The hierarchy of communications.

In today’s workplace, we have so many different ways to collaborate and communicate with each other. A common reason for miscommunication is actually really simple: the channel didn’t match the message. (Have you ever gotten a phone call for something that should’ve been an email?)

An exercise you can do – that I recommend spreading to your coworkers! – is to develop a hierarchy of communication channels. It’s actually quite simple and fast to do, and can make communicating internally more efficient.

First off, you’ll need to make a list of all the communication channels you have. You’ll end up with something like this:

• Email

• Face-to-face

• Phone call

• Slack / Teams

• Meetings

• …etc.

Depending on how many channels you have, you might also end up grouping some similar ones. (Maybe Jira and GitHub comments come under “Dev Tools” or something like that.)

Next up, you’ll decide how you want to organise your hierarchy. I recommend using Urgency (ie. how quickly do I need a response?) as a starting point, but your company might have different needs, like risk or compliance.

Organising by urgency basically means you’ll be sorting your list of channels from Least Urgent to Most Urgent. Your reordered list might look something like this:

1. (Least Urgent) Email

2. Scheduled meeting

3. Slack message

4. Phone call

5. (Most Urgent) Face to face

You could, if you wanted to, leave it here. You’ve got your list, so now if you have to communicate something you can refer to it to pick the right channel. But if you want to enact real change across your team/company, you can move onto to the real last step…

Define and codify your communication hierarchy. This is a bit more work, but basically means you create more guidelines and clarity and then document it for others. Documenting it means it’ll be easier to refer your coworkers to it if they get confused, but also you can train new hires on the process immediately.

Assuming you’re working off the Urgency framework, this means for each channel you’ll need:

• Any clarity of definitions/tools, and

• A turnaround time for a response

This might look something like this:

Even if you don’t have the level of influence to implement a communication hierarchy for your whole organisation, just agreeing on some simple guidelines with your immediate team can make you all more efficient.

How many communication channels do you have at your job? 🤔 I counted 15 here, and I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting some…