Always At Least Acknowledge
Upleveling your electronic communication
What would happen if, when you attended meetings with your team, you never acknowledged anyone in the room and never said anything? Socially, this would considered awkward. Professionally, this would impact the entire team. You would rightfully be labeled unprofessional and you’d get clear feedback1 from management that it needed to be corrected.
So how come people get away with never acknowledging other people’s electronic communications? That’s because, quite sadly, it’s become the norm. The excuses are commonplace. “I’m buried in my mail. Can you text me instead?” “Wait, we’re supposed to be watching for messages on Slack too?”
Study after study shows the continued rise of electronic communication. So the idea of feeling behind is not at all surprising. But accepting weak electronic communication for your team will hurt you all in the long run. Regular communication is the backbone to your team’s overall health. Rather than accepting this, you can take action to address this for yourself, and model the simplicity of your approach for your teammates to follow.
At Microsoft, I guaranteed a response to your communication within 24 hours (excluding weekends, of course). That response might just be an acknowledgement that I’ve received it and that more work is needed on my part before I can respond, in which case I would also try to provide an ETA for when that response would be. “Thanks for the mail. This will take me some time to read through all of this and respond. You will hear back from me by EOD Thursday.” But for every communication that was needing a response, I gave a response within 24 hours.
Satisfying this guarantee required 60 minutes on my daily schedule (45 minutes for email, 15 minutes for Teams messages and thread). Is a 10% cost to my time worth it to make this guarantee? Absolutely, because this contributed to the team’s steady and continuous progress. And when others saw that it was possible and manageable, they followed suit and the whole team benefited.
If all we do is communicate, we’re not making any progress on our work. But if we can’t effectively communicate, then we’re also not going to make much progress either. It’s a balancing act. You need to care enough about communication to keep the team moving forward, but don’t care so much that there’s no time for anything else.
This approach builds on the Energy Flywheel2, Timebox Everything3, and Triage Shield4 concepts I’ve already elaborated on in earlier posts. If, as I lay out my approach, you are doubting that it will apply to your situation, refer to these other posts to help convince you that we’re not all that different.
This exercise is best done once holistically. I will walk through these steps, and use my own answers as an example for you to follow. It’s a five step process to take control of all of your electronic communications.
Take inventory
Estimate volume
Establish guarantees
Compute daily cost
Block time on calendar
