How Do I Communicate With My Team?
Here at Rock Solid Assistants, we LOVE talking about communication. It is something that comes up all the time, and for good reason! Whether you’re used to DIYing things yourself, working in an office with your team, or even when you have some virtual team experience, communication can be challenging! So, if you’re asking yourself, “How do I communicate with my team?” then you’ve come to the right place!
I want to take a moment to share with you how I teach people to establish communication habits, and then I’ll share some of my favorite tools for virtual teams to utilize.
What Team Communication Habits Should I Have?
As a leader, you set the tone for your team! It is completely up to you to create environments and systems that encourage regular communication. When you’re working with a virtual team, it’s important to ensure that no one feels like they’re alone on a desert island. To accomplish this, I recommend daily, weekly, and monthly forms of communication.
Daily Team Communication
If you’ve ever worked in a physical space, you probably waved hello to someone or greeted your coworkers throughout the day. It was easy to pop into their office and ask a question. But when you work with a virtual team, you can’t exactly wave a good morning or pop into an office to see if your team member wants to chat over a quick cup of coffee. So, how do you establish healthy, daily communication that feels natural?
It is totally normal (and I ENCOURAGE it) to communicate when you’re hopping into work, give a rundown of what you’ve accomplished, ask questions, and note when you’re signing off for the day. This will give your team a good idea of what you’re focused on and when you are available.
Then, you want to think about professional relationship building. You’re not a robot, and your team shouldn’t be expected to act like robots, either! On our team, we share funny stories we experience, and sometimes we have genuine heart to hearts, too. This can even include silly details! For example, my team knows that Diet Coke from McDonalds is my favorite or that one of our team members prefers “sno cones” to coffee any day of the week. This has nothing to do with productivity or work, but it builds our team communication!
What are some ways that you can foster this kind of daily communication with your team?
Weekly Team Communication
When you have a virtual team, it is easy to go a week without seeing or hearing from each other. However, it is the opposite of a healthy work environment! You have to be intentional when you communicate with your team, or it won’t happen. I recommend a weekly team meeting as a baseline for your business.
This meeting can look like getting updates from each team member, providing feedback, answering and asking questions, delegating, brainstorming, and more. Meetings like this are vital to the health of your team, and they accomplish way more than an email or messaging platform ever could.
What does your team meeting look like? Do you need to implement more of the things above, or do you need to begin having them every week?
Monthly Team Communication
There are many big-picture things that could happen during monthly team meetings. You should be looking for analytics reports from your online campaigns (paid or organic) and updates on big or long-term projects. These are also great times to brainstorm for future goals and big problems and offer information that enriches your team’s skills and mindsets. Something else I’ve noticed from time to time during monthly meetings is what is NOT being done, and then we can course-correct.
When was the last time you had a monthly meeting to discuss 30-day results, long-term projects, and invest in the growth of your team?
Technology To Communicate With Your Team
One of the biggest issues I’ve seen virtual teams face is the uncertainty around how to communicate. The options are endless, and most of them are unfamiliar! So, how do you know what to use when you communicate with your team? I recommend trying out some of the more popular ones and then seeing what works best. The feel and flow of each one are a little different, so you might have to test a few before you find what you like.
Here are some of our favorites:
Voxer
The Rock Solid Assistants team loves Voxer! We are on it all the time, and for good reason. This “walkie talkie” style app allows you to send voice messages without a time limit, and there is a hands-free recording option. You can chat 1-1 or create group chats. You can also “star” messages to find them more easily. If you use the (very affordable) paid version, you can also recall messages to save your team time if you asked a question only to find the answer or if you shared a message in the wrong chat.
Slack
Slack is like email 3.0. You can send text or voice messages, link it to your gmail inbox, share documents, and more. It allows you to organize threads of conversation to keep track of specific project information, and you can even link it to industry-specific and business-oriented online apps. If you’re familiar with Zapier, there are many workflows you can create to connect it with your email server, file storage systems, and file collaboration software.
Trello
Trello is a project management tool. You can create “boards” for your project and then “cards” for the different things that need to be done. Within those cards, you can create to-do lists and smaller tasks. In practice, this could look like a “Website Updates” board. On that board you could have cards with the name of each page, such as “About,” “Blog,” “Home Page,” etc. On each card, you could have tasks like “swap the image of a notepad for an image of Jane and Mike working at a conference table,” and “update team bios.” Trello has a free option or paid tiers, and we use it for our big projects over at Rock Solid Assistants.
Once You Choose a System, Stick To It!
It can be easy to get “shiny object syndrome” when it comes to communication. You might text an idea, email a follow-up, use Slack to send a related document, send a voice message on Voxer, and then add a task on Trello. This will leave your team scrambling to find all the information they need. I recommend having a primary form of communication and then a secondary form. These should support the tasks on a project management platform. When you choose a system to communicate with your team, your efficiency, productivity, and camaraderie will all increase.
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