How to communicate effectively

We are a remote compnay and that is a good thing overall but it has it's own set of challenges. While we respect personal space and freedom it comes at a price - communication.

Having good communication is essential for any successful remote organization, and we strive to achieve it. Communicating the right things, at the right time with the right team members can be the difference between excelling and being a sore loser.

In a remote setting trust needs to be won and it goes both way. As an employee you are expected to give updates (mostly async) about things that are working and more importantly about things that are slowing you down and blocking your progress. Your manager is equally responsible for sharing the task in as much details as posibble where you can come up with as many follow up questions as you like. The sooner you get a clarity on the task at hand the better it will be.

Regular updates

We have async standup everyday at 11:30 AM IST and it's the most important 15 minutes of your day. Take the pain and time required to craft a good status update. Explain yourself and your tasks in as many details as possible so that anyone can understand what's going on with your progress. This gives every team member a visibility on what everyone else is working on.

We have synchronous standups every alternate days, 3 days a week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 05:00 PM IST. This is place where you get to know about the compnay level updates and what is new and happening. During sync calls, you can also share your updates in greater detail.

Please feel free to ask your peers for help when necessary. You should be able to setup a meeting with them and work together. When working on something new, exciting, and complex, we encourage pair programming, but communicating through the right channels is crucial to provide a picture to stakeholders of where efforts are going.

Early feedback

As an individual contributor you will be working on features and tasks and you are responsible to ensure that the requirements are clear from the start. If the requirements are not clear you are setting up yourself for failure. Don't do that. Ask question from your manager on task and get a calrity on the expected output before you touch your keboard or pen to start the work.

There will be time when tasks will be ambiguous and research oriented. Be sure to validate your understanding and findings with your peers and manager. You should not be researching or digging for more than 48 hours without a validation of your idea or progress.

Visiblity is a challenge in a remote setting and in such tasks it's on your shoulder that you keep everyone in loop about your findings and progress.