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Discussion on: What does your team do when your communication channels go down?

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nataliedeweerd profile image
𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝

Talk to each other? :)

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

that doesn't work when you're a remote team :D

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nataliedeweerd profile image
𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝

Are telephones not a thing in your country? :p

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

I don't remember the last time I used the phone for the actual phone functionality :D

Seriously speaking: I'm sure it's a possible last emergency but I think it's best to have a secondary chat tool, possibly hosted by a different cloud provider, when you have a distributed team :)

All you need is a policy and a company wide email that says: "Slack is not working, let's regroup in tool Y in 15 minutes"

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nataliedeweerd profile image
𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝

Oh yeah don't get me wrong, multiple channels are important :P It just surprises me how it seems so few people use email or phones. I've never worked remotely to be fair, or worked with remote staff, so everyone's always been in the office. But even at my current agency, where there are 60-70 staff on site, we still just email or telephone.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Whatever works best for a company...

I used to work for one that abused emails to the point that it was basically impossible to follow them because some PMs used to CC every possible person that remotely had anything to do with the product on them and anyone had stuff to say. Basically a broken chat :D

Regarding phones calls, I don't know, I guess it's also subjective. I'm not a huge fan personally (but I'm talking in general, not just for work) but it's not that different from having an audio call on any videoconferencing software, is it?

I think the most important thing is to have a plan B when your main tool of communication stops working, whatever that is.

Everything becomes the correct tool if it accomplishes that :)