Deliberate Communication: Make the Invisible Visible
This post addresses the importance of communicating context in remote teams. It’s part of the Visible Teamwork series. Context is part of Deliberate Communication, one of the principles of Visible Teamwork. Deliberate Communication suggests communicating your context, availability and mood to strengthen interpersonal relationships. (This post is part of our Guide to Visible Teamwork. Sign up to our Newsletter to hear of its release later this year.)
We continuously interact with our environment and it has an effect on us whether we realise it or not. In remote teams, our physical environment is often different to that of other team members. The people around us might be different. The circumstances in which we work might be different. When we assume people share our context, we expect them to behave in the same way as us, and it throws us when they don’t.
We often bring snippets of our personal environments into the office in the form of random conversations, photographs and other objects on our person or on our desk. Knowing people’s context helps us to get to know them better. It can influence our interactions when we know their context has changed and we expect a change in behaviour to follow.
An important event in our town, city or country can affect our working day - even the weather can affect us. If you work from home, what other people are up to in your household can affect the amount of work you get done in a day, whether you enjoy the luxury of a closed home-office door or not. Noisy people in a co-working space can distract you, or lead you to change unexpectedly the type of tasks you work on throughout the day.
Sharing context can also help team members feel better connected, as they gain an insight into the environment in which team members operate. It reminds everyone that we’re human, with lives and physical environments in flux. All this information about our surroundings can easily get lost when we work away from each other.
If this is something that you and your team members don’t get to do spontaneously, it might be time to structure to this communication.
Note: “Sharing context”, especially if you work from home, is not about sharing your personal life in a way that makes you uncomfortable. It’s about communicating those external factors that affect you as a person and professional, which team members might be unaware of because of your physical distance.
Context: Tool, Process, Behaviour
If you think context will influence how your team members work and your team interactions, find a way of providing the information in a way that suits your team.
Depending on your team culture and workflow, you can do this asynchronously, or in real-time.
TOOL: Chat-based Collaboration Platform
PROCESS: Set up a dedicated channel called “What’s Going On” or “Context” where you only post every time something has changed around you - in your home life, in your country, in your office space. For example, “Hey everyone, I will be moving house over the next two weeks, so my communication might be choppy” or “We have road works today just across the office, so I won’t be working on the final report for the next couple of days.” Depending on your team culture, this could become a place to introduce ‘co-workers’ like pets, children or co-working space friends, or to share photos and reports from travel and events.
To personalise the messages and increase the sense of connection, encourage (and role-model) the use diagrams, doodles and pictures, as well as text.
Agree to be brief and accept vague statements from those who don’t want to disclose too much: “Things have got a bit crazy at home” should be enough.
During those times when everybody’s personal context isn’t changing, agree to post once a week a message like “no change“. This will keep the existence of the channel in people’s minds, ready for when things start to change.
BEHAVIOUR: Pop into the channel a few times a week, to see whether anything has changed, and whether there is anything you should consider when you interact with your team members.
Agree how much conversation you might want in the channel. Maybe just post and accept that there will be no engagement - you’re just posting information invisible to others. As team leader, take note if you think the context might affect performance or might affect it in the future. If you are concerned about someone’s situation, follow up in private, or at your next one-one.
Not all concepts of Visible Teamwork need to be adopted asynchronously and sometimes it’s more effectively to communicate in real time.
TOOL: Meeting Platform
PROCESS: Set 5 minutes at the beginning of your meetings to check in with what’s going on around you. You can make this process easy by asking questions like, “What can you see outside of your window?” (“Have you got a window?!”) “What’s your weather like today?” “Is today markedly different to yesterday in any way?”
If you have a large team, it might be faster to type in the chat.
The question “What can you see in front of you, when you look beyond your webcam?” can give you instant information about what is happening around team members that might influence their participation in the meeting.
BEHAVIOUR: Make sure you honour this practice, even if you are very busy and need to get through a lot of material. Role model with short statements that describe how context affects how you approach your work.
Organisational Context
Besides missing out on colleagues’ context, by working away from each other and other employees in our organisation, team members often miss out on what is going on in the organisation. In a previous blog post, we saw that some people can feel connected to the organisation and its purpose, and that can motivate them to do their best at work. If they begin to miss out on that information, motivation might decrease. Feeling disconnected from the organisation you work from, can also be a trigger for feeling isolated, something we want to prevent in our workforce.
Most organisations will push out information via official internal channels, but the unofficial information might get lost. As a team leader or manager, you’ll probably come into contact with more people from other teams or departments than your team members. It’s important that you share some information you gather during those interactions with your team.
Some of your team members might be involved in cross-functional initiatives, and they will gather bits of information about what’s going on in other parts of the organisation.
As part of your Visible Teamwork processes, you can introduce an asynchronous way of people “dumping” any information they come across as soon as they acquire it. This could be information about training opportunities in your organisation, interesting webinars and online resources, budgets, information on clients, internal promotions, internal or external initiatives in the organisation, etc.
Make It Easy
The important thing about all these processes is that they are easy to follow and become part of everyone’s workflow. If you use Slack or MSTeams, create a channel to communicate context; if you use email, it could be an email thread; if you and your team members use Trello or Planner daily, create your system there.
Deliberately communicating information about the context affecting our work, should be as easy as stepping into the office space.
Thank you for reading our blog posts. If you need help designing Visible Teamwork processes with your team, get in touch.