Communication in remote teams

AUTHOR: LUKA Horvat

Communication fundamentals

In this lecture, we will cover the very basics of communication theory. We will see what are the most important communication types and why is it important to be aware of them. Everything shared in this lecture is something you can apply to all areas of leadership and life, not just remote work. Understanding the basics here will be the groundwork for successfully grasping topics in other lectures of this section. 

Any interaction we have in our life is done through communication. Whether this is talking to someone in person, sending an email or just liking a post on social media, it is a way of communicating our thoughts and intents.

Let’s take a moment and look at the basic structure. Communication happens over a communication channel that consists of at least three parts. These are:

1. Source
2. Medium
3. Receivers

In each communication channel, there is only one source. This is the entity that is emitting some sort of content. The content is emitted into the communication medium which relays it to one or multiple receivers. If we would think of this in a “normal” communication setup where you have at least two people talking about something the Source would be the person talking, Medium would be speech (sound waves) and receivers would be one or more persons listening. This model of the communication channel can be applied to any form of communication out there.

As a side note, I deliberately used the word content instead of information because, by information theory definition, information is only such content that provides a meaningful (meaning new) content for the receiver. For all purposes and intents, later in this lecture we will be only using word information.

On a high level, there are four types of communication. Depending on the source of communication, it can be verbal or non-verbal. Depending on the communication medium, it can be formal or informal. If we consider those communication types more closely and think about combining them in different ways, we will see that any kind of communication happening in an organization can be reduced down to one of the four possible pairs.

Describing and understanding the difference between formal and informal communication is definitely easier so let’s start with that.

Formal communication has the goal to share information as effectively as possible. It should be impartial, concrete, documented and fully understandable to all recipients. When communicating formally, nothing should be assumed or taken for granted. One of the most extreme examples of formal communication are legal documents which are (or at least should) be created in a way that nothing is left to interpretation and that both source and receivers have an identical understanding of the content. Another form of formal communication can be performance reviews, OKRs or feedback polls. With formal communication, discretion and secrecy will often be required

Informal communication is everything that is not formal communication, obviously :). It is relaxed, conversational and is applied in everyday life. Informal communication is the predominant way to communicate for most people and we use it in various different ways with our coworkers, friends and family. Slang, emotions and abbreviations are all commonly used.

In certain situations, such as talking with your manager, people you manage or a client you are trying to win, you will balance the usage of Formal and Informal communication. Being either at the “Yo, whasup bruh” or the “With my kindest regards” end of the informal vs formal spectrum will yield very poor effect on the person you are communicating with. Knowing what is the appropriate level of informality to use in certain situations is the key to success in a lot of situations. 

Now that we understand the difference between formal and informal, let’s look at verbal and non-verbal communication.

Verbal communication is the exchange of information using words. It can happen both through spoken and written mediums of transferring information. Verbal communication answers the question of what we say. Verbal communication should be structured and easy to understand.

Non-verbal communication is the communication we emit without, or on top of, using words. It encompasses intonation of our communication, body language, different kinds of audio or visual signs and overall answers the question of how we say something.

When communicating, we would always heavily combine verbal and non-verbal communication. Unlike formal-informal distinction, verbal and non-verbal communication are complementary and it is encouraged to use, and understand, both at the same time. Especially in spoken communication (face to face, video), non-verbal communication will always be present and the kinds of body language we use will be part of the message we are conveying. This is especially true if we try not to use body language and other forms of the non-verbal message – it will only amplify the non-verbal spectre of communication.

Various research has been made to study verbal and non-verbal communication and each of them concluded that all of us actually convey more information through non-verbal than through verbal communication. This means that when we communicate with someone, it is more important HOW we say something than WHAT we say. For the purpose of this course, we will not delve deeper into explaining why this is but it is important to be aware of this. Communication science is a huge area and in these few minutes, we only covered the very very basics. In the next lecture, we will see how all of this applies in a remote environment.

Communication venues in remote organization

In the previous lecture we have covered the fundamentals of communication and the difference between formal and informal, verbal and non-verbal. Let’s now take a quick look at how those types apply in remote settings.

If you are a leader in a remote organization, the importance of understanding different aspects and ways of communication will be more amplified than with in-office communication. This is because you are working with people you did not have a chance to meet in person, yet you need to make them feel welcome and as a part of a community. Communicating too formally and they will easily disengage and will not develop proper cultural fit. Communicate too informally and they might get too relaxed which will affect their output and productivity. Finding the right balance is not an exact science and depends on the personality of the recipients and the kind of culture you are trying to nurture in the organization. It is important to always be on the lookout for potential communication discomfort signs from the other party and by that try and adjust the level of formality.

Given that remote organizations are in their nature more progressive than average, the formal communication will also be more progressive. This means that:

• Something that before had to come on a physical paper will now come in a PDF
• Emails will be used as an official method of communication and conveying important news and rules
• Group chat announcements will be preferred over an office or team – wide all-hands meeting.
• Video or voice calls will replace face to face meetings where sensitive and/or personal issues are discussed.

Utilizing this approach to communication, remote organizations will save on operational complexity, time and costs to deliver a message. As a leader in the remote organization, you need to know your team and know which delivery option is appropriate for what kind message. Think of the level of formality, the impact message has, and the amount of it’s traceability that you require. Do you need a document signature, an assumption that a chat message has been read or an acknowledgment on the call?

In-person communication is something that remote-only organizations can afford very rarely and definitely not any time they’d like. If the team is spread across the globe, flying it in for a meeting would not be a good way to spend the money. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of working remotely. By not being able to meet face to face at will, everyone in the organization needs to excel at other types of communication listed above as well as have a strong understanding of verbal and non-verbal messaging. As a leader, you need to especially be aware of this and find ways to “read” people and ensure that you are nurturing their success and happiness in the workplace by communicating via chats and calls efficiently with them.

As a leader, it is your task to always be aware of this and set an example on how to communicate successfully. People will look up to and learn from you on this. If you communicate clearly and with empathy, so will others. If you limit yourself to formal ways of communicating, don’t expect more from the people in the team either.

Using Chats

A lot, maybe even the most, of communication in remote teams today will happen via chats. When in an office, due to the physical proximity of people working together, it’s almost as if you are on a constant voice call. However, actually being on a constant voice call would be pretty awkward and unsustainable. This is where the chats come in.

One of the first things any team, especially a remote one, will do is pick the official chat application where messages can be exchanged. There is a plethora of tools today that facilitate chatting in certain way and each of them comes with their benefits and drawbacks. Picking the right tool is extremely important as you eventually will end up modeling a lot of your communication processes around that tool.

Properly setting up your organization’s chat environment is an extremely important task whether you are doing that on the company level or on the team level. Just as with any other part of business, unless processes are set up and respected, things will quickly fall into disarray. Let’s then cover some of the basics about organizing the chat environment:

• Having a tool that enables both 1-1 messaging as well as group messaging is crucial. Having to set up a call anytime you need to talk to more than 1 person at the same time would be a huge waste of time. A big plus, even a must for a lot of organizations, is the ability to set up public and private group chats where the public chats could be discovered by anyone inside the organization and joined.
• The tool should be available on all major desktop and mobile platforms. 
• The tool should enable chat naming – set up a simple naming convention that will help people find their way around all the channels and what each of them is for.
• Having a tool that enables access to old chat messages easily and quickly will prove to be a big benefit.
• Teams should have their own group chats where team topics are discussed.
• Differentiate work chats from watercooler chats. Having both work-related and work-unrelated topics discussed in a single chat will affect productivity negatively and will introduce a lot of noise into the channel. However, watercooler groups, and chat in them, should not be discouraged as it helps build cohesion in the team.
• Leadership (or groups of leaders) should have their own group chats. Those will most likely need to be private groups where other might join on as-needed basis.
• If larger discussion around a single topic is happening, spin it off into a separate channel. This will both enable better focus of only those that are required and easier traceability.

Chats can usually be considered as the very informal way of communicating (unless there are some official announcements being made) and are used for work and non-work topics alike. Sending messages in chats is a form of verbal communication, because we use words. However, modern chat tools acknowledge the importance of non-verbal communication and they all support different ways to communicate non-verbally. That can be emoticons, alerts, highlights or something else. For any chat communication that is not strictly formal (eg announcements), usage of non-verbal components should be welcomed in the team.

Being proficient with using chats is an important aspect of working remotely. Ability to compose sentences properly, type quickly and use emoticons with ease is no less important than speaking skills such as pronunciation and body expressions. Make sure that everyone in your team is aware of this and that this culture is nurtured from day 1.

Leading and organizing calls

Communication via calls is, alongside chatting, the most dominant way of communicating in a remote team.

 Calls can be done with or without video component to them. This is important because of the fact mentioned in previous lectures, which is that we convey more information in non-verbal than verbal ways. When communicating via calls, especially without video component, a huge portion of the non-verbal communication spectrum is cut off. This means that facial expressions, body gestures and everything else visual will not be present. This creates problems both on the sender and the receiver sides. The sender will need to make sure they compensate for the lack of those with either more detailed verbal communication or conveyable non-verbal (such as accent) communication. The receiver will need to make sure to provide, in a verbal way, detailed feedback on their understanding of the information that comes across in order for communication to be successful.

As a leader in the remote organization you will participate in A LOT of calls and in various different roles. Let’s take a look at what kinds of calls there are depending on the size and structure of the participants:

• One on one calls are used for a variety of reasons such as training, syncups, discussions, feedback sharing and similar. They are the most personal ones and can weigh more on the formal or informal side depending on the topic. Team leaders and middle managers will have a lot of such calls with the people they lead and their peer leaders in the organization. Due to the direct relationship between all participants on the call, it is highly preferable that both participants are on the call with video turned on. This will enable best transfer of communication and feedback between participants which will have multiple positive effects such as less communication noise and better relationship building between the people. Depending on the kind of work the team or the organization does as well as other factors such as organization culture, 1-1 calls between various people will be scheduled in different ways. If you are running a small team, or a tight project, you might want to have recurring 1-1s. If you have laid out the processes in a highly efficient and detailed way, you might need to only have them on the as-needed basis. Definitely don’t avoid them though, as they really are important for the cultural and relationship building. Both parties of the call will usually contribute to the call in a similar amount.
• Team calls are the next most common type of calls. For instance, a software development team would have their daily scrums and retrospectives as samples of such calls. But this really applies to any other type of team. On these calls you would usually have one leader and multiple individual contributors. It is these calls that are the most important for the overall team’s success. The team lead will have access to the joint mindset of the entire team on this call to communicate any kind of direction as well as to receive any kind of team / project feedback and updates. It is therefore very important for the team lead to communicate as clearly as possible on such calls, without leaving any room for wrong interpretation by other participants. It is important to note that this kind of calls usually has very similar structure regardless of the level of leadership. The leader of the team will be the major contributor to the call but every other member will be encouraged to contribute without any hesitation.
• Department calls are the next major type of calls, which, depending on the size of the company, could be all-hands type of calls as well. In these calls, it will usually be the senior members of the organization leading the call and sharing various different updates to the very broad and diverse audience. The topics will rarely be tied to a single team but rather the results of synergy between multiple teams across the organization. Purpose of these calls is to bring high level updates to wide audiences as well as to bring alignment between teams that would usually not work that closely together on a daily basis but their outputs are working towards the same goal. Department head or few senior executives would usually be the predominant contributors to the call with individual contributors having significantly less “air-time”. This enables more straightforward way for information to be shared and ensures the call stays on the intended topic. It is important for such calls to stay on topic and within dedicated timeframes mainly because there is A LOT of people on it – it will be dozens or even hundreds for larger organizations. This does result in another negative consequence though which is that attention can easily drift away from the call to other things for people that are just listening in. Because human’s attention can easily be lost, it is highly important that people who lead the call do that in a very engaging way and ensure that the information shared really is useful to all the participants.

Another type of calls that are very common are Project-calls. Everything that an organization does can be called a project. Whether that is software development, new marketing initiative or a client on-site visit. Audience on these calls will always only depend on the project and nothing else. It can contain people from different teams as well as different levels of seniority and leadership. There most usually would be a project leader on the call that would manage the flow of the call and make sure everyone stays on topic and contributes to the overall goal of the project. This fact is not specific to remote organizations or meetings done via calls, same issues happen in live project meetings too. However, the additional complication that needs to be tackled in remote organizations is increased complexity of ensuring that everyone has complete and identical understanding of what is being said on the call. When you have people in the same room it is very easy to gauge who is “on top of it” and who is lost zoning off by reading their facial expressions and body language. In a remote call this is not possible and additional measures such as doing additional rounds of acknowledgment are required.

Proper alignment and thorough understanding of the project and individual tasks by everyone is of paramount importance for the success of the project. As a leader, you need to utilize the above types of calls and communication venues in various ways to ensure each group and individuals alike have complete alignment and work in unison towards the end goal. Being skilled in navigating calls and communication is crucial. Knowing when to take initiative and when to turn to chit-chat, when to be a source of encouragement and when to show compassion will differentiate the leaders that are successful and loved by their team versus the ones that are failing.

Information Sources of Truth

We have seen in the previous lectures that there are numerous ways of communicating in the remote teams, both when considering the communication venue (mail or chat for instance) and structure (or participants). Various communication channels will create different types of content and, without proper structure, a situation can quickly become chaotic. To avoid this kind of noise in the communication, proper structure of communication as well as sources of truth need to be established.

One of the simplest things that should be done is that communication venues are set up per topic or per groups of topics. We have covered this in the previous lectures too but the important takeaway is that:

• Teams need to have their own venues
• Department leads need to have their own venues
• Projects need to have their own venues
• Any important discussions need to be recorded and organized in a written form.

Venues can be both chat groups and group calls but most often they will be both.

A role of a leader is to always guide the communication into the proper venue. Discussing a project-related topic in a team chat will likely result that another project member doesn’t catch up on the discussion. It will also significantly reduce the traceability of the project history and why certain decisions were made. Having the proper communication venue processes in place will greatly facilitate this.

Always be aware that chats are much slower communication venue, where, due to the lack of non-verbal component, a lot of noise can be introduced. In the service of speed and clarity, the majority of discussions and brainstormings, especially when there are different interests involved, should be happening on video calls.

The outcome of important discussions done via a call should written down in the proper place though. This will ensure that everyone provides their immutable agreement on the outcome and next steps.

Having very clear organization-wide policies on where certain kinds of information are stored is important in any organization, but especially so in the remote one. The casual “Hey where do I find X” type of conversations that are very common and quick to execute when people are physically together are significantly slower in a remote environment. However, by setting up the information policies properly, remote organization would eliminate the need for such question by having each person in the team always know where they can find something. Whether it is project information, a process handbook, training materials or something else, everyone should know where to look for it.

There are various tools that facilitate information and knowledge storage in an efficient and accessible way. As the leader in the organization you will need to pick the right one and likely also figure out the right way to organize it so it suits your processes in the best way.