Something is really wrong with team communication nowadays, isn't it?
by Georgy NemtsovHey, founders, we all build teams. When there is more than 1 person working on a project, the problem of team communication rises.
It's not just about talking to each other. It's also about how we manage tasks, exchange knowledge and make decisions within our teams. Everything is team communication in the end.
How do people solve this problem? Well, they use apps! "Oh, I need to communicate in real-time." Here is a messaging app. Let's say, Slack. "Oh, I need to manage tasks." Here is a task-management app. Let's say, Jira. You get the idea.
What's wrong with this approach?
You end up with multiple apps and it quickly becomes a mess. One day a developer opens a story in the task management app and realizes that most of the discussions about the story took place in the messaging app. They start digging in the messaging app to gain the necessary context or even worse, they just don't bother to do it.
Does this sound familiar to you? Please share you thoughts!
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The problem with team communication is two-fold in my opinion:
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The team members do not all use the app at the same level. This is usually due to a lack of onboarding/training for the entire team. Just assuming that people will learn how to use the app effectively from their knowledgebase is not an effective team communication success strategy.
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The company assumes that all team members feel comfortable using the same tools. When you are forcing some team members to use apps that they hate it's only likely that the "unhappy" users will engage with the tool less. This makes communication more difficult for everyone involved.
The solution in my opinion is to discuss how to use communication tools in your organization before you choose tools to use. At a small company like an indie startup, this should be fairly easy.
Hope this helps!
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I totally agree. Too many tools out there! I actually read not long ago that the average IT team is using 40-60 tools. Just look at the chat apps...I miss the good old days when I could just talk with someone on Skype. Nowadays, you need to use Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, Whatsapp, and plenty of other tools. A quick search on google shows that you have solutions like Shift, All-in-One Messenger, and other similar tools. Might worth checking out.