Lack of clarity on agreements and expectations for team communication dynamics is one of the most common causes of stress in working relationships. When we don't set social norms and team agreements with intention, they get set for us to a default – usually from the preferences or habits of one person, or unchecked assumptions about how others prefer to work.
Whether you’re working 100% remote, back in an office, or a hybrid model – and whether you’re a co-located or global team — each environment offers unique opportunities and constraints. The problem with default communication norms is sometimes it only works well for one person. Without an explicit agreement or discussion about how we want to communicate together, undesirable patterns of behavior can persist over time, even when they don’t work well for anyone on the team.
Instead of suffering the consequences of the default, teams can set their own intentional communication norms and gain agreement for how to work together. Use these four steps to surface hidden assumptions and build intention:
Start with the goal and an engaged discussion
Share with your team what the benefits of clear, intentional, agreed upon ways of communicating and working together are. Some advantages of clear agreement on communication norms include: increased team effectiveness, reduced conflict and misunderstanding, increased team flow, and more healthy working relationships. Start a discussion by sharing with the team why you think this is important and how it will benefit everyone. Ask for others to do the same to incorporate all the voices on your team. Emphasize that there is no one right answer for how your team should work together and that the important thing is that you decide together as a team.
Solicit personal preferences
Be prepared to hear a diversity of preferences on communication dynamics and approaches to work-life balance and/or work-life integration. Accept that each person has different demands on their time and energy, and different preferences for tending to them. Be present, listen actively, and resist the urge to judge. Ask the team if they’re willing to do that same practice to ensure everyone feels heard and to avoid misinterpretations. It takes a personal commitment to seek to understand what someone else is saying. Let the team know you’ll check for understanding before sharing opinions.
Agree as a team
Email at all hours of the night or don't, expect fast responses or don't, save text messages for emergencies and Slack for regular updates or questions – what's important is that you decide and agree on this as a team. Remember to consider the various channels that are available, including Teams, Zoom and Hangouts, and options like emails with a delayed send or just removing work email from phones to address the different needs of each person. Deciding on team boundaries for how you’ll communicate with each other is a combination of personal boundaries, the nature of the work, cultural norms, and how you can bring out the best in each person. When you choose as a team how you’ll communicate you’ll get better results, and the journey will be more fun too.
Schedule time to re-evaluate and adjust
Your team gets to decide how you want to work with each other, within whatever constraints come with your roles, organization, and industry. Whatever you decide, schedule time on the calendar to revisit these communication agreements to A) assess what's working well, B) what hasn't been ideal, and C) what needs to change in the agreements. If some people are trying a habit of communication that’s completely new to them, it will take time to adjust – but testing is the best way to know whether those communication agreements are feasible or not. As people adjust, talk through how you’ll remind each other about what types of information to communicate in each channel (i.e. in the moment or at a weekly meeting). Use these conversations as opportunities to understand how others do their best and what works best for them.
Now, take a look at how these principles were applied to resolve common communication challenges, inspired by real teams:
How the Nighttime Emailer Continues to Email at Night:
A manager does their best work at night, sending most emails between midnight and 2 am even though the rest of their team worked 9-5. Rather than letting team members think they needed to respond outside of their standard working hours, this manager set expectations up front: no one was expected to respond in real-time, and only in an emergency would they be contacted outside of working hours – by phone, not email. By setting aside judgement about “the right way to get work done,” this team adapted to their manager’s preferences and were clear on what was expected.
The Recipient Uninstalls Their Work Email from Their Phone:
The recipient of a late-night and weekend emailer felt obligated to respond if they saw an email come through. It was distracting them from rejuvenating and enjoying their time outside of work. After a discussion between these two coworkers, they compromised and agreed it made sense for the recipient to remove their work email from their phone, because this person also rarely received time-sensitive late-night emails from others. The team agreed to text or call each other if there was an emergency If there was an emergency or something required an immediate response outside of their standard office hours. As a result, this person no longer felt anxious when their phone lit up with notifications outside of office hours.
Working During the Day and at Night (but Not Working All the Time):
On a dual time-zone team in a role that frequently required irregular on-call times, this team member was losing their work-life balance and beginning to risk burnout. With the understanding that limiting hours of availability (i.e., “No early morning calls or late-night meetings outside of 8am to 8pm”) would impact the team and risk their job, they brought up the need for flexibility during work hours. Their manager agreed it was appropriate to schedule personal time into their workday. Between required meetings, this person blocked out time on their calendar to ride their bike, get a massage, play with their kids, or to run some errands. This flexible work schedule and communication agreement aligned to their personal values, preferences, and priorities while ensuring the job got done.
The Weekend Emailers Uses Delay-Send:
Two senior team members were used to sending emails on the weekend. This caused stress and magnified a sense of power imbalance, given the relative titles and level of experience of everyone on the team. After talking about this dynamic during a team meeting, the two senior team members agreed that continuing with their weekend emailing pattern wasn’t worth the negative impact on the rest of the team, but they also wanted to work when it worked best for them.
They set up a brainstorming session to explore how they might best meet the communication needs of each team member. After exploring several options, the team decided the two senior team members would still write their emails when it was convenient for them (avoiding the added cognitive overhead of tracking a to-do list of emails) but that they would use the delay-send setting so that their emails would arrive Monday. Additionally, this team agreed that weekend emails were permitted for urgent topics and emergencies, as they needed to be reachable even on off-hours and they shared a preference for email instead of a phone call. The team was able to keep the lines of communication open and knew if there was a weekend email, it was urgent and couldn’t wait until Monday.
Our own sensibilities about the right way to work and communicate with others in a professional manner are likely to be different than the people around us at work. Paying special attention to understand perspectives and preferences that are different than one’s own demonstrates respect for others and a willingness to collaborate – key ingredients for psychological safety. Some people do their best with routine and clear boundaries between work time and personal time, while others do their best with a fluid, flexible integration of work time and personal time. Neither preference affects motivation, and neither preference leads them to do a better or worse job – it’s simply how they prefer to do their work.
High-performing teams focus on bringing the best out of everyone. Bringing the best out of everyone requires understanding when and how people will do their best and then finding out how to create the conditions that work well for the team. The default is unlikely to work well for everyone and the way we work together is the single biggest contributor to team effectiveness.