đŁď¸ remote team communication 101
Hey hey!
Today, Iâll be summarizing a Medium post written by Sarah NĂśckel the founder of FemStreet detailing her talk with Sandra Uddbäck the VP of Data Acquisition at Mapillary.
Iâm detailing out the ways that Mapillary communicates as a remote team, which will help you tighten those channels of back and forth communication with your co-workers.
Letâs dive inâŚ
Okay, so imagine figuring out whoâs online, where to update teams on the project status, running around trying to nail down meeting times - itâs crazy. On top of that imagine doing the above with a team of 65 people across 18 countries and eight time-zonesâŚ.phew Iâm tired just thinking about it.
The bigger your company becomes the harder it is to communicate. And thatâs normal. The act or practice of scaling communication ainât a breeze. Weâve got you though, keep reading.
Here are the 3 ways that Mapillary maps out their communication practices.
01 - Skip the 9am video call standup.
Save a bit of time by creating a #standups
channel in Slack, Microsft Teams, Twist, AOL, or your favorite messaging platform. Every morning everyone in the team posts their standup, example below.
What I did yesterday: 3 User Interviews and met with Eddy to refine our user story requirements for our next feature release.
What Iâm working on today: Iâll be offline for a move from 9am-12pm. Afterwords, heads down with prepping documentation for our new dev whoâs onboarding tomorrow.
02 - Schedule 2 1:1 with your direct reports weekly.
Usually, managers will set up a 1 hour 1:1 weekly but so much can happen in a week! How about 2 30-min. or 15 min. 1:1 calls weekly, instead?
03 - Sharing is caring. Seriously, share those meeting notes!
Documentation couldnât be more important as a remote team. The meeting notes you took yesterday, yes those - share them in Slack. The more public team notes, documentation, and design specs are the fewer communication blockers you or your team will face if anyone is out sick or away.
đĄTakeaways
Communication is key. Major key. It takes work and a lot of patience to get it right but when you and your team do, itâs incredible.
Try 1 of these out:
Create a #standups channel and ditch your 15 min. Zoom standup
Break up that long 1:1 into 2 1:1s
Share that documentation, donât hold onto it or assume your co-workers know what folder it was dropped into.
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