How to Make Communication in a Remote Team Less Frustrating

In an office, the number of interruptions can be uncomfortable. Anyone can see if I'm at the desk, come to me to ask questions or ask me to do something. At any time. All the time.

Now imagine that your colleagues are invisible. You come to a coworker's desk, start talking, and in fifty percent occasions, they don't respond because they are not there at all. Super frustrating, wouldn't it be? Yet, this is how remote work feels often.

In fact, in remote teams, we get the worse of the two worlds. A constant stream of interruptions from Slack or similar, together with colleagues ignoring our important inquiries.

The root of the problem lies in expectations. If you walk to my desk, you expect me to talk to you. If I send you a message, I expect you to respond. When turning on Slack, I expect not spending all day answering questions. If we want to set any communication guidelines, it's essential that every team member understand what the rest of the team expects him or her to do.

So when I want to…

1. Get something done now or today: tag @name at Slack.

On the one hand, this implies that I am expected to respond in time when I get pinged on Slack. On the other hand, I can be sure that I'm not bothered with things that are not urgent.

2. Get something done tomorrow or later: Asana.

Less urgent tasks should go to a project management software like Asana. It should have deadlines assigned to individual tasks. Of course, we need to be able to rely on the colleagues to finish the work before the due date.

3. FYI message: email.

We all know how evil email is, but it's actually okay for not urgent things that don't need any response. Much better than Slack certainly. We should just not expect a response to our emails.

4. A question that requires an answer today: Slack without @name.

Use the appropriate channel in Slack, and don't tag anyone in particular. If we all read Slack a few times a day, we can expect somebody to pick up the thread later today.

5. A question that could imply a task: Asana.

For example, "What's the current storage usage of CloudWatch? If it's over 30GB, set up a task to clean up old logs."

6. Email that would contain a task: move the conversation it to Asana.

Email is infamous for endless threads with more and more people on the CC list. If I realize that the email I'm writing could imply a task, don't send it, and copy the conversation to Asana instead.

7. GitLab: technical and impersonal only. 

Technical work trackers like GitHub or GitLab should stay technical. And impersonal, in a sense that tasks (issues) could be in theory reassigned to anyone.

8. For any discussions, pick up the damn phone.

Last but not least, remember that nothing beats a proper dialogue for any kind of discussions. It's a good idea to set up "open office" hours in your calendar, when the rest of the team knows that they can call you without bothering you. We can prepare a list of non-urgent questions we have for a particular colleague, and go through them all at once.

What are your tried and trusted tips for making communication in remote work painless? Let us know in comments!