Communication Standards

Obviously communication is critical to the success of any team. It is important to communicate in a consistent manner.

My teams have used Slack for team communications. It is a lot like Discord (which also works) but is set up for professionals and is used by companies. I very much recommend it and it is a great tool for teams.

If you decide to use Slack, set up channels for

• General (for everything important that is to thie whole team)
• Build (for anything that is related to building)
• Programming (for anything related to programming)
• Meeting Attendance (where you will post meeting times and teammates are expected to let you know if they cannot be present)
• Photos
• Random (for anything that does not fall into other categories but is still related to the team)
• Unrelated (optional, can get hard to police. For anything that is not related to the team)

Make sure your team knows the expectations of usage of team communication softwares, including appropriate use, organization, and consistency.

It is critically important that all important communications like meeting times are put in slack, even if they are also emailed out. Understand that keeping schedules is difficult for your teammates and you want to put everything in a consice location.

Make sure that if a teammate will not be at a meeting, they tell you in slack. This is multi-faced. It is important to know who will and will not be there, and this makes it easy to look and see. It is public, which will help prevent teammates from slacking off and being unfair to their team. And it allows everyone to see who won't be there so they can plan accordingly.