C. Minimise Disruptions and Delays

Select the Right Channels and Tools for your Goals

1. Email

One of the staples of business communication is email which allows electronic messages to be exchanged between individuals or groups.. Email can be synchronous or asynchronous depending on how you use it. If your team is not expected to monitor their inbox throughout the day and respond immediately, work interruptions are minimized.

People can read and respond when it is most convenient for them. If immediate feedback is important, don’t use email.

     Key Features: 

  • Text Editor – Format emails with text colors and add images or links
  • Mailing lists – Broadcast information to members of a group
  • File sharing – Attach small files to share with the recipient

Top Email Providers

Gmail by Google

Outlook by Microsoft

iCloud by Apple

Ideal for

Advantages

Pitfalls

One-way broadcast of information for internal or external audience

  • Announcements
  • Updates
  • Campaigns

Two-way transactional communication

  • Short message exchange between individuals
  • Customer inquiries or feedback
  • Reach. Lots of people receives information in a short amount of time
  • Sharing. Easy to share and review information even for people outside your organization.
  • Tracking. Emails are highly searchable and provide a good trail of conversations
  • Distraction. It is tempting to check and respond to emails throughout the day, even after work hours, which may lead to unhealthy work-life balance.
  • Flooding. Inboxes get flooded easily making it difficult to find  and retrieve information. 

Tips

  1. Minimize constant email checking by defining clear expectations on the use of emails. For example, let your team know that it’s okay to respond to emails within 24 to 48 hours.
  2. Add recipients via Bcc (blind carbon copy) instead of To or Cc fields if you don’t want other people to see who receives your email. This prevents people from accidentally replying-all. And your email can appear personal if they can’t see the other recipient
  3. Use filters and labels to manage your inbox. Don’t let unimportant emails accumulate in your inbox making priority messages difficult to find.

 

 

2. Chat or Instant Messaging

Text, images, recorded voice memos and videos can be exchanged real-time between individuals or groups across a variety of devices. Communication can happen in public and private channels and conversations can be organized in threads. 

Most of the popular IM apps listed below also offer voice and video calls and task management features because they are designed for work use. They are also popular among distributed teams.

    Key Features: 

  • Channels and Threads – Organize public and private conversations easily
  • Searchable Archive – Retrieve text, images, links, files and media for context. 
  • Security & Encryption – Encrypt sensitive information to protect your company.

Top Instant Messaging Apps

Slack

Microsoft Team

Chanty (free for up to 10 users)

Ideal for

Advantages

Pitfalls

Asynchronous use:

  • Non-urgent questions 
  • Informal conversations 
  • Discussions between people with different working hours
  • Announcements with feedback

Synchronous use:

  • Gathering inputs in a short amount of time
  • Real-time decision-making or coaching on simple matters
  • Scale. Information can be shared with a large audience and thousands of people can join a chat group.
  • Informal. Chats are more informal than emails and for remote work it excels in promoting social interactions.
  • Integration. Business communication tools make collaboration easier. A lot of the work can be done and tracked within the app.
  • Focus. Chat is instantaneous and important information can easily get lost in the abundance of messages.
  • Responsiveness. Just like email, chats can become a source of distraction if expectations on its use are unclear.
  • Availability. People may equate presence for productivity. If you’re not online, are you working?
  • Lack of Context. Emotion and intention are difficult to read with text alone. A chat message without proper context can easily escalate misunderstandings

Tips

  1. Be mindful of other people’s time and interrupting their work. Be clear if your message is urgent or not urgent.
  2. Use status updates to indicate availability (e.g. Doing deep work | Out for lunch be back at 1pm)
  3. Whenever applicable, encourage and support focus over responsiveness when using chat applications.
  4. Over-communicate and give the full context when making a request or giving instructions over chat. Be deliberate in minimizing misunderstandings.
  5. Use emojis to communicate emotion and tone in your message. Communicating emotionally can also help build connections.

 

     

 

3. Voice Calls and Video Conferencing

Video conferencing is the best synchronous digital communication because facial expressions, tone and gestures are present to enable rich interactions.  Chat applications also have video and voice calls, but voice conferencing tools are far superior in handling virtual group meetings and live web events.

     Key Features:

  • HD Video and Audio – Improve online meeting experience with high quality video and automatic noise cancellation.
  • Screen Sharing – Share your screen (including audio) in virtual meetings or live demonstrations. 
  • Recording and Transcription – Make your live meetings available for later viewing. Transcribe automatically with some degree of accuracy.

Top Voice Conferencing Apps:


Zoom

 Cisco Webex 

  Google Meet

Ideal for

Advantages

Pitfalls

  • Regular group meetings for complex and important matters
  • Facilitate collaboration: planning, decision-making, brainstorming
  • Handling difficult conversations and resolving conflicts
  • Rich. Being the next best to face to face interactions, video calls communicate a lot of information and meaning including emotion and mood. 
  • Feedback. Because it happens in real-time, it is easy to gauge reactions both from verbal and non-verbal cues.
  • Connection. Seeing the person you are talking to makes it easier to build trust and create a feeling of connection.
  • Scheduling. Aligning schedules for a video call can become challenging across different time zones and working hours.
  • Documentation. Making valuable information available after for review or sharing from a call is not easy.  Deliberate  protocols or technology on meeting documentation need to be placed. 
  • Resource-intensive. Picture and audio quality are sensitive to internet speed fluctuations. If meetings are not engaging or relevant, video calls can quickly become a huge time-sink

Tips

  1. Always schedule meetings beforehand and coordinate meeting time such that inconvenience is equally shared among members from different time zones.
  2. Before a meeting, prepare and share an agenda to the attendees, so it’s clear why they are needed.  People can then add items to your agenda that might be relevant.
  3. Always keep your meeting focused and on track to avoid wasting people’s time. Start and end the call on time to prevent cascading disruptions to people’s schedules.
  4. Because they happen in real-time, be especially mindful of your tone, word choice and be transparent with your intentions. Check your background noise so it will not be distracting for others.
  5. For new hires or newly-formed teams, maximize video calls at the beginning to build connections. As members get to know each other, gradually replace video calls with other forms of communication.
  6. If your call is about a difficult conversation or a sensitive topic, rehearse and role-play for how it will play out. Mentally prepare for unfavorable scenarios during the conversation.
  7. Create a protocol for documentation of important information from a meeting. Assign a specific person to take down notes and record calls for future reference.

 

     

 4. Knowledge Bases and Team Wikis

If you’ve used Wikipedia before, then you are familiar with this asynchronous tool. While Wikipedia is public, company wikis and knowledge bases are managed privately for internal use. Structured and unstructured information is organized and made available online for employees. Think of it as a replacement to printed handbooks and guides.

If you think an information or a question is likely needed by someone in the future, it is worth making it available for all online and uploading it to a wiki. For all-remote companies, wikis and knowledge bases become their single source of truth that must  always be updated to be useful to everyone. 

    Key Features: 

  • Collaborative Editing – Share access to content and format like a webpage.
  • Change Tracking – Every content change made by users is documented.
  • Organization – Structure content into threads or topics make it easy to search.
  • Integration – Connect with your existing applications so knowledge sharing is captured as it happens.
  • Templates – Use beautiful templates made by others for inspiration of your own content.

Top Knowledge Management Tools:

Confluence by Atlassian

Guru

Notion

Ideal for

Advantages

Pitfalls

Asynchronous management of internal knowledge 

  • FAQ – frequently asked questions 
  • Onboarding materials
  • References and Guides 
  • Company Handbooks
  • Long-term goals
  • In-depth plans
  • Asynchronous Access to Information. Information is available 24/7 regardless of the time people work.
  • Searchable Archive. Knowledge bases and wikis largely contain text information.  People can easily find the information they find if things are structured and organized well.
  • Transparency. Easy to find information improves team transparency and helps everyone get the information they need to do their work
  • Update history. Modification of content is clearly documented. Authorship is also carefully tracked.
Support processes need to be in place to keep information in knowledge bases accurate.
  • Shared Ownership. The responsibility of curating information must be shared by everyone in the organization. These tools are not effective if only a few people are responsible for documenting knowledge
  • Adoption. It has more impact if it functions as a single source of truth for the organization. Leaders must actively encourage their team to take advantage of company wikis and knowledge bases in doing their work.

Tips

  1. Acknowledge and celebrate contributors to your wikis. Left unnoticed, content editing quickly becomes an invisible and thankless job. 
  2. Model behaviors of knowledge sharing and access for your team. If you yourself prefer to keep asking people for information already available in the wiki, then their adoption will be low.
  3. Design processes for curating and evaluating information in your knowledge base. It works best as a single source of truth for your organization whether they work remotely or not.