<aside> 🗣 This page provides a clear guide on navigating Remote’s communication expectations and standards. Consider this our SOP for communication.

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When in doubt, always refer back to Remote’sValues when communicating with others.

Internal Communication - How to Communicate Effectively At Remote

• Assume good intent! We work across many cultures and people communicate in many ways. Approach issues or questions in channel with curiosity and don’t leverage sarcasm or passive aggressive language.

• The Single Source of Truth 🧱 is our Notion Workspace

• Use UTC when referencing time use Coordinated Universal Timezones(UTC) as the format for scheduling events and estimated delivery dates. This makes sense for anyone at any time of the day regardless of the timezone.

  • Examples:

• English is our preferred language at Remote. While external communications should be done in US English (en-us), internally you can speak in which ever variant you're native in or most identify with.

• Get names right: Make an effort to get people’s names right. This is an intensely personal thing for people and can even cause unintended offence. This can even make a small but important difference to customer satisfaction.This means:

  1. Double checking your emails to ensure you’ve spelt someone’s name correctly and that you haven’t used last name as first name etc. If in doubt, check! People will be glad to help and happy that you care enough to check.
  2. On calls, if you don’t know how to pronounce someone’s name, just ask them. Better not to guess and butcher it but if you are going to guess, also check at the time. Some platforms (eg Slack) also have features for people to include the pronunciation.

• Avoid idioms, acronyms, and abbreviations because they can be confusing. Use TextExpander (available in Okta) to truncate long words or phrases. Aim to use inclusive language, review our examples of inclusive language.

• Respect the preferred working method of each team. Each team has a way of doing business. Use this preferred contact/work method when asking for assistance or collaboration. Do not circumvent or backchannel a team’s process.

• Tag people using ‘@username’ when conducting discourse ✍️ Tag the specific people in every message that you want them to read, even if you’re replying to their message.

• Close communication loops ➿ An ACK emoji or simple "acknowledged" is important to close communication loops and make sure work is getting done.

• Be concise. You should transmit information in the least amount of space and time possible. If sharing a lot of information via Notion, create an executive summary or tl;dr callout at the top. This is a brief overview of the long document and should grab readers’ attention and summarise the critical information in the document, such as the problem/opportunity being addressed, the objectives, key findings, goals and recommendations.

• No tourists ✈️ Get involved in a thread if you are a subject matter expert or a DRI or a stakeholder. Leave channels (public and private) if they are not relevant to you

• Use a warm hand-off protocol when assigning tasks to others 🧤When handing something over, the hand-off is not complete until you have some form of acknowledgement of the other party. Until then, you remain the owner of the action item / issue. As long as you are the owner of something, you need to actively work to move that action item forward. If you can't, then you are responsible for seeking help or hand-off. This promotes ownership and conscientious collaboration. We never want to force work on our colleagues without a clear plan and understanding of why they've been involved.

  • Examples:

• Use Standard File Name Conventions

Ensure Transparency

<aside> 🗣 Transparency is key for Remoters: The transparency value shows up in how we communicate the decision and the rationale/background. For most Remoters, the transparency required to satisfy our values is minimal, i.e. "This is what we're doing and why." Where we run into friction/noise is when the transparency pertains to "what are we deciding" and "how did we come to this decision?"

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<aside> ⭐ If you have something that impacts a lot of people or workflows, announce in Slack #announcements or #important channel.

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<aside> ⭐ Include relevant stakeholders when making decisions.

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<aside> ⭐ Internal discussions should not happen in private Slack DM’s unless there’s a highly sensitive reason.

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<aside> ⭐ Remoters are encouraged to leave channels, rooms or meetings that are not helpful to them. This reduces noise. Just because a channel is public does not mean everyone needs to be in it.

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<aside> ⭐ To prevent bottlenecks, team leaders should delegate tasks and share information openly, especially when they're not available. This ensures progress without unnecessary delays.

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