Our team uses a variety of different communication methods and tools in order to collaborate with one another. This section covers the essentials you'll want to focus on initially, and the other tools and processes will fall into place as you go.
Effective and ongoing communication within Osio Labs is essential. As a distributed company, there's not a way to just "show up" without communicating it. The better communication tools you have, the better you'll be able to do your work. One important aspect of our communication is to document our decisions. We often hash things out in phone conversations or Slack chats, and those are hard to track down later or for others to be aware of if they weren't involved. Whenever we have a decision on a topic that affects the whole company or others on the team, it should be recorded in a more permanent medium. Often this can be an email to the entire team, but it may also make more sense to record decisions in GitHub tickets or Trello cards if they are about active tasks.
Here is an overview of the main tools we use and how we use them.
| Type | Resource | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | We use email to codify group decisions, send meeting summaries, and send our individual and project updates. | |
| Online Meetings | Google Hangouts and Skype | Used regularly for internal team discussions and one-on-one syncs. Also great for screen sharing. |
| Group Chat | Slack | Usually passive, except when directly reaching out to a teammate. Also used as the virtual "water cooler." |
We have several email addresses within the Osio Labs team. The main email to reach everyone is the "team" email group. We use this liberally. You can see a list of all email groups and who is in them in the Operations Manual.
On Monday morning the CEO sends an email to the team with the subject “This Week in Osio Labs.” This email will include any notable information about the coming week, the main topics for the weekly team call, and a quick list of anyone who is out of the office (OOO) or traveling that week. This is normally for informational purposes only, but if you have anything to add or correct, please respond to the whole team.
As a team we like to know what everyone is working on and how things are going. Once a week you should complete and email a “five-fifteen” report, which is a standardized report for updating everyone on what’s going on. Everyone on the team sends out a 5:15 every Friday morning. You can use other team members' 5:15s as examples, but you will need to provide the following:
- Recent Successes
- Things I've Learned Recently
- Current Challenges
- Project Updates for next week
- Needs and Assumptions
The Needs and Assumptions section is important if you are relying on other people to accomplish your tasks in the coming week. Tell us what you are assuming will work or be in place for you to have a successful week, and/or if you have questions you need answered to remove potential blockers. By sending this in the morning on Friday, we all have an opportunity to coordinate our needs and validate assumptions. If there are conflicts in availability or priorities we can have these conversations on Friday or early on Monday, so you can hit the ground running on Monday and know that your runway is clear.
We have one recurring, weekly company-wide call that is mandatory for the entire team. This call is every Tuesday at 2pm U.S. Eastern (8pm Central European, 1pm U.S. Central, 11am U.S. Pacific) on our main team Hangout, and is scheduled for 1 hour, though it does not always last that long. This is a dedicated time to discuss company business and general things going on that don’t fit in other calls.
Subsets of the team (e.g. trainers, marketing, etc.) have other regularly scheduled calls, and you will be notified of any you are expected to attend.
When you're working, you should be logged into Slack. It will likely be the first place that people will look for you if they have a quick question. It's also a great place to get help, answer questions, and share links to weird things on YouTube. Please use Slack's status to set yourself to "away" when you are done with your workday. We realize that "workday" is a loose concept here, so we'll leave it up to each of you to protect your free time. Your "away" status means that others are probably not going to get an answer quickly, and an email may be more appropriate.
We have multiple Google calendars. The main calendars are based on the areas of responsibility outlined under the Company Structure section. You will be invited to all calls you are expected to be on, and once you accept the invitation, the calendar entry will appear in your personal calendar. This way you do not need to have all calendars visible to see your schedule. We also have a Leave calendar which shows you all of our official holidays and days on which someone on the team is out of the office (OOO) for any reason.
We take security seriously. In addition to our obligation to keep our member and business information secure, we have various obligations due to compliance with PCI-DSS standards and our liability insurance policy. These are the main areas that you are responsible for securing. You can find more details and recommendations in our Operations Manual.
- Anti-virus software
- Laptop security (drive encryption)
- Account/login security (passwords, 2-factor authentication)
- VPN (secure internet connections)
- Backups
Our resources are somewhat scattered. It can be a bit overwhelming. Here is a quick rundown of our main tools, and what we use them for. There is much more detailed information about all the tools we use in the Operations Manual.
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Github
Contains code repositories and issue tracking for all of our websites. The canonical version of all written tutorials lives in GitHub as well, and is where creation, review, and updates are made. We publish our sample code for tutorials and workshops, and all of our open-sourced (free) curriculum, on Github as well.
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Trello
We use this to track most of our shared tasks that fall outside of GitHub technical issues. You will find a board for team goals, as well as boards for the various areas of responsibility and particular projects.
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Google Docs
This is where we keep more permanent documents and collaborate on spreadsheets.
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Dropbox Paper
Used for collaborative note-taking. Documents here are generally considered temporary, and only used for documents that we consider disposable. If you wish to retain a document beyond its usefulness for a particular project or collaborative session, you should copy it over to Google Docs.
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Dropbox
All of the files we share as a team. This ranges from workshop materials to licensing contracts to design and marketing assets.
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Zendesk
We use Zendesk to manage all support and sales tickets. If someone asks you a support question directly, you should forward it to Zendesk to keep everything centralized.