Remote team communication: when to write, when to talk.

Write it down when

• Someone will need it later. Decisions, how-tos and anything a new person will look for in three months.
• It needs thought. Proposals and feedback get better when people can read twice and reply when ready.
• People are in other time zones. Writing lets everyone take part in their own working hours.
• It's a status update. Updates read in a minute take ten in a meeting.

Talk it through when

• A thread passes three replies. If it's still going back and forth, two minutes of talking will settle it.
• Someone is blocked. Unblocking a teammate is worth an interruption. Walk over, look at it together and get them moving.
• There's tension. Tone gets lost in text. Disagreements and difficult feedback go better out loud.
• You're exploring ideas. Early brainstorming is faster in conversation. Write up what you decided afterwards.

Simple rules to agree as a team

Write these down once and point new people to them. They prevent most of the friction.

• Response times by channel. For example: chat within a few hours, email within a day, and a call for anything urgent.
• One home for decisions. A channel or a doc where decisions are recorded, so they aren't lost in private messages.
• Status means something. Busy means don't disturb unless it's urgent. Available means it's fine to walk over.
• Every call ends in writing. Two lines in the right channel: what was decided and who does what.
• No agenda, no meeting. A meeting without a purpose written in the invite can be declined.

Common problems and fixes

• Everything feels urgent. Agree what urgent means and which channel it uses. Everything else can wait for a reply.
• Decisions get lost. Move them out of private messages into the decisions channel, every time.
• Too many meetings. Replace status meetings with written updates and keep calls for decisions and problems.
• People go quiet. Quiet people often don't want to interrupt. Make it easy to see when someone's free, and check in one to one.