Get colleagues to use the phone instead of instant message/email in high priority situations

Question

How do you encourage your team members to pick up the phone when a high priority situation arises. They tend to always use email/instant message and assume the recipient has got the message, no follow up phonecall or heads up that you have an important message to deal with.

I sometimes think some of my team would send the fire brigade an email requesting help if the building was on fire.

We use skypeout for phone calls and all team members have direct mobile numbers stored in that account (so it is easy to get a hold of someone's number).

We actually prefer email/instant message for less urgent communications (as it doesn't interrupt our programmers during their normal work).

To date with have discussed this with team members ad naseum, and also issued guides & emails.

Answer 1

I've noticed that it's easy to get people to nod their heads to clarifying or changing communication and hard to get them to do it in practice. My thought is that it's not generally an issue of understanding that:

• High priority -> use phone
• Not worth interrupting someone -> use email/IM

But that clarifying who owns the problem and what "urgent" or "high priority" is can actually be the harder step.

My next step here would be:

• Make note of cases where the issue really should have been treated as a high priority with a phone call, and wasn't. Get a sense of the impact of doing it the wrong way, and discuss the issue of specific cases with the team at the next meeting. You shouldn't have to name names, although with a small team, this may become self-evident.

• Having notes on specific occurrences may highlight a pattern where only one or two people on the team are causing the problem - which may be a matter for a 1 on 1, not a whole team meeting.

• Make it clear that ownership of an issue ends with getting a positive response from the NEW owner saying that he or she claims responsibility. In other words - you will still be held accountable for fixing an issue if all you do is send an email and get no response.

• Get some clear cut rules for what "urgent" is - for example, if the issue must be fixed in 4 hours, it's urgent. Or if it affects a customer.

• Reinforce that no one really wants to have to check their email every hour - it messes up the flow for high-focus work. So don't do unto others what you wouldn't like yourself - mail a mail and expect a 1 hour turnaround.

I've noticed that people who aren't confident of their own judgement will lower the urgency of their own requests at times. Having clear cases for what is urgent and making it clear on who should take accountability will help eliminate that quandary of whether to interrupt others to get help.

Answer 2

Forgive me for saying this, but "What we have here is failure ... to communicate." (Cool Hand Luke).

You don't have a problem with the medium. You have a problem with your team understanding what communication is.

Your team doesn't seem to understand that without receiving an acknowledgment from the receiving party, you have not communicated. You have just made noise. It doesn't matter if it's email, chat, or phone. You must receive an acknowledgment from the other party before you are done.

This seems to be a common cultural issue with Millennials, but it is certainly not limited to them.

Explain it to them this way:

Notification is TCP, not UDP. Unless you get an ACK, you must retransmit.

[EDIT] - I believe @bethlakshmi put more meat on this concept. I recommend accepting her answer as the answer to this question.

Answer 3

It may be worth discussing & brainstorm with the team how to best handle high priority communications. They may have a completely different view on what works most efficiently. You may be used to picking up the phone but that doesn't mean others feel the same, nor does it make it an efficient communication means.

Personally, I think that the phone is a rather poor tool for this and I'm using it infrequently. Here is why:

I'm rarely in a situation where I can pick up the phone during the work day without it being very disruptive and/or rude. So it just gets to voice mail and then I have to get back to it later (sometimes with questionable quality and garbled numbers to call). A text message works a lot better: you can discreetly peek at it right away (and decide whether it warrants a larger interrupt) and you have a written record. We also use Skype very efficiently. We use text-chat to establish contact and level of urgency and then switch to phone/e-mail/video-call/in-person-visit/Skype-call as appropriate. Again this can be done while being in the middle of a meeting or another activity with minimum interruption and impact on ongoing activities.

You and your team need to decide what works best for you in your specific setup but it may be useful to reshape the question to "how do we handle high priority communication most efficiency" and keep an open mind while listening to your team.

Answer 4

What's the problem? Are you getting negative feedback for not responding to important emails in a timely fashion? What are your supervisor's expectations?

Does everyone assume you get email and IM on your phone as well?

It just seems like if emailing/IM didn't work, they would use the mode of communication that does.

Are you sure they see these issues as important as you do?

Sounds like a pet-peeve.