Like most families mine are spread across the world, in different time zones and with different favorites when it comes to communicating with each other.  One person favors FaceBook messaging, another SMS or iMessage, another SnapChat and only dad likes email. Some of the family are visual so Hangouts or Skype were favored, others liked the time to digest information before responding so often found family hangouts chaotic.  We found it difficult to make family decisions around travel, meeting up, sharing photos or life decisions that needed to be discussed in a group in a way that all views were included and appreciated.

All of the family are nerdy or geeky beings and predominantly work in the technology space so we decided to utilize the technology at hand. Slack offers a communication environment that allows group and individual channels to co-exist. Suddenly we could have all our communication in one place. We then started to explore other apps that connected or integrated with Slack to provide greater collaborations of all our existing information in a single repository. No one stopped using their existing favorite apps they just handed off the information to our new channels.

Family or Team communication is never a one size fits all so seek out the best way for your team to communicate; with each other, with sub-groups and with you (collectively and individually) to ensure you get the most out of their ideas, opinions and thoughts on making the workplace great again.