The New Meeting — communication in the remote world
Needless to say, we are living through uncertain times. How the months ahead go will depend a lot on our actions as individuals, as companies, and as nations. The pace of technology has fortunately brought us new ways to communicate with each other and keep touch with each other. But while texting your friends or Skyping with your loved ones is almost second-nature to many of us, those of us lucky enough to continue more or less “business-as-usual” from our remote offices have a tricky type of communication to master — electronic business communication.
Not to say that electronic communication is new to business — it’s been around in some shape or form for decades, picking up in pace ever since the internet became available to the public in 1991 — but where just a few weeks ago most of us could just get up and walk to our colleague’s desk to clear up a misunderstanding, meetings are now relegated to Zoom conference calls and watercooler chat has been replaced by sharing dystopian memes on Slack. How are we managing? What kind of norms need to be built up? Are we ready to turn our office jobs fully digital?
In this article I talked about the human adaptability problem — the concept, in essence, that our ability to adapt to new technology is increasing, but it is not keeping up with the current pace of change. Communication is no exception. Though there are dozens of services available for communication — from Slack to Reddit, from email to TikTok, from Skype to Snapchat — each has their own unique culture, which is even divided into subcultures based on country, interests, age, and any number of other factors. Few people are an expert in every one of these communication services, and nobody is an expert in every one of the subcultures. And, when we try to engage in a communication medium we aren’t familiar with, at best we can come across as ridiculous and at worst we can really do damage to a relationship (think of someone who isn’t familiar with emojis commenting 😂 on a Facebook post about someone’s grandparent dying).
Business communication is no exception — from senior managers expecting replies to their emails all hours of the day to students sending informal messages fraught with spelling mistakes to recruiters, there are many “electronic communication faux-pas” to make in the world of business. So, I’d say we are managing “ok” and that we are all quickly learning and adapting to these challenges, but that there are still a great many norms we need to hammer out. Let’s get into some of them, with a focus around remote work.
1. Setting Expectations
Transparency takes extra effort
When we set remote work rules at Solvemate, we saw it was all about communication — all the small ways that we can replace the in-person cues we’ve lost. For example, switching your Slack status to “do not disturb” is, for some people, the virtual equivalent of putting headphones on. And when we are trusting all of our colleagues to self-manage but also to take the time they need in these difficult situations, it becomes crucial that everyone sets clear expectations with each other. Maybe one colleague shifts their working hours earlier in the day so that they can take care of their kids (something our CCO did recently) whereas another colleague plans ten minutes between meetings to attend to them (something I’ve started doing). Some colleagues might take a two-hour lunch break to eat and go for a jog, whereas others might shorten their workdays. But where we can easily see if someone has left the office, proactive communication becomes even more important when everyone is remote. But it’s possible to go too far with this, which brings us to…
Meetings as-needed, Emails as-needed, Messages as-needed
When an entire company goes remote, it can be tempting to schedule more meetings than usual — be it out of a misguided attempt to “keep an eye on things” or because people are less picky about which meetings they accept when they know they can just mute themselves and continue working. But going remote is no excuse to let “meeting debt” get out of hand.
So when it comes to meetings, e-mails, and messages — ask yourself about the purpose, and ask yourself if everyone involved is also important to that purpose. It’s a tricky balance to keep, to be transparent and communicative but also not to go overboard — but it’s important to be introspective and to do our best to keep that balance.
(By the way, I’m not referring to informal catch-ups between colleagues — these are of course necessary to keep team bonds strong, replacing watercooler chat and lunches together).
Business hours still apply
At Solvemate, we have a general expectation that colleagues will respond to messages from their colleagues within one business day. Going remote hasn’t changed that expectation. The important part isn’t just to make sure recipients understand that messages shouldn’t “fall through the cracks” (even if it means just confirming receipt and saying “I’ll get to this tomorrow), but also to make sure senders understand that they shouldn’t expect instant replies. Business hours still apply, meaning that whatever a colleague’s chosen work schedule ends up being, everyone else should respect that and not get impatient just because it’s been a few hours. In case something is particularly urgent, we do encourage colleagues to share phone numbers on a Google Sheet as an alternate way of reaching them — but this isn’t mandatory.
2. Good Meetings
Good remote meetings = organized meetings
Even before this pandemic, the world has been getting more remote. We have more ways than ever to work through digital interfaces, but with that flexibility comes increased responsibility… in particular when it comes to organization.
In-person, it’s a lot easier to clear up misunderstandings and figure out problems “on the spot.” Not sure how to structure a project? Pull a couple colleagues into a room with a whiteboard and you’ve got the makings of a brainstorming session!
Although there are virtual equivalents to the whiteboard session (e.g., we use Miro), nothing else can quite compare to the energy of an in-person meeting. Nor will you be able to “read the room” as easily when speaking over a video feed. For this reason, when it comes to remote meetings, you need to prepare even more thoroughly and present in an even more structured format than usual.
3. Good Messages
Think ahead & make the next steps obvious
Speaking of sending messages, we could all take a page from “customer service” style communication. What do I mean by that? Well, imagine if you were going to return an item because it arrived damaged. Hopefully you wouldn’t just send a message to customer service saying “it’s broken plz fix”, but instead try to think ahead to what the party needs to know (e.g., specifying your order number, which item is damaged, and maybe even including a picture if you’re extra-forward-thinking).
The same philosophy should also hold in messages, especially when it comes to requests that you make from your colleagues. Ideally this should be the norm, but when everyone is remote, it’s more important than ever. All requests should include context and make it obvious what you expect to happen next.
Have a cool lead you want the sales team to follow up on? You should probably share their contact details, some quick context of why you think it’s a good use case, and possibly @mention the rep you think might be best suited for the follow-up. Want to ask for a change to your technical permissions within an organisation? You should probably share your exact requirements, why you need the change made, and the deadline.
This also ties into only sending useful messages (as per above) — just sending “hey, need your help to change something” — or, even worse, “hello” — just wastes everyone’s time. Instead, think ahead to what information your colleague will need and structure a message accordingly. It will save back-and-forth and will show you respect your colleague’s time.
Bring back brb / gtg
In the early days of instant messaging, common etiquette was to drop a “brb” (be right back) or “gtg” (got to go) whenever something else came up. For some reason, that’s not as prevalent anymore. Nobody expects you to update your status every five minutes, but if you were messaging back-and-forth on Slack for the past ten minutes and you now have to hop onto a call, it takes only a couple seconds to tell your conversational partner that you have to go.
Voice messages are selfish
We can typically get information twice as fast when we read it versus when we listen to it, but when “sending” information, we can speak three times as fast as we can type. So although voice messages are faster to send than written messages, they are far slower to digest. Not only that, but we tend to ramble a lot more when we are talking versus when we are typing since we don’t have the opportunity to go back and structure our thoughts or delete something if we’ve gone on a tangent. And not only that, but you can’t easily listen to voice messages when out and about — not everyone carries earphones, and not everyone wants to download long messages using their cellular data. So if you send a speech message, the sender saves time, but time is stolen from the recipient. For these reasons, I consider them an impolite and selfish way to communicate.
Can’t bring yourself to tap out a message on the go? If you were going to send a voice message anyways, dictation is a viable alternative. It can still be much faster than typing and as the technology improves, our digital assistants do a better and better job of transcribing our speech to text.
Closing
When it comes to electronic business communication, we all have room for improvement. But with the current situation testing everything from our healthcare system to our collective ability to stay indoors, do you really want to spend time arguing with a colleague over a miscommunication or being stuck at your computer to half-listen to a useless meeting? Let’s all do our part to be considerate of others in the small ways. Though how you structure your messages at work is one of the smallest things you can do, it’s still something, and together, all these small actions can add up to something bigger.