How We Communicate At LexGo

OVERALL

• Our key communication tools are LexGo, Slack and Notion
• Whenever you’re mentally ‘in the office’, fire up LexGo so you can see the team and vice versa.
• Set your LexGo ‘home room’ to sit with your team
• Share your status so others know when to loop you in:
• Stepping away (for lunch or otherwise), jump into ‘stepped away’.
• In a sales demo, jump into ‘Outside - LexGo Demo office’.
• Going into the flow and want to make sure no-one bothers you, move to ‘Focus time’.
• On vacation or ‘out of the office’ then there is no need to sign into LexGo.

SYNC / REALTIME

Conversation Experience:

• When we’re in a LexGo conversation we are present - cameras are on and we’re not distracted multi-tasking.
• Rename the LexGo room to the topic of the conversation so people know where to go to join and others who aren’t participating will see what’s going on on the LexGo map and feel informed.
• Jump into the room a few minutes early to connect with others before the conversation topic kicks off.
• Feel free to lock the LexGo room for privacy if needed.
• If you’re in a collaboration session and need a key detail or feedback from a stake holder to keep things flowing, invite them into the LexGo room. They can jump in for 2 minutes (or whatever is needed) and then jump back out.

When and How We Communicate in Real Time:

• Schedule future team working / collaboration sessions via team calendars and connect in LexGo
• Schedule standing meetings to be as short as possible for daily stand-ups, weekly planning. Since we work across time zones, try to keep group get togethers in the center of the day.
• If something is important and going to hold up your work, instead of scheduling an hour long future meeting to talk on the 32nd of Feptember, if someone isn’t in focus time ask if they ‘Have a minute’ in LexGo to talk now.
• Batch up non-urgent conversation topics to have an organized list for the next time you see someone. If something is urgent, have a quick conversation about it when you see the other person available in LexGo.

Handling Urgent Issues:

• Text if you need an urgent answer on something. Urgent system alerts go to group texts.
• Real emergency - Call and then assemble group conversations in LexGo.

ASYNC

General:

• Make sure chat is really async - avoid multi hour attention grabbing chat ‘conversations’ at all costs
• NO internal email unless it’s forwarding something from the outside (that we’re talking about in Slack)

When and How We Chat:

• Slack is async for updates & questions where a next day response is ok.
• Turn off Slack app and channel alerts. Only exception is a couple alarm channels - turn alerts on for those. General systems information alerts go into Slack.
• A great chat message includes enough background & details to paint a complete picture of the update so no conversation is needed (i.e. for progress status updates include items completed, what’s on tap next and any issues - calling out specific individuals for help) or providing the info someone needs to digest to provide feedback on without lots of back and forth.
• Respond in Slack threads where possible to keep information grouped together.
• Put chats into the Slack group that is most appropriate. It’s ok to ask a question of one person of the channel (make sure to @ tag them) - that’ll give others context on what’s going on too.
• Avoid group direct messages in Slack with more than one recipient, those are hard to go back to in the future. Put those in a channel (or create a new one if needed)
• Provide async feedback as close to the work product as possible (so in the tool being used ideally). If it’s new marketing content in Notion, place comments in Notion. Slack is the fallback tool for async feedback in the appropriate channel to keep things grouped together.

3 Chat Rule:

• After going back and forth 3 times, ask should this be a quick conversation in LexGo to resolve instead of the chat becoming a running distraction? Invite the other parties to a LexGo huddle to talk.