As a transparent organization, at Camplight we try to keep all of our endeavors publicly available for all members of the cooperative. This is an easy task given that we use digital tools like Trello, Slack, and email which provide public but focused threads of communication. And focused threads of communication are important for us because we can keep a conversation in its context without straying in different seemingly related topics.

As you can see, all of these are tools for written discourse. We try to limit our video and voice chats because they usually take too much time and scheduling and you can’t comment on the discussions in them afterward. Of course, we value face to face meetings when we are just having informal talks and fun because without these there will hardly be any sense of being together. And when we do have meetings, someone is appointed as a scribe for the group and makes sure that they provide meaningful and exhaustive notes.

After that introduction, I’ll briefly share our main points for embracing written communication.

Out-of-the-box documentation of all decisions which were made

It often happens that someone would like to see why a certain thing is the way it is. Why we have this process? Why do we do this part that way? Why we’ve put this seemingly useless button on the most clickable place?

If you make each of these decisions live you’ll hardly be able to document all of them. Of course, you’ll provide meeting notes, but are you sure that the scribe would have written everything? At Camplight we make each new initiative in a Trello card and start discussions there. That makes sure that if we make a decision a person could see the whole train of thought for the decision in question. Therefore they’ll be able to understand it in full.

We definitely have what to improve in this. When all your documentation is in Trello cards it may become hard to search, so maybe an index or a good naming convention will be useful.

When you write, you have time to think and express yourself in a concise and easy-to-understand manner

Writing gives structure to one’s thoughts. Not only that, it gives you time to think and try to write something that’s easy to understand. It also gives the reader the possibility to easily move back and forth in the writing, so if they don’t understand some thought, you don’t necessarily have to repeat it. Of course, writing in a concise and easily understandable way requires skill. You can’t jot down a sentence which is the exact expression of your thoughts, post it and expect people to make sense of it. You have to iterate, reread and put yourself in the shoes of the reader.

It allows people to hop in when they can, without forcing them to a given schedule

Meetings require scheduling. If you’re a small group, you can easily agree on an hour, date and duration. But as the group grows and people get into different timezones meetings can be a real burden. That’s when writing first and meeting only if necessary can be helpful.

When you write something you don’t expect people to act on it right away. If it’s important enough they’ll see it, think about it, sleep on it and answer if they have something to say. They won’t lose their precious time meeting about something which isn’t a big deal. They could rest or do some deep work instead.

Of course, written communication can have some serious drawbacks if misused. These are mainly in the realm of emotions and proactivity.

Regarding emotions, you have to be very careful while crafting or reading something. Written words can easily be laid out in a way that strips all emotion and gives a sense of negativity towards the person who reads them. Especially if you’re mentioned in some comment. In order to avoid this, we’ve found out that as a writer you have to be mindful of your feelings towards the subject of your writing. E.g. if I’m writing to another teammate to tell them that something could be improved, there’s a huge difference if I say to them “This doesn’t work. You should fix it in this and that way.” and if I say to them “What do you think about improving this by doing that?”. Of course, you shouldn’t lie to the person either because people are smart enough to understand the real meaning of “I really like the thing you’ve done, but …” or “I totally agree with you and you’re not quite right there.” As a reader, on the other hand, you should keep in mind that things are rarely personal — sometimes just seeing the comment from several other viewpoints is enough to understand its objectivity and react in a reasonable way.

Regarding proactivity, we often find ourselves in a situation where a statement requires the input of many people but few actually participate. This can also be experienced in a live or video meeting where few people talk and the others just listen. In written communication, however, we talk about longer timeframes which may be too long for the communication to be productive. Currently, we’re tackling this issue by first of all respecting that people in the cooperative have different priorities. You might think that your statement or initiative is the most important thing in the universe but it might not actually be. So, as a writer, you should provide a concise call to action and a method for people to signal that they’ve read your post but have nothing to add to it. This usually involves telling people to react with an 👍 emoji if they’ve seen your statement. Also, if you still consider the input of others important, you have to go and contact each person individually by private message, phone call or in another way which will make them respond in due time.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Feel free to share them in a comment or reach out to team@camplight.net =)

This is the first post in our series for efficient and effective teamwork. Stay tuned for more interesting experiences in that realm.