How can you improve communication in a remote software development team?

There are various measures and approaches to improve communication in virtual or remote engineering teams of software developers and software engineers. It is irrelevant whether they are front-end, back-end or other more specialized software developers.

Here is a table with my personal assessment of how effective the measures are in each case. This will help you to choose the right measures.

	Rating	Context
Strengthen individual personal relationships in 1-1 meetings	3: High impact	The good personal relationship helps to teach employees communication skills (can be supported with tools such as Echometer)
Strengthen asynchronous communication	2: Medium effect	Can increase the work focus of employees, but requires good relationships and established rules
Introduce clear communication guidelines	2: Medium effect	Helps to improve together in this regard, but requires a certain level of motivation and maturity in the team
Use good communication tools	2: Medium effect	A prerequisite for good communication, but not enough
Conduct good Agile retrospectives	3: High impact	Can be extremely effective at continuously improving communication - especially when using software tools like Echometer
Setting a good example	3: High impact	Easy to implement and highly effective if you make expectations transparent in parallel within the team
Pair Programming Rotation	3: High impact	Peer-to-peer communication creates good corresponding relationships and more confidence to open up in the team
Code Review Guidelines	1: Low effect	Experience shows that they are rarely looked at again after creation - targeted agile retrospectives as a “habit” are more effective
“Launch Fridays” - Demo of the latest release	2: Medium effect	Helps specifically to promote communication regarding tasks, but not to promote the basics of good communication (e.g. psychological safety)
Monthly “Tech Show & Tell” - developers share something they built/learned	2: Medium effect	Relaxed atmosphere leads to relationship building, but does not necessarily lead to immediate improvements in everyday life
A #wins or #gratitude channel with “thank you”, help and mentoring	1: Low effect	Initially helpful, but later often no longer actively used in the team because there is no regular trigger (as with retrospectives)
“Remote Coffee” - a bot pairs team members weekly for relaxed conversations	3: High impact	Peer-to-peer communication creates good corresponding relationships and more confidence to open up in the team

To give you a little more background on my evaluation of the measures, here’s what I had in mind:

• How easy is the measure to implement?
• How sustainable is the measure?
• What is the potential effect of this measure?
• How much does the measure contribute to the foundations of good communication: a motivated team with trusting, positive relationships with one another?

Next, I have a short step-by-step guide that chronologically classifies the measures.

Step-by-step guide: Improving communication in IT teams

Here is a short step-by-step guide if you want to improve communication in your team based on the measures mentioned above.

1. RelationshipAs a manager, build a positive relationship with your employees or direct reports. Software tools such as Echometer can help you in bi-weekly one-to-one meetings
2. Informal appointmentsInformal appointments such as joint (remote or virtual) lunches and walks also help a lot to improve relationships within the team
3. Set expectationsAs soon as the relationships in the team are established, you can define communication guidelines and code review guidelines etc. together in order to regularly reflect on them later in your retrospectives.
4. Setting a good exampleOnce you have established clearer work rules, it is your job as a manager to demonstrate these in an exemplary and transparent manner and to demand them from the team.
5. Pair Programming RotationPair programming helps with both the professional and personal development of employees and further strengthens the network of relationships
6. Agile Retrospectives with Echometer: Sprint retrospectives are the guarantee that you regularly reflect on your communication goals and thus sustainably improve them - especially the Echometer software tool has good templates to improve communication

With this process, you should have a clearer sense of how to go about improving communication in your software engineering or development team as an IT leader.

FAQs: Frequently asked questions

Here are some frequently asked questions in this context.

What is the most effective way to improve communication in remote engineering teams?

This depends heavily on your team and its level of maturity. Basically, the combination of different ingredients is crucial:

1. Creating psychological safety in the team, coupled with the
2. Creating clear expectations of the communication processes, coupled with
3. Regular trigger to reflect on and further improve communication, for which agile retrospectives are ideally suited

The Retrospective Software Tool Echometer even has templates to help you reflect on communication in your team - you can browse here: https://my.echometerapp.com/retro-setup

What are the least recommended measures to improve communication in virtual or remote software development teams?

In my experience, something like code review guidelines or #gratitude channels may have a short-term effect, but without regular reflection triggers, they do not lead to sustainable improvements. Only in conjunction with regular agile retrospectives do they develop a certain power.

What tricks or tools are there to improve communication in virtual remote software engineering teams?

One “trick” is, to a certain extent, especially with teams that don’t know each other well, to initially place a high value on building psychological safety in the team. This is especially possible through a good error culture of the manager - show yourself vulnerable and talk about your mistakes!

The sprint retrospective software tool Echometer is a tool that helps to sustainably improve communication in software development teams. With various psychologically based templates, it helps to regularly reflect on and improve the fundamentals of good communication, such as psychological safety and clear processes.