Communication Golden Rules
From the Talking-at-a-brick-wall Dept.
The “Three Golden Rules of Communication” are-
- Repetition is communication
- Communication is repetition
- Repetition is an opportunity for re-communication
- Communication is repetition
I can pinpoint the exact moment I became a better workplace communicator.
Our team was going through a growth spurt and I was responsible for improving the onboarding experience and local dev env setup. Documents had been written, videos recorded, scripts written. We even had automated Slack messages for “Day 1”, “Day 2” etc.
One of the new starters asked me a relatively simple question - “How do I restore the testing database?”
My body immediately reacted with frustration and anger - how could he have missed, in the list of helpful links, the wiki article explicitly titled “How to restore the testing database”?
But my second reaction was more considered. I took a deep breath.
Earlier in the week I had been talking with a colleague Alex about communication. He said something to the effect of “you need to view requests for information as an amazing opportunity - the person wants to hear what you have to say! And you get to learn how to improve your documents”.
So, after a second deep breath, I responded with-
Great question! Here is a link to the document for that. Let me know if there is anything that doesn’t make sense.
Also - if you don’t mind me asking - where and how did you look for this info? I’m wondering if we can improve the experience for the next new starter.
The new starter was thankful, and I got good data back to improve the process. Turns out they were searching for “QA database” rather than “testing database”. I added some metadata to the page to improve the search results, and we all moved on, but with a stronger connection.
This change in mindset, from negative annoyance to positive curiosity, has been the single biggest difference-maker in my communication skills.