Communicating with a Dispersed Team

EllisLab, like many contemporary companies, has a staff that is dispersed around the world. We have staff in at least six states in the United States and in two other countries. Every workday for us now spans several time zones. This kind of situation can create some communication challenges for any size organization and we’re keenly aware of how this could affect us as we continue to grow in the months and years ahead. Looking at ways to improve our communications with each other is one of a handful of behind-the-scenes projects we’re currently working on.

When I served as the director of a childcare center we also tackled the challenge of communicating information within a somewhat dispersed staff. Even though we all worked in the same building, we were situated in different rooms in the building, we worked overlapping shifts, and employment laws and childcare laws created a situation in which the whole staff could not meet at the same time, in the same place, without the center having to pay overtime wages. Our staff had to meet after closing in the evenings, and we had to pay folks their hourly wage plus one-half hour’s time for every hour of the meeting. This made meetings very expensive so we only held them about 10 times a year.

There were 27 employees, six daily volunteers and other volunteers who comprised the staff of the center. At the time I started as the director, the center had a ton of dysfunctional issues that needed attention, and I was leading some pretty major change initiatives and really needed some way of communicating with staff to keep it up to speed on a daily basis. The building had one computer, two phone lines, no employee lunchroom or break room, and no intercom. Basically there was no way to communicate between the office and the classrooms or from one classroom to another except to have someone physically walk from room to room or yell down the hallway.

The building was very old and among its many challenges it had one adult toilet for the entire staff and visiting adults. Over 100 adults worked in or visited the building each day and we had one toilet in a small room with a sink at one end of a long building. Student toilets were in rooms with little or no privacy and were not suitable for an adult. It was also not a good practice for students to use the same facilities at the adults.

It wasn’t long before I realized that the one adult toilet was the functional bottleneck (constraint) of the whole center. If just about any other functional system in the building quit working, we could stay open and legally continue to care for the 80+ children we were licensed for. But if that adult toilet ever quit working, even for a couple of hours, the whole operation would have to shut down.

One night, I was writing a contingency plan to cover us in the event the one adult toilet ever quit working, and something occurred to me. That toilet was the one place, the only place, that I could pretty much guarantee the entire staff would visit on any given day. Also, I could presume that at least one daily visit would take three or four minutes with the person sitting still long enough to read something.

The next day, I wrote the first edition of my “Soapbox;” a mini-newsletter printed in a large font. I taped it to the back of the toilet room door so that it could be easily read from the “seated position.”  Within an hour, one of the staff was so offended that I had found a way to invade her “personal space” that she ripped it down, wadded it up, and ran water over it in the sink to ensure it wouldn’t be put back up.

That first week, I remember replacing the Soapbox with a fresh copy about 10 times as staff kept removing it in protest. Then one day, I noticed the copy hung on the door was one that had been ripped down, crumpled up, retrieved and re-hung with fresh tape. Someone on the staff actually wanted to read the thing and had hung it back up.

I continued to publish the Soapbox at least once a week and each edition improved on the layout and presentation of information. After that first week, it wasn’t ever ripped down again. Within the first few months the staff accepted this new form of communication, and I knew the acceptance had reached critical mass when a staff member asked me to start putting a second copy of it on the outside of the door for those waiting in line to read.

The Soapbox became our primary source of news and information at the center. Once information was posted, nearly the entire staff would know about it within 24 hours. The staff learned to rely on the Soapbox for important information about employee benefits, vacation schedules, changes in funding, policies, procedures changes, requests for input to assist with decision making and updates on our ongoing remodeling projects: essentially everything and anything that mattered to the staff and parents. One edition featured paint color samples so the staff could choose the color we would have the building painted.

The consistent flow of up-to-date information from the main office, and the fact that everyone had equal access to it on a daily basis made the Soapbox a success. Our staff was kept updated on all pertinent news and announcements, as often as new information was available. This proved to be a big help with preventing and controlling rumors, and encouraging useful conversations between staff members.

The key things that made that made the Soapbox a success were:

1. A captive audience with 100 percent attendance; everybody read it within 24 hours of each other
2. Regularly updated information from a reliable source
3. A presentation format that made the information quick and easy to consume

Today, I’m considering what might prove equally successful that can be served up to our dispersed staff at EllisLab. We have some systems in place now; might there be something even better? What’s the best way to ensure the captive audience? Who will be in charge of posting the information to ensure the steady flow of updates? A blog, RSS, staff forums, bulk email, a weekly podcast, project management software? You would think that with all these options available, and all the geeky, techno savvy folks here at EllisLab this communication thing would be easy to figure out, and maybe it will be, but for now, it’s a work in progress.

If you work in a large group of folks that are dispersed in one way or another, what’s your winning solution, and how’s it working out for you?