Collaborate effectively as a remote-first, async team
Our team was fortunate to have been a remote-first team from the start, but we still experienced some of the same challenges as other teams that moved to remote-first with the pandemic.
- We had less focus time for real work due to increased meetings on top of new collaboration channels
- We lost the in-person and impromptu interactions that often led to breakthrough ideas and opportunities
- People and teams were getting their work done, but they lost the connection to the bigger vision
In this second post of our Slack for Architects series, we’ll discuss how we use Slack to address the pain points above and we’ll give you resources to get started doing the same for your teams.
Free time to focus
Architects lead cross-functional teams on complex implementations and are constantly evaluating trade-offs. To start thinking Slack first and free time for real work, we started by evaluating the trade-offs that come with in-person meetings. We audited our current meeting schedule to remove unnecessary meetings, create space for focus time, and embrace asynchronous work. We started by cataloging the meetings across the team by organizer, purpose, attendees, frequency, and length. Then we determined an action plan for each meeting following some basic best practices like moving recurring meetings to Slack channels when we are primarily providing status updates, editing content, or sharing information. You can refer to our last post, Using Slack as a Control Plane, to read about our approach to using Slack and what influenced our Sync vs Async decisions below.
We use Sync methods of collaboration for: Working sessions, Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR), 1:1s, backlog grooming, troubleshooting, and team building.
We default to Async forms of collaboration for: Follow ups, status updates, content production, idea validation, feedback, and handoffs.
You can also use the future forum framework for assessing meeting types, like we did below, to help you determine which meetings can be moved to hybrid or async formats like Slack channels:
We were able to remove 75% of our recurring meetings reducing our total in-person commitments by roughly 10 hours per month per person. Some big cross-functional projects still require meetings to keep things moving, but we were able to improve those too by being more intentional about the meetings that we kept. We now require that all meetings scheduled by our team members have a purpose, agenda, specified destination for notes, and specified note taker. Each meeting also has accurate optional attendee requirements so you can make more informed decisions about where to spend your time.
Tip: You can protect your focus time by blocking your calendar with an out of office event to auto-decline meetings with a message asking the organizer to reach out in Slack or look for another time.
Be intentional about interactions
Replacing in-person interactions is difficult. Being realistic about how and when people work and fostering a collaborative environment across tools can bring back the interactions that often produce some of the biggest breakthroughs. A future forum survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers across six countries found that 94% want flexibility in when they work. Schedule flexibility is important. It sounds simple, but we update our Slack status with an icon and description so others know when we are available and what we’re up to (as much we’d like to share of course). We also defined overlapping working hours for our team and only schedule meetings within these overlapping hours. The status updates and working hours support our commitment to focus time and the flexibility to work whenever and wherever work happens while making it clear to others when team members are available to collaborate.
To enhance collaboration within the work, we specified the following behaviours to help foster new ideas. We try to keep information in close proximity to the work itself to spark relevant ideas and keep quality high.
- Keep docs in Quip and messages in Slack
- Keep doc related comments in the Quip doc and everything else in Slack
- Send pre-work via Slack ahead of meetings to start the ideation earlier
- Curate Slack channels to keep them active and collaborative
- Retire channels that have passed out of relevance
- Spot bad habits with Slack reactions and trigger a workflow that sends a DM or a fun reply to help stop certain behaviours that take you away from your goals
Stay connected to the vision
We moved quite a few meetings to Slack channels. To keep channel members connected to the vision, we limit the number of pinned messages to help members find what matters most. We use pinned messages to draw attention to key announcements and bookmarks for anything that should persist and be easy to find like “Getting Started” docs, time-sensitive info, and any relevant FAQs.
We also strive to make all of our channels easy to join & navigate with welcome message workflows in Slack. You can use the template below to create a welcome message for the channels you own:
Hello
<Person who joined the channel Slack Variable>!Welcome to
<Channel that was joined Slack Variable>.Use this channel to discuss
<channel description>Get started by reviewing these documents:
<Document title / link>
<Document title / link>
<Add any additional relevant information here... e.g. how to launch any workflows that are specific to the channel, etc...>Thanks for joining!
Agree to be flexible
We established a team agreement to collectively, as a team, decide what behaviours are & aren’t acceptable in this Slack-first model. Teaming is a discipline and is fundamental to a remote-first team’s success. We prioritized a team-focused agreement that keeps us thinking customer-first. Our agreement incorporates the tactics above detailing who we are, our team values, how we work, how we communicate, how we collaborate, and which tools we use to get things done.
Slack is at the center of our teaming strategy. The tools portion of our agreement documents all of the tools our team uses to collaborate across the team, across Salesforce and with external stakeholders. We documented all the Slack channels, the workspaces, and descriptions. We also documented each of the workflows that run in the channels with information about what the workflow does and when it runs.
You can use this Team Agreement template to get started building your own.
What’s next
First, I appreciate how refreshing it is to email A LOT less. The activities described in this post gave me a clearer understanding of the Digital HQ analogy and the genius behind our strategic effort focused around Slack. Removing the demands of meetings helped give us more space for deep work, and Slack helped us stay connected and able to collaborate intentionally & spontaneously. Next, we want to define Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for each of the Slack channels we manage to better serve our stakeholders and we want to continue being disciplined about documenting all the workflows.
We remain focused on automating our business processes with Slack as the control plane to free even more time for deep work and collaboration. The next post in the series will cover how to automate and scale engagement & projects with Slack followed by a post on applying well-architected principles early & often. Stay tuned!
Here is a list of some useful resources to help you on your async-first journey
