Communication Tips For Remote Companies

Effective communication, according to Chris, is the cornerstone of a successful remote business and ought to be regarded as one of the most crucial principles of business. He demonstrates that effective communication enhances cooperation, leadership, customer connections, and overall business performance based on his more than 15 years of experience managing LifterLMS as a wholly remote firm.

He highlights that writing is an essential communication skill since it facilitates idea organization, improves documentation, generates more powerful marketing material, and even facilitates more efficient use of AI tools. Chris also describes LifterLMS’s methods for maintaining remote teams’ alignment without overburdening them with meetings. He talks about quarterly planning using the Shape Up framework, organized monthly all-hands meetings that highlight individual, client, and business successes, and the practice of recording ideas in shared Google Docs before they are forgotten.

In order to keep everyone on the team informed and improve teamwork, he advises using Slack for open, public discussions rather than private messaging wherever feasible. Beyond technologies and procedures, Chris emphasizes the significance of fostering a supportive remote workplace culture by honoring cultural differences and communication preferences, recording corporate expertise, and providing chances for colleagues to bond via virtual game days. Additionally, he offers productivity advice on how to communicate more quickly and effectively by using voice-to-text software and comprehensive AI suggestions. His main point is that effective communication is a lifetime talent that enhances leadership, marketing, teamwork, and all facets of managing a profitable internet business.

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Episode Transcript:

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

 What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and this is a solo podcast episode with just me, where we’re gonna talk about how to communicate effectively at a remote company. I actually had a team member suggest this topic for a podcast. I’ve been communicating in a remote company, both internally and publicly, for over 15 years, and I realized I have a lot of tips and tricks to share with you today and level up your communication ability at a remote company, whether you’re- have an education company or you’re running an agency or running any kind of online business.

So the first thing I would say is to value communication at the highest level. So what do I mean by that? One of our top company values, and we only have six or seven, is clear communication. So we value communication very highly at all levels, both internally in how we write, in how we market, in how we send emails, in how we treat each other as team members, clients, users, prospects, and all of that.

So clear communication is super important to us at LifterLMS. If you value clarity of communication, you can build a better company that’s much easier to run, manage, that you will actually enjoy. Good communication means clarity of thought. So the way I like to think about this- Is writing is the ultimate form of communication.

So writing is not just for making blog posts or building a sales page. We use it all of the time. We use it for figuring out what we’re gonna say in a video. We take notes, we send emails, we do social media content. We write all over the place, and especially now with AI tools, we are writing prompts and creating skills for agents, and so on.

This is all types of communications. So let me next go into my tip around communication around meetings. I learned this saying from one of my business mentors, Dan Martell, that basically meetings shouldn’t suck, and if they do suck, you’re doing them wrong. Now, in the remote world, sometimes companies trend towards no meetings at all, ever, just complete asynchronous communication, which is fine.

But I actually think it makes a lot of sense to have some meetings that are effective with the right people on the meetings on a regular cadence or ongoing basis. So how do we do this at LifterLMS? Internally, we have I don’t know, maybe let’s say … It depends on your role, but for me, as an example, not including podcasts recording sessions and things like that, but when I’m actually meeting with my team on Zoom, not asynchronous communication, which by the way, we’re constantly communicating asynchronously via Slack, which I’ll talk about in a little bit.

But in terms of communicating through meetings at a company we have one all-hands meeting a month, and that has a particular format flow that we do. It basically goes housekeeping, where we just catch up, we talk about people’s upcoming time off and things like that to just make sure we’re all synced up on schedule Then we do a section of the all-hands meeting called Wins.

And at companies, it’s really easy to focus on the problems and the constraints and focus your meetings where most of the content of the meeting is course correction or in general can come off with a negative vibe. So I always like to start a meeting, the all-hands meeting, with sharing wins, and I break that down into three categories.

There’s the personal win. Anything happen in your life? Did you have a baby? Did you run a marathon? Did you move or, get engaged or something like that? That’s just a personal win part which brings the humanity and the, we’re not just workers, we’re human beings doing life together.

So that’s for that. And then we do a customer win. And anybody can contribute to these. It’s not just the CEO talking. It’s anybody can contribute. So in the customer win area, we like to surface recent testimonials or five-star reviews, or maybe we saw on social media that somebody was really excited ’cause they launched and sold 5,000 courses on their first launch and so on.

So we’re always sharing the wins of our customers and celebrating them even if they don’t know about it because- In my view, in business, whoever’s closest to the customer wins, and if you’re not actually, keeping tabs on them, seeing what’s working, seeing what’s not working, but particularly celebrating their wins with them, you’re out of sync with your users.

And then the third win area is the company win. So this is something like, “Oh, we did this marketing campaign and it did really well,” or, “We shipped this new product, it was really hard,” or, “We built this new course that a bunch of people contributed to,” and so on. So that’s an example of a company win. And then when we get into it we…

From here, we go to the actual functions of a business. So the big mistake that a lot of companies make, particularly in my space, software companies an immature founder or CEO or operator will just see the business as just two things. There’s engineering and then there’s marketing. But that’s not true at all and that’s how businesses get lopsided and have big gaps and a lot of failure points.

A business is actually seven areas. Now, you can slice and dice an organization in different ways, but here’s how I like to slice and dice those areas. So as part of our all-hands meeting, I call do it doing a tour of the functions. We’re gonna go through the seven key functions with, key project updates, challenges we’re having giving props to somebody on the team who did well in this function asking for help.

And again, anybody can contribute to these areas. So those seven functions are, number one is product, number two is engineering, number three is marketing, number four is sales, number five is customer support or customer success, number six is operations and admin, and then the seventh area is just the CEO.

This is a moment, a part of the… where the CEO or the founder or the owners or partners could really just contribute some of that CEO stuff like a high-level celebration, or charting a vision, or vision casting the future, or doing a quick reminder of the company values, or spotlighting team members who exhibited the company values in the last week, and so on.

And then from there we wrap up. So that’s our all-hands meeting. Happens only once a month. I used to do it every week, but once you’re rolling and established and your asynchronous communication is really good, I find one hour a month is great for that meeting The next kind of all-hands meeting we do once a month is just called a team game day.

So there’s literally zero business agenda on that meeting. We just show up and play online games together as a team, whoever can make it, and that’s often a game like GeoGuessr has been our latest favorite that’s easy for everybody to play from all over the world. And that’s just a chance to communicate and connect as just human beings without some kind of organizational hierarchy and whatever, just to connect as humans, and that’s all that is.

And it’s super helpful just for putting the human touch in an organization, particularly when you don’t have an in-person office where natural, just personal do life conversations and having fun together can happen as easily The next set of meetings I do really depend on the organizational structure.

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typically this is known as a one-on-one with, your management team or your leadership. For example, I do a one-on-one meeting with our head of growth/marketing. I do a one-on-one with our lead developer. I do a one-on-one with my business partners, and that is really it for how… the one-on-ones that I do.

And sometimes you may have a manager who does one-on-ones who has a bigger team underneath you. It just depends on the scale of your company as to how many people do one-on-ones. So all that is to say, in a given week, I have about three hours w- of three or four hours of internal company meetings.

So that doesn’t eat my lunch. We don’t do meetings every day, and that’s great. And there are times where we’ll do a one-off meeting for something that’s pressing or urgent, or what I call co-working, where we just wanna collaborate with somebody and work on a project together. And then there’s a bigger meeting system we do four times a year, which I’m gonna tell you about here.

I’ll probably do a whole episode on Shape Up, which is the system we use for figuring out what to build, what to focus on, coming up with strategic projects and so on. In this episode, I’m just gonna go over the high level key aspects of Shape Up. So Shape Up is a system for managing a company that was developed by the folks over at 37signals.

We do a modified version. Jason Coleman, my business partner, modified it to work for companies of our size, style and scale. So basically, what Shape Up is the management team comes together in a quarterly rhythm, and these meetings don’t happen all at once, but the first meeting is called the ideas meeting, and this is where over the course of the last quarter we have…

Whenever you have an idea like, “Oh, we should build a product for this, we could c- should create a course about this, we should do this marketing campaign, we should focus on this engineering project, or we should do this on our website,” instead of just blasting that stuff to the wind or losing it in a Slack thread or something like that, we actually have a document where we collect those, and whoever puts it in there writes their name beside it so we know who had it, and it’s like a little tickler file for when you actually do the ideas meeting, which is where we meet and decide which ideas we’re gonna prioritize on in the next quarter.

But the next step is not just to work on the idea. The next step is called a pitch. So pitches between the ideas meeting and the pitch meeting is these ideas that we’ve decided to write pitches for are assigned to a particular leader or manager in the company, and then that person writes a pitch, which is like a product specification, user stories.

It talks about the opportunity of doing this project. It gets into the solution. We give it a time constraint, which we call appetite, and we get into no-gos things to not focus on in that project. It’s basically like instead of asking, let’s say, a web developer, “Oh, we wanna build groups e-commerce for LifterLMS.

Good luck. That’s your project,” we actually get into writing a detailed pitch or specification of how it’s gonna work with interface designs and so on. It makes the purposeful work that we do down the road much better and tighter. At the end of the, that pitch meeting there’s some there…

it’s called the betting table. We present our pitches- And then after those are presented, we’re voting on whether the next quarter is the time to focus th- on this or not. Some of the things that we find in the pitch meeting, we may decide to just categorize as a JDI, which just means just do it, and that just means it folds into the day job territory of whoever’s responsible for that area.

And basically in the betting table we have a whole spreadsheet that where we can put in all the pitches we voted to pursue in the next quarter and assign them to people, and if they all don’t fit, we have to make cuts, which are called notable passes. So after that’s over, the next week begins a seven-week or six-week cycle where we’re, quote, “on cycle” and we actually do the work that each person has in their pitch.

It doesn’t mean they stop doing everything they do in their regular day job, but they will prioritize that cycle project, we call it. So that is Shape Up in a nutshell, which requires an ideas meeting and then a betting table where after the pitches are written, we decide what to focus on.

So that’s eight more meetings a year since this happens on a quarterly cycle, and that’s how the Shape Up system works in our meeting cadence. So that rhythm is super important. So instead of trying to plan a whole year out, we’re basically focusing on one quarter at a time ’cause things change a lot and as you’ve noticed, we’re living in an exponential age with lots of rapid change and stuff like that, so kinda getting in that quarterly rhythm is really important.

I should also mention I also do a one-on-one with myself on Fridays where I give myself permission to step back, review the week and think strategically, think about my team, how I can set them up for success, think about the company, spend a little time more zoomed out on the ten-year vision, five-year vision, three-year vision, one-year goals and all that stuff.

So I also regularly have calendar meetings with myself to focus on something like strategic thinking time is actually what I call it. So another cool thing about the meetings is it’s hard to hold an agenda in your mind or rush to, right before a meeting, to figure out what you’re gonna talk about.

So that’s the immature way to do it. The way that we do it is we actually just use a simple system using Google Docs. So each meeting, whether it’s a one-on-one or the team all-hands, there’s a document with a template and some structure to it that we can fill in whenever inspiration strikes. And what this does, if…

Let’s say I have an idea to discuss with my lead of growth and marketing. I’m not necessarily gonna bother him on Slack, particularly if it’s a big idea, a new project, or something that’s gonna take detailed feedback where it’ll be better on a Zoom meeting. I’ll actually just add that as soon as I have the thought to the document for our next one-on-one.

Or if I have an idea about a future product LifterLMS should make, I will add that to the next quarter’s ideas list that we’ll look at later. So what this solves is it keeps your brain empty, it keeps overwhelm from happening, and it… most importantly, it prevents you from losing those good ideas you have in the shower, or on your run, or while working on something else, so that you capture all that value in a document.

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So when we have meetings, particularly all the recurring meetings I’ve mentioned, there’s a recurring calendar invite in Google Calendar, there’s a Zoom link to join, and there’s also a link to the document, so that anybody at any time can empty whatever idea they have in their brain to that document, which is very efficient and captures value, ’cause we think our memory is a lot better than it really is.

So I highly recommend using Docs to… as a capture device. This is classic getting things done methodology to unload your brain. Some people call it building a second brain or whatever, but I actually find it more useful, not just my brain, but everybody’s brain in the company is using the same system and contributing to these documents.

So we’re more working as a group mind than just one mind, which is very refreshing, particularly as a leader, because there are other leaders, and good ideas, and innovation ideas on your team. So you have to empower people to communicate, speak up, and to use the, The systems and contribute.

‘Cause what ends up happening if you don’t do that is that you’re not really helping people fulfill their potential on your team. Fulfill potential is actually w- another one of our company values. So getting people engaged and contributing to meetings and unloading their brain when inspiration strikes is a good idea.

Now, there are times, of course, where something is … doesn’t need to go in a doc, it’s just a Slack post. So let’s talk about Slack for a little bit. If you’re not a Slack user, Slack is just like an instant messenger internal communication tool for a company. I personally do not like using email for commun- for communication, particularly within the company.

We do all that communication in Slack. And one of the biggest things that makes Slack effective, and where I see a lot of companies struggling ’cause they’re not doing it, is to have almost 99% of the conversations in public as opposed to DMs. And what that does is it allows multiple people to collaborate, and this whole concept of working in public, it just creates more context for everybody on the team.

So if you’re constantly just emailing or DM- DMing people individually, you’re basically operating in an unnecessary silo So when it comes to Slack it’s good to develop what’s known are channels, which are just areas where certain conversations happen. So for example, we have a private management channel in the LifterLMS Slack that the folks in the leadership positions have access to.

We have a marketing and sales Slack. We have a developer Slack. We have certain big project Slacks, like our newsletter, and just getting people to work in public is huge. And I’ve noticed when you do this in a company, it often takes some time for somebody to get comfortable, particularly if they’re shy or if they’re maybe not as confident in their role, or they don’t wanna show publicly that they’re asking for help.

Whatever it is, once you get over all that kind of insecurity, the company is much more powerful and just the public communication and working in public is 100% the way to go. Now, when do you not work in public? When do you actually use the DM? Yeah, sometimes I DM people on Slack. It could be something about somebody has a sensitive question, like HR-related question.

Okay, that’s fine to DM that kind of thing. If you’re ever sending a team member sensitive information or they’re sending you sensitive information, of course, that can be a DM. So I’m not like never DM, but literally 99.5% of the time, I’m always communicating in public with my team. So if you’re not s- using Slack, I highly recommend it, even if you have a small team And let’s talk more about the softer side of communication.

So one of the things you’ll find in a remote company, particularly if you have team members all over the world or customers or users or prospects all over the world, there’s so many different cultures out there, which is one of the beautiful and awesome things a- about humanity. And different cultures and even languages have different styles of communication and different personalities and so on.

So one example of this some folks in different parts of the world are not as comfortable being on camera, so I don’t force that on a Zoom meeting as an example. I do very much appreciate it when somebody does turn their camera on, ’cause it’s like a… it’s a show of being present. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around somebody who’s working in a corporate job and hates their job and there’s a meeting going and their camera’s off and they’re not paying attention and they’re doing something else on the side or not even working.

I find that kind sad. I don’t think that there are like not great places to work and all that kind of thing, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to, be engaged, particularly if you do like we do where you’re not in meetings all day. You’ll hear corporate people sometimes complain about, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been in meetings all day.

I’m double-booked constantly. I can’t get any work done.” You definitely don’t want to create that. So if you can do the minimum effective dose of meetings like we do, and when you do have a meeting give it everything you have, be present, be on time, contribute to the docs and so on. And then also related to international sensitivity- Particularly if you have a business like LifterLMS, where less than half our customers live in the English-speaking world.

Even though we use English at our company as our primary language, I’m always super sensitive to a team member or a customer or community member who English is not their first language, or perhaps they can’t even speak English at all. So it’s good to be sensitive to that and communicate more simply if you’re speaking to a non-native English speaker, and just have some grace and gratitude and, get creative.

Use tools like Google Translate or an AI tool if somebody’s trying to talk to you in Spanish or Swahili or a different language, ’cause the tools have never been easier to communicate cross-culturally, and it’s important to be sensitive. Related to that, in terms of brand voice, we often hear about brand voice communication as “Oh, we need to get everybody in the company to kinda communicate if they’re marketing so it sounds like it’s c- coming from the brand voice.”

For example, the company MailChimp is really famous for having like a good brand voice document, and their team and the interface and everything in that product kinda has the same vibe. That’s cool. So figure out what your brand voice is and, create a document for that and share it with your team and work with people.

We actually use LifterLMS on a private website to power an internal training resource, so it’s full of courses and standard operating procedures and policies and things like that. That’s a good place to put your brand voice. Lifter has an add-on called Private Site where you can build your own internal company playbooks I call them, or standard operating procedures that are not open at all to the public internet or Google search indexing and all of that.

So that’s LifterLMS Private Site. If you haven’t created a internal training platform for your business yet, you are behind. Every company is a education company, whether th- they realize that or not. So even if you sell education publicly, you need a place to document your standard operating procedures, and LifterLMS can do that.

The other area is project management. Project management, people use tools like Trello or Asana or Monday.com or Jira, Atlassian or whatever. That’s another good place to communicate, and that’s really communicating around projects, and you get a feel for it. The more complex your business is and the more people there are, the more necessary strong project management tools are.

But that requires communication as well. Also tagging on to brand voice, it’s really important to communicate in a very respectful way. So what I mean by that is, if you’re sensitive and inclusive across cultures some things which may be fine in one culture where people swear a lot, as an example, may be very offensive in another culture.

So I always try to make sure I’m communicating professionally and I’m being culturally sensitive, whether people have different religions, values, cultures and so on. So it’s always good to do that both publicly and internally. For example, I was at a conference in the UK for membership site owners and the, all the speakers, almost all of them were swearing in their talks from the stage, and one of them said “I think we have an all UK audience here.”

It was just me and a couple other Americans that were there, but there was a lot of swearing and that was– They were okay ’cause it was mostly a UK audience and it was private or whatever. But that’s the kind of thing, if you do that in your TED Talk, you may actually offend or turn off a lot of your audience, which can have a big impact on morale and sales and things of that nature So I wanna share a communication tool that has 10X my productivity that I recently started using.

It’s called Whisperflow, and what it does is you load it up on your computers and on your phone, and you just hold a key, and you can start dictating and it’s voice-to-text. And you might be asking how is that better than the little microphone that’s already there, like on Twitter or ChatGPT or whatever?”

It’s f- I don’t understand how it works, but it works way better. It’s way faster. It works across devices. It saves your history. I find that particularly useful for working with our AI agents and kinda doing brain dumps and so on. So if you’re a slow typer like me, go get yourself a copy of Whisperflow and just try it out.

I’m insanely more productive because of that, particularly because I am a slow typer. So one final pro tip for you, and this is just a artificial intelligence pro tip. If you’re a beginner and you’re just starting to use AI chat tools, you’re not really using memory systems, and the chats are resetting with no context every time.

So one of the things you can do is you can slow down and communicate and create documents. Dan Martell calls these master prompts that you can use to provide context to your AI tool. For example, I have a Chris Badgett, CEO, LifterLMS founder master prompt, which is five pages long, and then I have one about me as an individual personally in my personal life, which is about five pages long.

So I have that loaded up in my AI tools so I don’t need to constantly re-communicate who I am, what my goals are, how I like to roll, and so on. So communication skills with AI, because AI is so fast, you are the limiting factor as a human. So if you can communicate more effectively with AI, you’re gonna be a lot more productive as well and then the last thing I’ll say on marketing and sales, back in my day, I’m kinda old now there was no marketing degree at university.

It was just called communication. I actually don’t have that degree. I did go to college. My background’s in anthropology. But when you think about it, marketing is called communication at universities. Why do they call it that? ‘Cause basically, that is what marketing is. Marketing is just communication.

Maybe you’re doing visual communication and using tools to help you create brand consistency, like Canva templates, or you’re doing copywriting, you’re trying to be persuasive in a email or on a landing page, or you’re trying to clearly, with clarity, describe the features of your product or program or service.

This is all communication. So if you wanna get good at marketing, it’s not about the tips and tricks and the hacks and the ads and the all the tools. It’s really about how well do you communicate. How well do you understand your customer avatar, your ideal customer profile? How well do you understand your team members?

As a leader, what we do as, is influence, and influence can have a negative connotation, but there’s a lot of positive stuff with leadership and influence as well. And in order to influence in a positive way, you need to be an effective communicator. And the good news is that communication is not a skill that you just do once.

It’s a lifelong journey, and you’re only gonna get better at communication over time if you work on it. And it comes in handy everywhere, from working with your team, working with your customers, customer support, selling, in your personal life with your partner, your friends, your family, and so on. Clear communication is one of the biggest unlocks in life.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’d love to hear from you about any communication tips that you have. I’d love to hear what you found most useful or valuable from this episode. And if you want me to follow up with you on anything communication related or you want some more ideas expanded on based on what I’ve been sharing with you here, please do.

I’m Chris from LifterLMS. Clear communication is one of our company values, and I hope you got some value out of this episode. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode