Your Team Needs a Comms Manual
Here’s How to Make One
When you receive a message from your colleagues, how quickly do they expect you to respond?
The simple question above has served as a starting point for some of the most important conversations I’ve had over the last year. And unless you are 100% sure that everybody on your team would answer it the exact same way, then you need to have this conversation as well.
Thankfully, it doesn’t need to be complicated or contentious— a simple, one-page comms manual can help your team navigate the intricacies of modern communication in a way that obliterates harmful assumptions and minimizes miscommunications.
Why a Comms Manual?
Perhaps this sounds familiar: your team is struggling with a particular communication tool or channel (say, email). “Email is the worst!”, you declare, “and we should try something new.” So your team rolls out a new communication channel (say, Slack, or Microsoft Teams). For a couple of weeks, everybody is excited. Emojis are flying! Inboxes are manageable!
A few months later, however, things somehow seem to have gotten even worse. Some people are still using email, while others are ignoring email entirely. Nobody is entirely sure what Slack channel they should be posting in — so they send an email too, just in case. Before you know it, you’ve gone from having one inbox you can’t manage to having an indeterminate number of inboxes you can’t manage. You can’t keep up, or you resent others for failing to keep up, or both.
The problem isn’t our communication tools and channels themselves — it’s our misaligned assumptions about how to use them. My business partners and I experienced this first-hand when we found ourselves struggling to balance email, Slack, WhatsApp, text messages, and Google Docs alerts. So, after hitting a breaking point (a polite way of saying “after I completely lost my s*** upon receiving one too many notifications on my phone”), we decided to sit down and craft a comms manual — a simple operating agreement that would capture clear, shared expectations around how and when we communicate with each other.
And it changed everything.
Starting the Conversation
When my team and I sat down to create our comms manual, we started by asking ourselves, “What are the specific challenges we are having around communication?” Our answers were as follows:
- Unclear expectations around how long a given task will take (i.e., if I ask one of my business partners “can you take a quick look at this?”, how much actual time am I asking for?)
- Misalignment about how quickly a response is expected (i.e., if I receive an email from one of my business partners, I might interpret it as urgent — even if it is decidedly not urgent!)
- Inbox overwhelm, which makes it difficult to parse and prioritize new messages (i.e., if I email one of my business partners and they have 100 unread messages already sitting in their inbox, how do they know what’s important?)
I encourage you to have this kind of frank and specific discussion with your team. What are some real examples of times when your expectations or assumptions have been misaligned? What have the negative consequences of those misalignments been? From there, you can figure out what exactly you need to capture in your own comms manual.
The Anatomy of a Comms Manual
The comms manual that my team created consists of three sections: a list of guiding principles, a set of cadences and channels, and an email subject style guide. Your team’s particular needs may vary — especially, for example, if you don’t use email very often — but we have found this to be a good starting point for putting a basic comms manual into place. You can find all of the following sections in this comms manual one-pager template.
The “guiding principles” section provides your team with the opportunity to align on high-level principles and guidelines that will help you communicate better. Both of my team’s particular guiding principles are about setting clear expectations around timing — both the timeframe in which we need an answer or ask to be addressed, and the amount of time we anticipate it will take.
To this day, we still often find ourselves needing to come back to these basic principles. For example, if I send an email to one of my business partners asking for their “quick eyes” on something, I can now expect a response that says, simply, “When do you need it, and how long do you want me to spend on it?” (Or, when we’re feeling a little looser, “NO TASK WITHOUT A TIMEBOX!”)
The “channels and cadences” section is the operational heart of your comms manual. This is where you set clear expectations around how quickly a response is expected across different communication channels.
Note that this section starts with a specific set of cadences, and then assigns a channel to each cadence. This is no accident — in many cases, walking through this section of the comms manual reveals that a given team is actually using more communication channels than are actually needed.
For example, a few months after my business partners and I created our comms manual, we found that we were barely using Slack at all — not because it‘s a bad tool, but rather because most of our messages were better suited to our “ASAP” agreement for WhatsApp, or our “72 hour turnaround” agreement for email. During our next team retrospective, we decided to stop using Slack altogether — or, rather, we observed that we had already stopped using Slack altogether, and were able to focus exclusively on WhatsApp and email.
Speaking of email, the “email subject style guide” section can help your team write emails that immediately and unequivocally announce their own relative urgency. Agreeing to standardize your subject lines can help free your team from the tyranny of ambiguous “quick pings”. As a bonus, the fact that you have all explicitly agreed to a style guide means that you don’t need to worry if a strongly worded subject (such as “RESPONSE REQUIRED BY TUESDAY EOD”) will be interpreted as aggressive or rude.
In our experience, these three sections have given us the baseline of clarity we need to work better as a team and avoid damaging miscommunications.
Make It Your Own and Revisit It Frequently
Every team is different, and every team’s comms manual can — and should — be different. At the bottom of our comms manual template, you will find a set of questions we’ve found helpful for teams to talk through as they create and customize their own comms manual:
- How do we communicate expectations and urgency in other channels (such as comments on collaborative docs)?
- Where does this comms manual live? How often do we revisit it? When/how do we add or subtract comms channels?
- What do we do if somebody does not meet an expectation that has been set in an email?
- How do we manage working hours across individuals and teams? (i.e., what is expected when you receive an after-hours message?)
Asking and answering these questions together can help your team figure out how best to populate, customize, and maintain your own comms manual.
As you create your own team’s comms manual, I hope you’ll take the time to share your learnings, customizations, and questions!
