Why Your Remote Team Needs a Separate Chat Backchannel

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Communications Management  

Your team has probably figured out how to work with video and audio by now. However, while video and audio are necessary, they are not sufficient for remote teams. Every team also needs a persistent chat backchannel. With a chat-based backchannel, the team can continue to collaborate when the audio and video are done—or down.

Let’s first take the problem when you’re done with a meeting. If you have a team-based persistent chat backchannel, team members can decide when they want to start, continue and finish discussing team issues.

Use a Persistent Chat Backchannel
Most of the audio and video meeting tools have a chat function. That’s great—but it’s not enough. The team needs to be able to ask and answer questions outside of a meeting. Teams might need to start discussing those issues before the meeting, then during the meeting—and those questions and answers need to persist past the meeting.

Susan, an agile project manager, was thrilled her team used video for most of its meetings. And, it often discussed ideas in the video tool chat—and then wanted to refer back to that chat later. However, that chat didn’t persist past the meeting.

Susan could find the chat and post it on the team’s wiki—but it wasn’t easily searchable. And when the team wanted to start a new topic? She’d have to …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.