https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa

Return to Effective Remote Work, Remote Work Bibliography, Jobs Bibliography, Jobs, Remote DevOps - Remote SRE - Remote CI/CD, Remote Cloud Native - Remote Microservices - Remote Serverless, Remote Security - Remote DevSecOps, Remote Functional, Remote Concurrency, Remote Data Science - Remote and Databases, Remote Machine Learning, Remote Courses, Remote Glossary, Awesome Remote, Remote GitHub, Remote Topics

Fair Use Source: B09Z5F678G (EfctRmWrk 2022)

“ (EfctRmWrk 2022)

“It’s all well and good having a host of techniques to improve your communications, but you get a huge head start if you’re choosing the right tools in the first place. The exact tools you’ll use will depend on you, your team, and even your company culture. However, the advice in this section is broadly applicable. If you start with the goal in mind, you can better choose the way in which you’re going to communicate. That’s half the battle. Let’s take a look at the different communication tools and the scenarios in which they work well, and the situations in which they don’t.

Medium Good for … Bad for … Phone call

An interruptible urgent matter, since a video call is typically used for regular scheduled meetings.

Anything else. Calling someone’s phone directly can feel intrusive.

SMS

An urgent alert, such as the system going down.

Anything else.

Chat

Informal conversations and light interactions that require near-synchronous responses, both for work and social purposes.

Finding important information later due to limitations in retention and searchability. Not as suitable for formal communications due to lack of archivability. Also can suffer from poor signal-to-noise ratio.

Video call

Rapid discussion, feeling connected to fellow humans, and discussing nuanced issues such as interpersonal matters.

Finding time for everyone to be available and needing to stop the world. More introverted personalities may have a harder time communicating in meetings than in asynchronous mediums. Complex matters can be hard to discuss without preparation.

Email

Formal and archival communication, broadcast updates, and nonurgent matters that don’t need immediate replies.

Matters requiring quick replies and ensuring that everyone has read your message. Big email threads become unwieldy and actions can be unclear.

Recorded video

Material that will be rewatched repeatedly, such as for onboarding and training. Preventing large synchronous meetings from happening.

Searchability and discoverability of content. Can sometimes take a lot of time and effort to create and distribute.

Written document

Developing complex ideas and getting others involved through shared editing and commenting (e.g., design documents and idea papers).

Time-poor recipients who may not engage. Repelling people more than attracting them if documents are poorly written.

Wiki/README

Discoverability and searchability. Treelike structure is well-suited to browsing. Evergreen content.

Easily going stale and becoming misleading. Continually changing content can become a pain to maintain because collaborative editing functionality is weaker than shared documents.

Dealing with Dichotomies As a final note in this chapter, it’s worth mentioning that any communication, in whichever format, is always subject to dichotomies. This is just part of being human. There’s never a perfect answer for how to be, act, and respond. You have to be aware of the trade-offs and then do your best. What do we mean by this? Have a look at the following dichotomies:

Fun versus noise. Having some fun while you’re communicating is brilliant, but it has the side effect of generating more noise in written communications that can make it harder for people to easily understand what has been said.

Flexible working versus communication out of hours. Staff working flexible hours in different time zones can be enabled by asynchronous forms of communication, but it has the side effect of producing things to read at all hours of the day, making people potentially feel guilty for not logging in and keeping up.

Friendliness versus lack of assertiveness. Being friendly and jovial is great, but sometimes it can dilute your messages if you just want to get things done.

Being resolute versus being overbearing. Conversely, being assertive and resolute may make people think that you’re overbearing and uninterested in communicating with them as humans. You can come across like a robotic taskmaster.

Process and organization versus rigidity in approach. Those who like to carefully organize their work and wrap everything in processes may have the unwanted side effect of boring others to tears who just want to get on with things.

Humility and humbleness versus passiveness. Being overly humble by accepting and deferring to others in conversation as a means of being polite can have the side effect of making you seem like a passive participant. You may get looked over for your input into decisions in the future.

Detail-orientation versus dryness. Infusing all of your communication with detail may be a sign to some that you’re diligent, but to some it may make you come across as overly dry and dull and distract from your message.

So there really is no right way of doing things that will please everyone. You have to ride the line among the dichotomies whenever you communicate and be mindful of the different ways in which you can be interpreted. It seems that in communication, as is the case in life, you just have to try your best. You can’t please everyone.” (EfctRmWrk 2022)

Fair Use Sources:

• Effective Remote Work on DuckDuckGo
• B09Z5F678G (EfctRmWrk 2022)