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Communication Channels

Communication covers all exchanges of information necessary to complete our tasks. The typical tools available for us to cultivate levels of communication include (but are not limited to):

  • In-person Meetings
  • Virtual meetings
  • Emails
  • Direct messages
  • Forums, Channels
  • Office layout
  • Work pairing
  • "Water cooler" conversations
  • Asynchronous code review
  • Documentation
  • Issues and bug reports
  • Status updates
  • After-work drinks

This broad collection of communication tools allows us to enable channels of various types of information exchange, from low-noise high-concentration work to collaborative work and cross-disciplinary brainstorming.

Communication Medium Aspects

Communication channels present individual strengths and weaknesses, which are typically complementary. We distinguish between the following aspects of the communication media to highlight the appropriate tool selection for our communication purposes.

  • Immediacy
    How quickly is the information received and read? How quickly can we expect a reply?
  • Audience reach
    What amount of people do we reach with this medium?
  • Investment
    How much time are we required to spend on preparation, drafting, attending?
  • Longevity
    How ephemeral is the medium? Is the information archived? How accurately does the information age?
  • Searchability
    Are we able to search for semantic content and references within the information? Longevity by itself is necessary for audits, compliance, and potential legal issues, but longevity without searchability is pointless for daily business.
  • Context
    Is the medium referencing work? Can we attach information? Do we know who is sharing information and in what their position might be regarding the shared information?

Meetings, both virtual and in-person, are immediate. Information is shared, received, processed, and responded to within seconds. However, meetings do require a high amount of investment due to preparation time and full task switching of all attendees. Meeting minutes, transcripts, and recordings increase longevity and searchability.

Emails, instant messages, and channel posts have decent immediacy and the asynchronous advantage that people are not forced to abandon the tasks they are working on. Written messages suffer from the lack of body language and tone and require slightly more effort to phrase accordingly. Additional context can be established through URLs and attachments. Naturally, forums and email servers are archived and available for decades.

Code reviews, status updates, bug reports, and documentation offer the highest amount of organic context, as the communication body is attached to referred work. When dealing with evolving products, such as code, it's considered good practice to hard reference the version of the product.

Let's keep in mind that we are never restricted to a single form of communication. Generally, it is better to overcommunicate than undercommunicate when it comes to media and channels. This avoids misunderstandings, accidental loss of information, or the impression that information is being withheld deliberately.

Social Aspect of Communication

Human communication problems can be mistaken for technical problems. Communication problems with the IT department may result in building a new ticketing system, instead of establishing low-effort communication channels. Technology alone does not strengthen personal connections.

Nurturing direct communication and social relationships is a catalyst for increased productivity. Building baseline trust over time reduces communication barriers and shortens the time needed to get work done. The most driving facilitator of strengthening bonds is in-person meetings. For geographically distributed teams, try to meet at least once a year, ideally 4 times per year.

New tools, team members, or management require additional communication until sufficient time and energy have been invested. When our teams are stretched thin, they can take out their frustration when practices aren't working as smoothly as before. Across cultures, languages, and personalities, people need to make adjustments to their expectations of processes and behaviors to avoid friction.

Negative communication behavior can express itself as non-constructive criticism, contempt, or defensiveness towards other teams or team members or a complete emotional distancing towards the team. Throughout a product lifecycle, it is natural to go through emotional ups and downs towards a product or task; the initial hype of the kick-off event is not sustainable.

We need to stay on the lookout that emotional disregard does not extend itself towards team members. Communicative indicators are blanket accusations of "we always" or "they never". These symptoms lead to an us vs them mentality across our teams which lowers delivery frequency and quality across our organization.

Our culture and feelings toward each other mirror the form of communication we have, which always finds a way into the product we ship and therefore into our market competitiveness.

Note

Too much conflict avoidance leads to a homogeneity of thought that reduces creativity and problem-solving skills. Our employees are not children. We can expect our peers to communicate like adults. Until they can't and a designated person steps in as a mediator.

As with everything in this book, communication is an ongoing process that we continuously learn to improve.

Transparency

Our communication channels are public by default and available to every member of our organization. This does not mean we encourage every member to join every communication channel, but we certainly do not want to arbitrarily limit the flow of information. We encourage people to attend each other's meetings for more visibility into what different parts of the organization are working on. Our policy, enforced socially, not technologically, is everyone gets to listen, not everyone gets to speak.

Successful software products need input from fiscal and market realities. Executives providing a clear and non-conflicting vision of business direction help create realistic timescales and clear reasoning behind priorities.

Communication helps build resilience among individuals and teams - letting people know that they are not alone, allowing them to share coping strategies, and transferring knowledge between both people and groups, having a significant impact on the organization as a whole.

All of our internal media is public by default to every team member. This includes source code, development environments, documentation, and assigned tasks and backlog. We actively encourage our employees to confer about work in progress and completed work. If our employees are able to access all knowledge that was tackled throughout the history of our organization, we drastically reduce duplicated work and initial research phases.

Non-harmful exceptions to this transparency rule include necessary compliance enforcement, security-driven decisions, and C-level market-driving decisions such as potential acquisitions.

Workspace Design

We have influence on the communication behavior of our teams. As with the Inverse Conway Maneuver, we ask ourselves who we want to communicate with whom, how frequently, and design our workspaces around this mandate. This approach works for both physical and virtual workspaces.

The most physical method for steering communication within an office is, quite physically, walls. We plan who shares an office with whom and the physical distance between teams. We arrange our vertical teams by rooms, floors, and buildings. Subtler influences of communication behavior are established by designing the viewing angles of individual contributors. For office workers, we strategically place table arrangements, whiteboards, plants, and décor.

Over the course of a product cycle, we want to offer workspace characteristics for our teams:

  • Environments for low-noise, high-concentration work
  • Environments for collaborative work and brainstorming
  • Environments for social engagement across disciplines

Our teams and individual contributors should be able to cycle through these environments with little overhead. We can support the creation of these environments through tactile efforts, virtual tools, and process guidelines.

Within office buildings, we offer closed offices with high ceilings and natural and adjustable lighting for low-noise environments. We establish war rooms and conference rooms for collaborative experiences and nurture social encounters in the kitchen, break rooms, or lounges. While we are somewhat limited by the physical location of our remote teams, we have the ability to offer equipment for home office design, noise-canceling headphones, or offer coworking office spaces.

We guide virtual collaboration experiences with our set of tools and features. The ability to send and also mute incoming noise in the form of emails, instant messages, or calls enables our contributors to focus on high-concentration work without distractions. Real-time collaboration tools support our teams when sketching out ideas and brainstorming. Cross-disciplinary channels and public-by-default channels within our primary communication tool underline our organization's practice of open communication.

Our policies and processes enable helpful workplace characteristics by setting certain expectations in the way our teams do their work. Offering flexible hours supports our teams to plan out work hours which are most productive for them. Disallowing meetings during certain days or times of days in the week guarantees that teams can plan low-noise work. Setting our kick-off events and social events during work hours prevents the exclusion of team members with responsibilities outside of work. Ensuring consistent work practices across teams nurtures inter-team work discovery.

By setting up organic traits and processes, we encourage interaction modes to become team habits.

On-site, Remote, and Hybrid

Since a global pandemic and government-dictated self-isolation accelerated work-from-home policies, remote work has become a debated topic. With software, we have the unique ability to hire (almost) any division of our workforce from any timezone. Hiring across state and country borders introduces additional HR responsibilities of income tax, potential organizational tax, etc.

Virtual and remote work have the potential to hire a more diverse workforce from a larger talent pool. These factors should be the driving factor of workplace design and need to be documented. Workspaces are tools towards productivity and should be wielded as such. Offices are not to monitor our employees. Our employees are not children.

If we offer remote work, our organization has to ensure full remote capabilities. Decisions have to be made and understood using remote tools. If decisions or agreements are made within the office walls exclusively, it negates the positive impact our remote members have on our organization.

Remote work performs best with the correct infrastructure. Established tools, processes, communication habits. Proper cameras, multiple screens, good microphones, and a stable and fast internet connection. Our remote employees are still working in physical locations. While we cannot fully control the environment, we can, if necessary, influence it by offering coworking spaces or dedicating infrastructure or equipment.

As our teams evolve and interactions evolve, we also adapt our office design. This requires high flexibility for physical offices. Virtual offices are easier to scale.

Hybrid models have the advantage to focus our employees on work. Parents can choose to work undisturbed in the office. The downside is potential expenses for unused space. We can offer free access to co-working spaces.