How Can I be an Effective Communicator in a Virtual Remote Environment?

Virtual doesn’t mean without human contact

1. When it comes to anybody, when you’re starting off in a new role or if you’re in an existing role, is make sure you understand when it’s okay to send a written communication versus when you really need to pick up the phone or schedule a zoom call and have that face-to-face.
2. If it’s something that you’re delivering that can have some type of emotion in it, it’s best to have that conversation via phone via a zoom some type of virtual conference so that there’s no misunderstanding of the intent.
   1. And then always follow up.
   2. If you are going to have a phone call or a zoom call, make sure you follow up the communication with just a bulleted email so that nothing can be misunderstood.
   3. That’s one of the biggest obstacles with virtual communication. If it’s just all text or email or not personalized, there’s a lot of misunderstanding that goes in and then you find yourself new to a company saying, oh well, that wasn’t my intention, I’m so sorry it was taken that way.
   4. You can avoid all of that if you just know that when and where to pick up the phone or schedule a zoom call

Make sure that you are checking for typos

Just because we’re putting something in Slack or in Teams or we’re moving very fast doesn’t make it okay to have typos, especially, if you’re new to a team. You’re representing yourself. So, make sure you’re not quick to hit the send or the enter button. If someone sends a message to you with typos in it, it just kind of makes you take a step back and go, did they check that?

Show body language

1. A couple things that happen with zoom calls often times that can mess with our brains.
2. And one of those is, in person-to-person interactions, we can communicate more with our body language.
3. They can see ours. They can see what we’re doing. We can see what they’re doing.
4. And that feedback is the bulk of the communication that happens in a normal face-to-face conversation.
5. A lot of that is removed in a virtual world.
6. If we’re talking on the phone, then all we have is a tone of voice to go off of.
7. In the zoom meeting, it’s a little bit better, because we can see facial expressions.
8. But we don’t get to see the hands as much. We don’t get to see what’s happening with legs and feet, which consciously, we may not pay much attention to, but subconsciously we’re always monitoring those cues as part of our trying to connect and communicate with people.
9. Additionally, how close we are to the zoom camera can even affect how we feel.
10. We all have our own personal bubbles on what we’re comfortable with.
11. And if we’re in a personal interaction with somebody, the more comfortable we are with them, the more closer we’ll let them into our personal bubbles.
12. And so, if you have somebody that’s a stranger, then you wouldn’t want them coming in very close to you. You want to keep a very wide berth.
13. But then, if you’re wanting to be a little more friendly or personal, then those zones start to come closer.
14. So we often inadvertently do that with our zoom calls.
15. I’m not sure if my video’s really clear but what often our zoom videos look like is just a zoom in of our face. So that we can be closer to our computers and we can fight. We may inadvertently be getting too close to someone’s intimate personal zone when we do that and triggering a fight or flight response in them. Taking a step back gives them that space and also allows them to see more body language, more hand gestures. The other factor here that complicates this is our personality types. Extroverts are going to tend to feel more comfortable being on the video while introverts are going to tend to want to just do audio. So you kind of have to balance that too. Everything’s the balancing act with it. And we can pay attention to how we feel in zoom meetings and see what it is that’s causing us to feel that certain way. And then try to learn and adapt and adjust as we’re stepping into this more virtual world.

Overcommunicate

1. Here are some communication mistakes
   1. not telling people what you are working on
   2. not communicating through written emails
   3. not writing down the artifacts of what i was doing
2. When you make these mistakes, people don’t know where you are and what you are doing, what you are working on.
3. This reinforces the idea that when you’re remote, you have to communicate, you have to almost over communicate.
   1. Not directly in person, because, if someone’s always talking to you, you’re gonna go, “all right stop talking to me, we’ve been talking for too long”.
4. You have to leave artifacts.
   1. Those artifacts can be updating jira tickets or updating things you worked on.
   2. They can be updating issues, if you’re using github.
   3. They can be chat, where you talk to people and say, hey, I think we can improve this.
5. If you are not in someone’s presence, they need to be able to know that you’re there, and part of working remotely is just reassuring people that you’re present and that you’re working.
6. Start sending out a weekly email to just anybody who’s interested saying, here are the three things I did this week. Always limit them to three because people’s time is precious. These are the top three things I did this week. This is what I learned. And I think I’m gonna look at this next week.
7. Even if no one reads them, and nine times out of ten, no one ever comments on them, when you have in-person conversations or random conversations like one-on-ones, they would say, I love your emails. They never reply to the emails. You have no way to know that they are even looking at the emails. But it gives them a sense that you are present and that you are working because you always tell them what you are working on.