⭐️This is the Telescoped internal framework that we use for remote work. If you find it helpful please feel free to copy/modify/share for use in your company. ⭐️
Everyone starts their day with a check in. We share typical "stand-up" items plus other things that go beyond work (which are the most important). E.g. How you're feeling, interesting news in your life, photos of what's going on in your life, etc. At the end of the day we check out, sharing what we got done for the day, how our day was, and what we're hoping to tackle the next day. For this we use our own Telescoped internal software, but we started this practice on a dedicated Slack channel called "Standup".
We have a dedicated channel in Slack called "Thanks" that anyone can use to praise or thank a team member. Praise often for things big and small.
We have a water cooler channel on slack called "Fun" where you can share whatever you want and let your guard down. Feel free to hop in there to hang out and talk about things other than work.
We also create temporary channels to support our team during emergencies like the current COVID-19 pandemic. The idea is to have a dedicated channel on Slack to share news, reports, data and tools related to the emergency. It helps us separate this from the rest of the normal conversations and it allows the team to jump in or stay out depending on their preference.
Wiki - We use Notion as an internal wiki for many things, but in terms of communication, we use it to show what every person in the company is currently working on, what their priorities are for the things they are working on, what their "budget" is in terms of time to complete the work, and then what work was completed in the last week. We also categorize and link to video recordings of all of our company meetings, as well as any functional area team meetings, accompanied by relevant notes. Each department has a dedicated area in the wiki to keep things organized.
Email - Email is for external communications.
Text Chat - Chat (Slack in our case) is for all internal communications and wherever possible public channels should be used instead of direct messages in order to provide transparency and searchability. It also helps us capture a history of the conversations to ensure that any new team members can jump right in.
Video Chat - Video chat is used for collaboration, meetings, and individual conversations where social queues are important (for example, when giving constructive criticism or just doing a regular 1:1). We use Tandem for daily quick calls and RemoteHQ when we need to meet as a team to discuss a specific subject.
Documentation > Meetings: before scheduling a meeting consider creating and sharing a wiki page with a writeup plus diagrams to describe the problem you're trying to solve. Most times collaborating on a document is more effective than a disruptive meeting.