How do you communicate in a distributed team?
Hey all
Trying to understand how everyone here communicates in distributed teams?
If you use loom or some form of communication if your team's working off different timezones
I ask as we're building a product to resolve async communication, a few levels beyond loom (which is a fantastic tool for what it does) and I'd love to speak to teams that are practising async communication
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I've worked in a remote team for 4 years and my main takeaway is that you either go 100% remote or you don't. There's no middle ground where a small portion comes to an office and the rest of the team is distributed. This will inevitably exclude distributed team members as they don't have a chance to participate in regular chats at the watercooler.
Otherwise I'd advice to go as async as possible. Document everything you can. Hire people who can communicate in an async fashion as efficient as possible.
You can use the artifacts you create to easily onboard new team members.
Don't "discuss" things via Slack. The regular chatter happens in Slack and it gets noisy pretty quickly (+ it's tough to follow-up on all the messages if you're located in another timezone). Jump on a call and turn on your camera. Turning on the camera should be a must as it builds empathy and lets you interpret the body language. Afterwards document the outcome.
IMHO Google Docs work best as you can add comments easily. Another, more developer-focused workflow could be to write markdown files and use GitHub PRs to discuss the changes.
As a last point: Keep everything as accessible as possible. Don't lock down documents as you might lose a day when your team members can't access a document and are therefore blocked.