We are a small remote team, and although we don't spend our time in a physical office, we are regularly in touch throughout the day and we enjoy working together. We have found the following practices and tools help us facilitate successful communication and collaboration.
Every Monday our team starts the week with a video conference. This gives us a chance to see everyone's faces and hear from each member of the team. Everyone shares what they have been working on over the past week, what was completed, and what they're planning to work on in the coming week. In addition to sharing work related information, it's important to us to take the time to hear how everyone is doing, and share what we're all up to personally. We take the time to touch on personal elements so the entire team knows more about each other and feels more of a connection to each of us as people. This is some of our most valuable time throughout the week. We grow comfortable with each other through these conversations, and we build deeper trust among our teammates. Because we care about each other, we treat each other respectfully and are able to hold each other accountable without blame or shame. We have each other's best interests at heart.
We have an internal set of chat rooms that we use as a team, and a set of rooms that we use for external client chatting that the client is part of. We keep them separate so that internally we can discuss the project without fear that a client might react to unguarded team discussion. It's important that there's no judgment or negative consequences to team members expressing their honest opinions on things. We keep our internal and our client chat rooms on separate platforms, which further helps us to compartmentalize these different types of discussion.
We find that team chat is a great place for quick questions or comments and small conversations. We have a chat room for each project where we can share ideas and discuss strategies. This prevents project specific chat from taking over our general channel and helps us to focus on each project separately. Each of our chat rooms has its own video conference link when we feel the need for a face to face conversation, a screen share, or a more in-depth discussion amongst team members.
All team members belong to our general chat room, and this is where we discuss internal issues relevant to all of us, say hello to each other, and have informal, non project specific conversations during the day. We want to make sure we're hearing from team members each day so they don't feel isolated, especially if they're working solo on a project for most of the week and don't naturally get to interact with others. It's important that while we stay connected, we don't want it to become too distracting. Use the general room for interesting things you're seeing or share small stories without making it joke central all the time.
We check in with clients each week on project specific video conferences. You can find more details on our weekly calls here. The purpose of these client calls is so the team and client can stay in sync on a regular basis. The team covers what work was done, what we're planning to do, and if anything needs to change. We facilitate the discussion using our project management board. The client shares feedback and lets the team know if something didn't work for them. This call is also when new cards may be written/added to the board, so it has been an important meeting for getting work slated. These meetings are scheduled for an hour, and it's important they don't drag on. At the end of a call, the team should know their steps to move forward and the client should feel aware of what's happening on the project. We also always have our standing video conference for each project to be used internally or for impromptu client discussions if needed.
Sometimes team chat doesn't cut it and you need face to face time. This is the reason all of our team chat channels have an associated video conference that we can hop into when a discussion is needed. We use them for team check-ins on project progress, particularly when there's a question about code or process. We're able to easily share our screens, look at each other's work, and provide feedback and ideas. This is also a great way for senior developers to mentor those on the team who are more junior. Rather than waiting to review code when a pull request comes in, we have the opportunity to touch base in the moment when we have a question or need support from a team member.
We use email for sending larger updates on functionality or if we have client questions outside of weekly calls. The strength of email is everyone has it and it's great for asynchronous communication that could take days to resolve. Email is also better than chat rooms for referencing results after the fact, as it's easily searchable.
We use online project boards to manage our progress on projects and to keep track of what everyone is working on. We are able to break projects into small tasks, assign ourselves to a task, leave comments and checklists regarding our work, and see at a glance the status of each task. We use task cards on the board to capture requirements and details about features or bugs. While team chat is great for quick discussions and getting immediate feedback from team members, it is vital that actions decided on in team chat wind up on the board for future reference since we are unable to look things up in team chat. Check out our related documents on developer workflow and card flow for more on how we use this system.
We have a shared Dropbox where we store resources for projects and for internal use. Our project folders include resources like style guides, logos, icons, important screenshots, and data. Our resources folder contains articles, PDF's, and ebooks on design and programming topics we may want to reference or learn more about.