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Communication

Communication is important for all the reasons you’ve heard, and especially in an office like ours where we work with a variety of clients and contractors, and you may be on a few different project teams with different coworkers on each team.

Below are our base level expectations for how we communicate as a team. We also have remote-specific practices when you or one or more teammates are working remotely.

General Communication

Set your notification preferences

Our people work in different time zones. If you don’t want your phone to buzz at 5am or 11pm, it is up to you to manage for that. Basecamp has settings for only getting notified during office hours that you set. This is found under “Change your notification settings.” This is a preferable solution to requiring people to always be calculating time zone differences in their head, and saving questions or ideas in their head for when it’s timezone-appropriate for the other person. Saving information in your head takes up space, let’s not make our teammates do that!

Alert your team if you usually work outside of 9-to-5 hours

Let your team know when your work hours fall outside of the norm. This helps with planning meetings and also expectations of availability with regards to responding to communication. For example, a coworker who starts work at 7am likely does not want to have meetings scheduled at 4:30pm, and so should be frank about their start/end times with their team. This overlaps a bit with the time blocking in your calendar mentioned on the working remote page. How you ultimately communicate your general availability is up to you, and likely will differ depending on if you are primarily on-site or primarily remote.

Project Communication

Keep shareable, detailed notes on larger pieces of work

This helps especially across time zones to sync up efforts. These notes can be in Basecamp (pings/campfire/message board), on the Jira ticket or GitHub issue, or in an email. The preferable place is the GitHub/Jira ticket; however, this can vary on different projects depending on client needs or expectations. The main thing to ensure is that all involved parties can access the information.