ability to get important work done.
We’re fortunate to have so many communication channels at our disposal, but it’s important we put some thought around how we want to use them.
Take some time to establish your communication norms.
You’ll be glad you did.
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