Tip: Have a chat room open at all times
Your team can just pop over to your desk. Remote teams need to know that they can reach you. They need to see that you are there. Having a team chat room and individual chats on a system like Microsoft Teams, Skype, or Slack can really make communication easier.
It’s less formal and team members can ask each other questions. This allows them to help each other and it allows you to see their communication back and forth. You may answer a question for 1 of them and find that multiple team member had the same question but were afraid to ask.
Be wary of Chat and Email overload
It is hard to communicate enough and easy to over communicate. No one is going to read a long chat message or an overly long email. You need to keep things short and easy to understand and you need to limit communication to only the necessary times.
Depending on your intention you need to choose the method of communication that works best.
- Email – For quick interactions that are not meant to be long conversations.
- Chat programs – Skype, Microsoft Teams, or Slack are great tools for team communication.
- Video chat – Anything voice related should be done over video chat so that you can see each other. We do our 1 on 1’s in a video chat and then track those interactions in 1 on 1 Track to help improve our teams performance.
