How Virtual Teams can stay Connected and Aligned

Every time I dig into the 2020 research report from The Business Agility Institute*, I find new insights: valuable pointers for those leading the journey to organisational agility. For instance, improved communication and collaboration holds the top spot for 'the single biggest benefit that business agility has brought to your organisation'. Good communication is deeply intertwined across all aspects of agility, and quality collaboration relies on it. As the pandemic has thrown us into a largely virtual world, we need to review what good communication looks like, and how to improve connection and alignment for virtual teams.

Managing Communication 

How do we communicate and collaborate more effectively in a world where so many team members are working remotely? Maybe we can improve how we use collaboration tools to support being more connected and aligned in a virtual world. What I mean by ‘collaboration tools’ is the likes of Asana, Basecamp, Airtable, Monday, Wrike and the many other excellent Kanban tools out there. I use Trello – it was the first I worked with and serves my purpose well. 

Communication matters.

The Business Agility Report, 2020 – respondents identified collaboration & communication as the highest benefit arising from their business agility journey, up from 4th in 2019.

To be effective, teams need to be closely aligned around a common purpose – one that every member understands and can get behind. They need to be able to trust one another to work well together, and communication is how that trust is built.

Not about Agile

I live and breathe Agile, but sometimes the ‘Agile’ label simply isn’t needed. The Agile Manifesto confirms ‘Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools’. This is an article about how humans communicate to get a job done – the term Agile Communication connects this thinking to Agile principles, but ultimately it’s the outcome we’re after.

Where we Fail

It’s common to state ‘Transformation is hard’ but you know what? ‘Communication is hard’. It’s hard because it’s too easy. It’s hard because we do it constantly, continually, and without that vital pause for thought. We set up Kanban boards, meetings, and processes but don’t always think through the related communication aspects. I frequently hear people are spending a lot of their day trawling through emails trying to find out where they left off with a project, or trying to locate an idea a team member contributed. You need to find ‘that message’ – was it on email, Slack, Whatsapp, a text, or somewhere else entirely? Would activity updates and the associated messages not be better on the Kanban or collaboration board?

We need alignment, not only on our goals but how we communicate. 

When a team member queries if something has been done on Slack, only to find out that it has been done, but was updated on Trello, then that alignment is missing. A process may be in place, but how we communicate has been missed. 

Keeping Communication with the Issue

We can get a bit over excited about the options available to us. ‘Do I send an email? Would a text be more immediate? Or I could put it on the Whatsapp group or Slack channel, but which is most appropriate?’ Let’s apply our Agile principles here. Keep it simple, keep it transparent and explicit. 

I need to add in a word about email here too.

Email is essentially a command-and-control system and not good at promoting collaboration. Think about it. The sender of an email decides who is going to receive it, who will be copied, maybe even who will be blind-copied! There’s no transparency in that, and by limiting who has access to information we may be damaging collaboration. 

Could you make the first rule of your Kanban, or online collaboration board, that communication stays predominantly on the board? That way it’s available and transparent for everyone involved, and the discussion remains where the issue is. 

Chatter is Important too

In these virtual times, where teams are remote and distributed, ‘chatter’ is important. We need that low-key semi-social chat to connect with our team and our leaders. It’s this level of connection that can hold the team together when tension hits. Having rapport allows difficult conversations to take place and potential problems to be resolved before they damage relationships and progress. 

Make a clear divide between ‘chat’ and communication that specifically contributes to the priorities we’re working on. Task communication can stay on the Kanban board. Choose your channel (Slack, Whatsapp, text, Yammer) for the rest. 

Meetings that Deliver Value

When Covid first hit, one of the first things I noticed was teams becoming overwhelmed by continual meetings. Staying in touch is a good thing, right? So organisations were having virtual meetings to maintain alignment with their newly distributed #WFH teams. All well and good, but people soon start sweating when they realise they come out of each meeting with actions and have no ‘spare’ time to get these things done. 

Meeting time is precious. It’s a costly resource that should be valued and used wisely.

We can keep meeting time to a minimum by applying some lean and agile principles to how we communicate around meetings. Here are some suggestions:

• Avoid using meetings for information updates – keep your Kanban boards updated. Be transparent in how you’re working
• Share the outcomes you want from the meeting on a digital board in good time and take these 3 steps to prep for the meeting:

1. Be explicit with the questions you need answered
2. Allow team members to respond on the board with answers where they can
3. Whittle down the issues to those that genuinely need discussion

Only the items that cannot be solved by interaction through the collaboration board make it onto the final agenda

Collaborating Transparently

We talk a lot in the Agile world about the importance of psychological safety. It’s the critical foundation for effective collaboration. People need to feel valued, to feel safe to disagree, to be understood not criticised, and developed rather than sidelined. However, effective communication and collaboration needs something more. 

Where there are aligned goals, underpinned by commonly held values, transparent communication will most likely come more naturally. If we’re planning a road trip together, and I find out there are roadworks and disruption en route, I may not be transparent and share this with you if:

• I think you don’t really want to come along, and this would provide a reason for you to abandon the trip
• You may blame me for not finding out earlier (did we have equal access to this information? Was it clear that I should be checking?)
• If there’s a risk you’ll assume it’s my responsibility to organise a diversion and I disagree

In other words being clear about process, responsibility, and how we’re going to interact, will prevent uncertainty breeding a lack of trust. The psychological safety to be transparent needs to be underpinned by rigorous and robust communication practices. 

Agile Communication points to ensuring transparency and the democratic sharing of information. It involves reducing the need for formal reporting by providing places where people can ‘go and see’. The accepted Agile paradox still applies, by having ‘just enough’ discipline around how we communicate, we can cut back on wasteful use of resources and open up the space to be adaptive, to innovate, and to collaborate – building trust, personal and strategic growth, and success. 

* The Business Agility Report: Responding to Disruption, 3rd Edition, 2020. Published by the Business Agility Institute