5 Ways to Communicate Better Now. We All Have To.

Hey everybody. I think one of our biggest challenges as leaders, as CEOs, as founders, figuring out how to work better together today as distributed teams, as newly distributed teams. Not folks like GitLab or Zapier that have worked on it hard for years, not folks that have even done it intentionally, but folks that have been forced into being distributed teams. That's most of us today. And I'll share at least the five things that we've worked on that I've worked on and how they've worked and how they haven't, and how we're going to do the next phase of these action items to try and get better at communication. Because I think for most of us we've gotten a little bit worse at communications and shelter and it's time to step it up because it's going to be like this for quite a while. So the number one thing that I tried to do is a Daily Jason. And Daily Jason was an email. And I would wake up every morning and at about 7:30 I would send a lengthy email. The first three points would be our goals for the week. So everybody knew what were our top three goals. And I would force myself to force rank our team level goals and the rest would just be things I'm learning, what's going on with Saster, what's going on with content, community, sponsors and the rest. And at first, at first the Daily Jason seemed great. People got it. It aligned us in going from the old normal to a transition phase, the new normal. And I did about 34 daily Jason's every day, including Saturday and Sunday because I was still working the same on Saturday and Sunday during shelter since it really wasn't that different. But after about 30 they really fatigued the team. The team started to get worried about all of these action items about 30 times three. So that's 90 times I told everybody what we needed to get done this week. It was too much. People sometimes felt they were failing against it. They felt it was too much information. They felt even maybe that it picked at them a little bit even when it didn't intentionally do so. So at first it worked. And I think it aligned us clearly on what our goals were after shelter, because everyone knew every day. But now I've dialed it back to once a week. Every day ended up being a little too much of the Daily Jason. The second thing we did, as many of you did, is we dusted off daily standups. I had not done a daily standup in longer than I care to remember at this point in my life. My career, I really didn't want to do any standups. I really would prefer to have no standing meetings, as hard as that is to do. But the last thing I wanted to do was a daily standup. But I learned we needed to do it. And we've done a daily standup. We've experimented. We've done it at 1:30 which is what we do now. And we briefly did it sort of old school engineering scrum style first thing in the morning. And what I learned with our team in this world in a cross functional team, is the daily standup is critical, at least for us. Maybe you don't need to do it every day, but it's good. We now communicate, at least in some ways, much better than we did. Everyone talks, everyone shares and we learn more. But what didn't work in the daily stand up was using it as a true standup, as a scrum for folks to share what they're working on in classic sort of bite sized engineering pieces. Today I'm working on this piece of code. It was really too much for, for folks on our team, which are really no engineers. And because folks weren't able to really break their work up into daily chunks, it ended up being just a handful of us would talk on these daily standups after about 30 days in. So we switched. We switched. Which goes to the next point of my third of five which is to use Slack differently. We did a hybrid approach. We keep our daily standups at 1:30. And you know, the leaders do talk more than the rest. But it's okay. That's just for other folks to ask questions, share learnings, share wins. During the day, it's to check in midday for the work we've already done during the day. And then everyone in Slack puts in the top three things they're going to work on that day. There are other Scrum tools, there's other Slack tools, but with the small team we just found, everyone just checks in on their one, two or three things they're working on today. So everyone knows that first thing in the morning. And then we all check in at 1:45 to talk informally on the day. And for us three points in slack in the morning and and 1:30 in the afternoon to check in live is the right combination. Importantly on point three for us. I've learned a lot about how to use Slack. And as a leader, as a leader, I've sometimes found slack tiring over time. I found people use it to send me tasks and things to do that they wouldn't do. In person or by email. They would hesitate to send an email and ask me to do something. They would certainly hesitate to ask me in person, but they have no issue just slacking me to have that them do something for them. And I want to help everyone, of course on my team, as do you. But the more soon you are in the org chart, the more overwhelming it can be when everyone feels like they can task up, it just doesn't work. So I became Slack fearful of people asking me in yet another place, yet another medium to do things when I was overloaded as a leader and as an individual contributor. But using Slack as a wiki, that's how we use it now. So folks check in in the morning, they log the three things they're going to do. Everyone logs wins during the day, wins with partners, wins with content, wins with sponsors, etc. But we don't use it as a group task manager. And that's been great for us. A dynamic wiki is how we've used Slack to win and then two other points. The fourth one, which you know what you're all doing, but I've learned everyone's doing, which is zooming more with your customers. I was speaking with Stuart Butterfield just before we went on together at the sastr Summit. It was a great session and he was sharing. He was talking to 10 times more customers today than he did before Shelter. He said he was talking to a relatively small bank on Slack and they couldn't believe they got to talk to the CEO. They weren't joking. They said, oh, we're worried Slack might even be in trouble if we're talking to you. It was a joke. Slack. Slack's obviously crushing it, but they couldn't believe they had access to the CEO. That's what you want today. We have without question lost something by not visiting our customers and partners in person. Don't let anybody say otherwise, but we need to make up for it in Velocity. We need to make up for it to meet with 10 times more customers. We had the VP of Commercial Sales at Salesforce join the Saster Summit as well. And I'll link to his session and Stuart's in the body of this video. And he said he'd met more custom, more Zooms, more conferences with customers than in one month and in the prior year before he'd met with so what is that, 12, eight times? 12 times. I'm getting my math wrong, but met with an order of magnitude more customers over Zoom than he had in the preceding year. So you've got to do that, and that needs to be part of our DNA. Eventually we're going to get back on jets. Eventually we're going to meet with more folks in real life. But what's going to change is we're also going to have to do the zooms. We've always met with our top 10 customers or our top 5%. But now what's going to happen is the top 30% are going to expect to talk with leadership and you need to find a way to make that happen and to make it part of your life. The last point I would say of adapting to work during shelter and newly distributed teams is one on ones. And I'm both a huge fan of one on ones and I struggle with them. I've written on Saster many times that as a leader, one on ones are. One of the most important things you can do is ideally once a week or at least once every two weeks, depending on how many reports you have. Have an unstructured meeting meeting where the folks that report to you can just share what's on their mind. The good, the bad and the ugly. It creates new learnings together. It's bonding. It lets you have unstructured thoughts. And I really don't think there's much more important for leadership and management than one on ones with your reports. But what I found during shelter is that they're of course different. So I found that they need to be longer to work. People just have different expectations and because of that it's hard to do as many and you may find yourself not wanting to do as many. And for me, I have, I do a fair amount of one on ones but in the office they are almost all unstructured. I've gotten to the point in my life where I didn't want to have 80 standing meetings in my calendar, you probably need them. But I would do the one on ones but we would just grab each other. Grabbing each other. You know, it really doesn't work as well during distributed times and shelter times. So I found the areas where I've invested more on one on ones I've had more success and where I have scaled back, I haven't. So you've got to schedule more one on ones. You have to make the time. Just like you have to make far more time with your customers now on Zoom, you have to make more time somehow with your team. And my little technical tip there is I love Zoom. We use Zoom all the time. But for my one on ones we love our Facebook portals. They're little devices. They sit right next to the computer. They have a high resolution camera that tracks you and it's less tiring than staring at your screen and we just portal in. I'm looking at mine right now next to my computer. It's more relaxing. I can say hi and then I can even do work while we're doing it on one or share a document or collaborate. So we love the portals as a less intensive way to have real time video and audio collaboration but again those are the five ideas to think about. Daily communication Daily Jason's were too much. We've moved to weekly but they're good. Daily stand ups help us and we're going to do them every day but not necessarily have everyone have to break it up into weekly bite sized chunks. Use Slack as a wiki, be prepared to talk to 10 times more customers going forward. That's point four and lean in even more on one on ones you got to find a way.