Distributed Teams: Clarity through Better Communication

In my very early 20s, I became a middle manager at a retail clothing store. Let’s just say it sounds like E.J. Taxx. I worked there for a few years while I was in college. I don’t feel like I was an amazing employee, but most of my coworkers were highschoolers. The bar was set pretty low. The fact that I showed up on time and actually did my job gave me a leg up on most of my peers. Unfortunately, that didn’t prepare me for management.

I struggled to properly communicate with my direct reports. The first hurdle I had to overcome is that most of them were teenagers, and while I wasn’t much older than they were, we spoke a very different language. Every request I made, and every discussion I had, ended with a series of rolled eyes and heavy sighs. The only thing that seemed to work was constant communication. I felt like my only choice was to be a micromanager.

This experience followed me into my next management role at the local public library. As the IT manager, an important part of my job was overseeing part-time employees and volunteers. Poisoned with my “knowledge” of how to manage and direct teenagers, I wound up being terrible at this aspect of my job: I gave people too much direction; they didn’t have any room to make their own decisions. People didn’t want to ask me questions because they were afraid I’d take away whatever autonomy they had left. My direct reports were miserable. My boss was miserable. I was so miserable that my wife suggested we leave the country.  

Those two management experiences solidified in my mind that micromanagement was synonymous with too much communication. I didn’t realise that the problem was what I was communicating, not how often I was communicating. That didn’t serve me very well at my next management stop. In my haste to not be a micromanager, I left my direct reports to wonder what they should be working on and how well they were doing. I didn’t know what they needed or how projects were progressing. Eventually I left the company disheartened and unsure that I really wanted to manage people at all.

Building Bad Communication Habits

Fast forward to the founding of Saturday Drive. We began our company as a completely co-located entity. We had a great office space in downtown where the whole team would work together every day. 

I loved having an office. I shared an office with my founding partner, James. It was right by the front door. I was usually one of the first people there, so I got to greet the rest of the team as they came in every morning. 

Back then, it was easy to roam around the office and bump into various team members. It was convenient to call everyone into the board room to have an all-team meeting. If anyone needed to know anything, it was likely just several steps away. It was our own little version of Silicon Valley in the middle of Southeastern Tennessee.

Yet, eventually, we still wound up leaving the office space for a more distributed workspace. (We’ll talk some more about the hows and whys of that move in another blog post.) The team all went home to work, and those early days were painful. It was a traumatic change for a bunch of office dwellers to become free range. There were casualties.

Most of the hits we took were around clarity and connection. We’ll focus on clarity and talk about the connection challenges another time.

Not having an office made us more keenly aware that our communication strategy was flawed. From our early days as a small team we had picked up some bad habits.

Let me be clear; these aren’t only an issue for co-located teams. It can just as easily happen with distributed teams that have conversations in one on one chats, private Slack channels, or limited Zoom calls. They were merely amplified for our team making the transition from co-located to distributed.

1. Too many conversations behind closed doors or with too few people without a culture or system for distributing information to the larger team.
2. Decisions, processes, and strategy was not written down, but lived in the heads of a few people.
3. Institutional knowledge distributed from person to person on an as needed or as requested basis instead of formally documented.

These bad habits come with bad consequences.

1. When a person leaves your team, so does all the institutional knowledge that lived only in their head.
2. Onboarding new team members is especially painful and slow. This is especially true when those team members are distributed.
3. Lack of clarity as decisions or information changes. Some people know the new way, while others remember the old way. Very poor version control.
4. Cross-department or role knowledge is almost nonexistent. Talk about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.

It has taken us a while to address these bad habits, and, honestly, we’re still dealing with them. However, we’re much better today than we were, and it began by being introspective about our communication.

Goals of Communication

To get started, let’s talk about why we communicate with our team. This may seem like a silly question, but it’s the most important. If we don’t know what our goals are, how do we know if we’ve communicated successfully?

Let’s brainstorm some of the reasons that we communicate with our employees:

• To clarify the work that needs to be done.
• To help employees understand how their performance is being measured. How do we expect our people to do a good job if they don’t know what a good job means?
• To build relationships.

Knowing why we communicate is an important first step in improving our communication.

Before you move on to the next section, take a minute to brainstorm why you communicate with different people in your organization. Why do you communicate with your direct reports? Why do you communicate with your boss? Why do you communicate with stakeholders?

Communication Frequency

It’s easy for managers to question how frequently they connect with their direct reports. Do you communicate too often and risk being labelled a micromanager? Or do you err on the side of less communication and risk team members losing clarity? Is there a happy medium between those two extremes? In this instance, I don’t think that we should try to find a middle ground. The right information cannot be over communicated. If you’re giving your direct reports meaningful, useful, and genuinely helpful information and feedback, you cannot communicate enough.

I truly believe that when employees complain about micromanagement, the problem is often what is being communicated, not how frequently it’s being communicated. When was the last time you heard someone complain that their manager provides too much clarity? Or that they know too well what’s expected of them?

How do we achieve this state of over communication?

Great communication can be challenging. Having a set tried and true communication methods in your toolkit can make communicating easier and therefore more frequent. Here are a few of the communication tools we’ve had success with:

Asynchronous Communication

Asynchronous communication makes up most of our corporate communication. Most of our work takes place within projects which have their own spaces for asking questions and measuring work. Since that’s not the focus of this post, let’s talk about a few company-wide techniques we use to keep everyone on the same page. I’m sure that we’ll go more in-depth with each of these in the future, so I’ll just give a brief description here.

The power of asynchronous communication can easily be understated or missed entirely. Since it tends to be our primary and preferred type of communication I want to share a few of the attributes that make it so effective.

• It’s more economical. Everyone consumes when it’s best for them and not during their best working hours.
• It’s more efficient. No one has to change their schedule to all get together at the same time or fit it in.
• It’s more effective. Anyone can access the content at anytime giving your company a backlog of communication.

Internal Podcasting

Your team wants to hear what’s going on in the minds of their top leadership. It helps them stay informed with the direction of the company and the challenges it might be facing from all sides.

For us this means every week the three owners record a podcast with project updates, business decisions, team members shoutouts, etc. This is a vehicle for spreading high-level information, and each team member can listen at their leisure. Show notes are typed up and posted with time stamps and the team can comments with additional questions or their own takes on the content.

Short Video Messages

Call it internal TikToks if you will. With 100% less lip syncing and dancing. Unless that’s your team’s culture. Record short messages that unpack a concept, value, or process within the company. Over time the team may suggest things they would like to understand better.

While not on a set schedule, our CEO posts short video messages for the whole team. He might post two in a week or skip a week in between messages. These are usually under 5 minutes and never as long as 10 minutes. They are a great opportunity to really make a connection with the CEO as well as feel his connection with the content.

Written Heartbeats

We borrowed the name of these from Basecamp and their ShapeUp development methodology. These are messages from a department or role where they share the progress of work being done in their area. There is no set schedule, but we usually encourage people to try and post these every few weeks.

Anyone in the company can then and comment on their own schedule and everyone can be in the know of all the great things happening in every corner of the company.

Check–ins

These are automated questions that get asked of every team member on a regular basis. For example, we ask each team member to post a picture of themselves on a weekly basis or to share what they are proudest of at the end of the week. The goal of each check-in is to help everyone feel connected. Especially when it might be someone or somewhere you don;t have regular contact with.

Synchronous Communication

While we far prefer asynchronous communication over synchronous, there is still place for it when used appropriately. Here are a few of the ways we use it.

All Team Meetings

These are tough when you have team members across many different time zones, but still very powerful. Plenty of energy is found when everyone can see the whole team all in one place.

We rarely do these. Perhaps a few times a year at most. We try and save them for important vision casting where live Q & A’s would be helpful, other similar important events where collaboration and connection are the primary goals.

1 on 1 Meetings

All of our managers have weekly, thirty minute 1 on 1 meetings with each of their direct reports. We’ll have more content on the structure of these meetings in the future, but for now I’ll say that these meetings are the main way we build relationships and rapport between managers and direct reports. The purpose of these meetings is to foster connection; the biggest danger is that the 1 on 1 becomes focused on project progress updates.

A benefit of having weekly 1 on 1 meetings with your direct reports is that if you have to cancel a meeting, there’s usually not a need to reschedule. Because you’re meeting so frequently, missing a week isn’t traumatic.

Keep in mind that everyone needs communication, even people who are “low maintenance.” Having a weekly 1 on 1 gives even those who don’t require a lot of attention space to ask questions and receive feedback.

Team Co-Working Pop-Ups

These are simply team member initiated video conferencing calls where people work beside each other and converse on whatever topics strike their fancy. In a distributed company it’s easy to feel disconnected or isolated. Being able to create an simple space to engage other team members goes a long way in easing those feelings.

Project or Departmental Meetings

These meetings are led by individual teams on a as needed basis. For instance our Customer Success team meets every Friday to discuss the common issues of the week and their overall processes. Our Communications & Engineering teams usually meet a little less regularly and mostly around specific stages of a project.

There’s a lot more to say about communication, and we’ll pick that up next time.

Until then, how do you foster communication between your managers and their direct reports? What are their goals for communicating? How do you communicate important information, like what should be worked on, and how are employees being measured?