Ask HN: How do you encourage a culture of written communication on your team? - cborenstein
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trilinearnz
Think about the 'why' of your question. What is the goal that written
communication will solve for your team, in your view?

This has two benefits: one, it challenges your own thinking (perhaps the
underlying issue could be solved in a different way, which might be more
successful); two, it gives you justification which you can use to persuade
your team members.

See: Simon Sinek's "Start With Why". Additionally, I've found the "Hands-on
Agile" Slack group to be a great community resource for this type of team-
focused Q&A.

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firebones
* Lead by example.

* Steer ad hoc discussions toward the issue tracker--whether via stories or spikes.

* Don't let Slack/IRC/Teams be the place decisions are made and documented. They're good tools for conversation starters and finding throw away answers, not good as a record of design and decisions.

* Always be steering ad hoc conversations towards outlets that provide reusable context when it becomes clear that there's something of substance. This could be steering towards issue trackers, wikis, knowledge repos, README.md files, etc.

* Realize that many people aren't natural writers, and accommodate them.

* Hire for writing ability. Find a balance and pair writers with talkers.

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cborenstein
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

What do you to accommodate people who aren't natural writers?

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inertiatic
As with any other thing you try to encourage, it's not going to work without
consensus or decision power.

If you have either, it should be easy to do so.

One easy way to push people in the right direction without much effort though
is to allow people to work remotely more. Suddenly, sharing something
interesting or weird that happened to them while resolving something gets
shared in writing, their aha moment gets told on the open ticket instead of
around the watercooler etc.

~~~
cborenstein
Really interesting idea, thanks for sharing.

