🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

You sent a co-worker a message in Slack, but you haven't gotten a response.

Now what? Do you follow up? How? When? Did they see the message?

💡 Concept

When you spend time wondering how to follow up after sending a message or email, you’re wasting valuable mental resources.

Instead, establish universal expectations for async communication in a team charter, including how team members should do each of the following:

👀 Acknowledge receipt: How should people indicate that they have seen a message? Does the expected response time vary depending on the communication channel?

➰ Close the loop: How does someone confirm that any required action has been taken?

👋 Follow up: How and when should someone follow up if either of the above steps have not been completed within a designated time frame?

If expectations differ for a specific message, make that clear when you send it.

Setting these expectations can save mental resources and avoid confusion and miscommunication, ensuring that your distributed team operates efficiently and effectively.

🎬 Take Action

• Create a team communication charter to establish universal expectations for how quickly teams should respond to different categories of messages.

• In the messages that you send today, be explicit about your expectations for how the recipient should acknowledge receipt, when you will follow up if you don’t hear back, and how the loop will be closed.

• Acknowledge receipt of any messages that don’t require your immediate response.

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Use our template to create a communication charter with your team.

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.