This is the fifth post of twelve for Mixmax Advent 2020.
Effective asynchronous communication is one of the most important parts of working in a distributed team. If decisions are made or information is surfaced in a conversation and that conversation isn’t recorded and shared with others in some way, the knowledge is siloed at best and can be lost at worst.
Mixmax has always been a distributed company, and with the COVID-19 pandemic still making gatherings unsafe in the U.S., we’ve gone fully remote. This means it’s extra important to make sure our communication methods work for everyone on the team regardless of location, schedule, and time zone, and that we share knowledge effectively.
To that end, we’ve taken to recording our meetings that happen via Google Meet. This is easy: at the start of a meeting, we ask for everyone’s consent before starting the recording, and after the meeting is done, Google emails the recording (as a Drive link) to the organizer and the person who started the recording.
Thing is, we want these recordings to be shared and visible to people who weren’t there. We could open up the file and relocate it to a central shared folder, or copy the link and send it to specific people or groups by hand. That’s clunky, though. No-one wants to have to remember to do that and then go through all those steps after each meeting. That’s a recipe for frustration and lost information.
Getting rid of annoying busywork is where Mixmax shines. On my team, we set up a Mixmax Rule to handle this for us:
When I receive an email from meet-recordings-noreply@google.com with a subject line containing “Daily Standup”, post the email to my team’s Slack channel.
Now our daily standup recordings are automatically shared with the whole team, so when one or two of us can’t make it for whatever reason, we can all still learn and benefit from what was said. It’s a win for the team, and it makes our work more efficient and pleasant.
Want to be part of a team that values good communication and strives to make busywork a thing of the past? Come join us!
