Your Team Needs a Written-Down Workstyle
Turning the implicit into explicit is just good comms.
Years ago, early in my time at Google, my boss Rachel Whetstone said something in a team meeting that washed over me like a cooling summer rain.
“There’s no such thing as an urgent email.”
I remember three things hitting me at once upon hearing this.
First, how revolutionary this was to me after half a decade working in environments where the culture not-so-subtly signaled the opposite expectation without actually saying it. The advent of Blackberries in the workplace gave rise to the implicit expectation that you have a device cybernetically connected to your body at all hours, like a member of the Borg. As far as I can tell, this remains the expectation in most corporate comms environments.
Second, that this rule was absolutely right, but almost nobody in comms runs their team that way. Email is not built for urgency. That’s what the phone is for.
Third, and most useful for our purposes here today, was how rare it is for leaders to explicitly declare their expectations for how things operate at a meta level.
Communications teams ought to be the best group in any company at knowing what each channel is actually for and how to judge the priority of messages. It’s the whole job, arguably. And yet most teams have no shared agreement about how the work gets done.
It’s my belief that this ambiguity drives a real share of the frustration and burnout on comms teams. The background mental cycles that feed straight into anxiety are a quiet tax that runs day and night, the low-grade guessing at rules nobody ever said out loud.
So say them.
Saying them is the team leader's job. A workstyle isn’t real until the person with the authority to enforce it writes it down. Until then, everyone else is just inferring what you’d tolerate.
Take meetings. Meetings aren’t for sharing information, because email already does that better. If you’ve called a meeting only to share information, you’ve called the wrong meeting in most cases.
But vacation is where the gap between stated and real does the most damage.
Most teams have a written policy and the real policy. The explicit rule says take your time. The implicit rule says be reachable, keep half an eye on chat, don’t make us feel your absence. Those two rules can’t both be true, and when they conflict, the unwritten one always wins. So the better move is to make the real expectation match the stated one. Off means off. Go live your life. If you’re going somewhere with no signal, tell people, so they know that even in a genuine emergency you simply won’t be reachable. And then actually be unreachable.
This all holds for senior people most of all, and they’re usually the worst offenders. If you’ve built a team you trust, prove it by disappearing for a week. If you can’t take a vacation without managing your team through it, that’s not your team failing you. That’s you having screwed up somewhere upstream, either in who you hired, or in what you taught them, or in your own inability to let go.
There are two reasons to bother with any of this. The obvious one is coordination. A team that agrees on its own mechanics wastes less time and steps on each other less. Fine. But the one I care more about is quieter.
Communications is a mentally taxing job in a very specific way. A therapist will tell someone with anxiety to stop caring so much about what other people think. That’s reasonable advice for a person. It’s impossible advice for this job, because caring what other people think is literally the entire point. We’ve chosen a line of work that runs directly at the thing most likely to wear a person down.
A defined workstyle won’t fix that. But it removes an entire category of worry and ambiguity, so people can just focus on execution. It takes everything implicit and makes it explicit, so there’s nothing left to guess at.
Which, when you think about it, is the entire job. We do it for our companies every day. We should do it for ourselves.
A starting point
This is built from the rules above and sharpened with a few ideas worth stealing from other people who’ve thought hardest about this. (37signals’ How We Communicate is the best of them.) Take it, argue with it, make it yours.
1. What each channel is for. Email moves information and leaves a record. It is not for urgency and not for decisions. The phone or a text is the only thing that means this can’t wait; if you wouldn’t call about it, it isn’t urgent. Meetings are for decisions and for conversations that are too tangled or too sensitive to write down. And the channel most teams forget to name at all: a document is for anything the next person will need to find. When in doubt, write it rather than say it. Speaking helps whoever was in the room; writing helps everyone who comes after.
2. What “urgent” actually means. “No such thing as an urgent email” only works once you’ve defined the thing that genuinely is urgent. Name the real emergencies — a story breaking, a crisis, a reporter who can sink you by 5 p.m. — and agree that everything else waits for working hours. Pick the single channel that means drop everything, and protect it by never using it for anything less. The habit to kill is the expectation of an instant reply, not the occasional real fire. 37signals puts it more bluntly than I will: “ASAP is poison.”
3. Who decides, and how you know it’s settled. Decisions belong in meetings, not email — but a team also has to say who actually makes the call and how everyone knows it’s been made. Name the owner for messaging and positioning. Say who signs off before something ships and who’s only kept in the loop, and default to fewer approvers, not more. Then write the decision down somewhere durable. A decision that lives only in people’s memory of a meeting isn’t a decision; it’s a future argument.
4. What meetings are for. A meeting needs a decision to make or a disagreement to work through. If it’s neither, it’s an email. Whoever calls it owns the agenda and writes up what got decided. And keep the cost in view: five people in a room for an hour costs five hours, not one. Most standing meetings don’t survive that arithmetic.
5. When people can expect to hear back. Set a response window for each channel, inside working hours, and say it out loud: same-day for email, a couple of hours for chat, right away for a call. The exact numbers matter less than removing the guesswork.
6. What “on vacation” means. Off means off: not on chat, not lurking, not “just checking in.” Name who covers. Define the one genuine-emergency escape hatch narrowly, then honor it. Put the weight on the senior people, because a team reads what its leaders do on vacation, not what they say. One boss answering email from the beach quietly rewrites the rule for everyone below. Around 20 countries now have some form of right-to-disconnect law; you shouldn’t need a law for it inside your own team.
A few real ones, if you want to see how others do it
37signals, The Guide to Internal Communication — The closest thing to a finished version of everything above. Thirty-odd principles, comms-first, and the source of “ASAP is poison.” Start here.
Atlassian, Working Agreements — More workshop than document: a 60-minute exercise for building your own, template included. The one to click if you actually plan to do this.
GitLab, Communication — The maximalist end of the spectrum: a communication section buried in a fully public company handbook that runs to thousands of words. More than any comms team needs, but instructive about how far “write it down” can go.
Julie Zhuo, A User Guide to Working With You — The individual version of the same instinct. If a whole-team workstyle is too big a lift to start, have everyone write one of these instead.