Team communication issues often come from differences in how people communicate and how people want to be communicated with. This can be cultural, personal preference, or forged by previous work experience. Either way, every team member has specific ways that they like to interact, receive feedback, and collaborate on tasks.
When discussing our approach to communication at Clever Endeavour Games, other leaders often ask for details, so I thought I’d share that here.
What we do at Clever Endeavor is that we have a form called How to Interact With Us that all employees fill in at the beginning of their employment. When a new employee joins, everybody on the team updates their own How to Interact With Us page and also reads everyone else’s page. This is not only for managers! It’s important that anyone who will be working together understands the quirks of their colleagues, and it helps to accelerate this process to avoid miscommunication and frustrations.
Even when we don’t have new employees, we do this once a year anyway, because things change from year to year in terms of how people want to be interacted with. The form includes these questions:
- Conditions I like to work In
- The times / hours I like to work
- The best ways to communicate with me
- The ways I like to receive feedback
- Things I need
- Things I struggle with
- Things I love
- Other things to know about me
I’ll give a couple of examples of my own answers:
Best ways to communicate with me: “Ping me on Discord. Ideally, ping me in an open channel so that people see the conversations we’re having so that it promotes more of a culture of constant communication.”
Things I struggle with: “The balance between micro-managing and not giving enough direction. I don’t want to have my hands in everyone’s work but also want to make sure everyone’s working toward the same goal and has motivation in their work.”
From one of my employees—The hours I like to work: “It depends on the day. Lately I’ve been working late mornings – late evening, but I am sometimes up early mornings to afternoon.”
Some of these are somewhat “easy”—enjoying working early in the morning, preferring focused time in the afternoon, whether they like to get feedback in open channels or direct messages, etc. But I’ve also had examples in the past where someone has said that they can sometimes get distracted on video calls because of their ADHD and therefore I shouldn’t feel bad to call their attention to the discussion if I see them drifting. Had I not known that, I might have assumed that their wandering attention was because they were bored, not checked in, or not motivated.
In general, it’s important to communicate differently with each person on the team whether you’re a manager any other team member, and tools like this can help you encourage effective communication. Highly recommend!
—
❤
Rich
Richard's Blog 