Establishing Norms for Remote Teams

Remote work, the topic de jure of the month - wait, make that the topic de jure of the YEAR.

There are numerous articles available online that contrast the pros and cons of remote work. Some articles offer advise for how to be productive while others focus on the tools of the trade. Although those are all important factors for being successful at working remotely, this article will focus on the importance of establishing a shared set of principles and norms amongst your team for communication and collaboration.

Tools alone will not make you successful at remote work, they only serve to enable communication and collaboration. However, by establishing a shared framework for how to initiate communication across the team, your team will be better prepared to be successful at collaborating virtually. It will set precedence and expectations for the use of various communication media and help reduce confusion around the type of communication and acceptable response times.

Google published the 7 Secrets of Successful Remote Teams. The article is based on a two year study that focused on key factors that make remote teams successful. Funny enough, without knowing about this research beforehand, Google lists “Set clear norms for remote teams” in their third bullet. If you work remotely, I recommend reading the article and thinking about how these things are being addressed (or not) by your current organization.

This article is primarily based on my time with the GSA Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO). I spent 1 year with this team with half of the time working remotely, so I’m providing dual perspectives - from in-office and remote. Let’s explore what it means to establish team norms for effective communication of remote teams. Again, there are numerous factors to consider when setting up the optimal remote environment but we will focus on team norms for effective communication and collaboration.

Communicating to talk about….communicating? Really?

You may find it awkward to talk about how the team will communicate, trust me, I did at first as well. Time is priceless, especially with the workload we are all juggling. You need to close a ticket. You need to finish a feature. You need to close out a user story this sprint. We’ve all heard it before, nobody has an hour this sprint to talk about how to communicate with each other. Besides, we already have email, Slack and instant messaging, so what is the point?

Well, the point is, just because we are all using the tools, and the tools are intuitive, it does not mean we are using them to communicate in the most efficient way. We all have a different perspective for using communication and collaboration tools that may not align with others on the team.

Depending on where you work, you may even experience communication fatigue where you’re having to monitor email, IMing, Slack, SalesForce, Trello/Jira, mobile text, etc… and the list goes on and on. Which do you monitor for what? How do you know you’re not missing an operationally critical message posted in an IM forum where people are also having non-work related conversation? Talk about frustrating, confusing and a waste of time. So one hour spent on establishing team norms for communication is time well spent, in my opinion. It can save you and the team hours of frustration, and even worse a work related miscue.

There are a couple of key areas to cover:

• establishing communication protocols per media, and
• determining reasonable response times

Establishing a well-defined and shared communication protocol is key to setting clear expectations for how the team will communicate. Start by creating a list of all the communication tools available to your organization. Again, as mentioned earlier this could be email, IM chats, modern ChatOps tools such as Teams and Slack, Trello for teams running Kanban, and/or mobile devices. You’ll want to know the tools available to the organization and the ones currently in use by the team.

Once you have a list, collect feedback from the team. Canvas the team and solicit feedback on how team members use the tools. Context is important here to determine how each team member currently uses the enterprise tools and in what circumstances. For example, if your organization uses email, Slack, Google Chat, and Trello (for workflow), frame the feedback in a way where team members provide several specific examples for when they use each tool. If email, do they use it for work related communication, and if yes, for internal or external customers - or both? Do they only monitor email for intaking work or do they also monitor Trello and/or Slack for work related activities?

Collaborative concurrence!

Align and aggregate everyone’s feedback so that the team can easily understand each of the use cases per tool. This should give everybody good perspective of how his or her colleagues communicate. If you get this far, great! Now it’s time to schedule a meeting to discuss the results. There are two goals you’ll want to achieve, 1) establish shared norms for how each tool will be used, and 2) determine appropriate response times per tool.

Some of you might be thinking, why a meeting, can’t we do this through a shared document where team members will provide his or her input? Well, yes and no. You can get the same results through asynchronous feedback, however, a meeting (likely a virtual meeting) amongst the team where each member can be seen and heard (turn those cameras on!) is by far more personal and impactful for making team-wide decisions than just through collaborating in a shared document.

Be sure that everyone’s voice is heard and all opinions are considered (whether on the call or in writing). The example below should be the result of how the team wants to communicate and not based on one or two assertive team members. I know it’s hard, but pry out the opinions of those introverts - which will likely be outlined in the document, so be sure to have it open and reference it often during the discussion.

A simplistic example of a high-level outcome of the meeting could resemble the following.

Having such a frame work in place sets clear guidelines for how the team will communicate, covers the various circumstances, and establishes adequate response times. There is less ambiguity amongst team members and less risk of work-related priorities falling through the crack. Moreover, new team members will step into an environment where there are clear expectations and common understanding.

At first this may seem a little micro-management(ish), but its far from it. As a remote employee, I would appreciate having such guidelines in-place on day one. You can get up-to-speed much quicker than going with the flow.

I hope you found this article helpful and informative for how to help remove communication ambiguity for your team. Please feel free to send me a note via the Contact page if you have any questions.

References:

• Google Research Reveals 7 Secrets of Successful Remote Team
• Picture by Mitchell Luo @mitchel3uo