Team Communication Solutions

[keehun]

Hi ChiefDelphi,

I come here to ask a question about team management and communication.

This past year, our team has tried Emails. Official team created and sanctioned emails like... i.e. keehun@team2502.com and it's worked out -okay - but no one has an urgency to check it daily and communications has been pretty bad.

Next year, we want to fix this, but we're really struggling to find a good solution.

We have a couple limitations.

1. Not everyone has phone/texting
2. Not everyone has Facebook (mentors especially)
3. People on our team have agreed that emails have not been effective for them

Things we are trying to communicate through emails are:

• Team updates – weekly
• Big team meeting reminders
• Urgent News
• Reminders to bring something (i.e. money for T-Shirts)
• Whenever it's more than 1 to 1 communications that's not in person.
• Some more that I'm forgetting...

We can't call everyone! We can't text everyone... Our team is about 30 people.

What do you do for your team? How do you manage communications?

Should we communicate with parents? Would that help?

Thanks,
Keehun Nam
Team 2502

[Carolyn_Grace]

1. You should definitely communicate with parents. Get a parent email list, and email the parents as well as students. This will help students stay informed, and it will encourage parents to participate in your program.

2. Our team uses a variety of communication techniques. Our main form is by email (parents and students). We also have a facebook and twitter account.

3. We have a few parent meetings throughout the year, a couple at the school and a couple at Chrysler (which is where our shop is located - THANK YOU CHRYSLER! We love our shop!)

4. We also rely heavily on students informing other students during the school day.

5. This said, communication is not our strong suit and we are always looking at way to improve this. A better emailing list would help. As would updating our website regularly.

[Jared Russell]

We have a team forum on our website, as well as an email list. Part of your responsibility as a team member is to regularly (daily) check your email and/or the forum for important announcements.

[Wildcat]

My team usus e-mail for parents, website for students that are regularly involved in team activities, and usual weekly meetings at our home school. on a side note i would avoid using facebook to communicate with members because of people like me who refuse to acknowledge its existance

[Vikesrock]

Our team uses a Google Group for almost all of our communication. We have found it works very well for us, but it is not going to solve your problem as you either have to check the group webpage frequently or set it up for email notification and check your email frequently.

Checking email at least daily is typical for a college student and in most jobs so I think the main "solution" to your problem is to find ways to help the students get in this habit. Here are some things off the top of my head that might help:

1) Establish a routine, check your email at the same time every day. When you wake up or before you go to bed are two options that may work well.
2) Set your email page as your homepage. This will remind you to check your mail each time you use the computer.
-An alternate is to add your email to a Google homepage and use that as your homepage
3)Set up a local client to inform you when you have mail. You can either use a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird or something like Gmail Notifier if available for your webmail.

[TD912]

We have similar communication problems.

We started to have meeting reminders spoken over the school's PA system as a morning announcement, which seems to have helped a bit.

[jest] FIRST gives out awards for acting like a business, so act like a business: Fire employees who don't respond or read their emails. [/jest]

With all seriousness, part of being a part of a team is being in the loop. If your members aren't checking their mail, they'll need to learn this habit eventually. Help them with it.

[Radical Pi]

We keep 2 mailing lists: parents and students. We also have weekly team meetings that the general rule is to attend unless you have a good reason not to.

We also see most of our team around school, so even if someone doesn't catch the e-mail there's a good chance they'll hear it somehow from other members

[Trent B]

Originally Posted by CraigHickman

[jest] FIRST gives out awards for acting like a business, so act like a business: Fire employees who don't respond or read their emails. [/jest]

With all seriousness, part of being a part of a team is being in the loop. If your members aren't checking their mail, they'll need to learn this habit eventually. Help them with it.

I am tempted to implement your "jest" method of conducting the team. I think part of the problem this year was the team emails, personal probably would have been better but even then I find that high school students seem to check their emails very sparsely. Keehun and I have been trying to find a solution because we are anomalies as my email app is running as long as my computer is so I get all emails within 5 minutes of them being sent if I am on (send receive time)

I am thinking maybe next year if the majority of people have texting we send them a personal email, then possibly send them all a text saying please check your email.

The forum this year pretty much was only alive pre build season and then died, we are trying to find a good means of communicating next year, which I think maybe we should stick with a forum just not have it tied into email accounts like we did this year.

We have also been looking at 37signals "Basecamp" has anyone used this product before?

[Foster]

[jest] FIRST gives out awards for acting like a business, so act like a business: Fire employees who don't respond or read their emails. [/jest]

With all seriousness, part of being a part of a team is being in the loop. If your members aren't checking their mail, they'll need to learn this habit eventually. Help them with it.

Originally Posted by Jared341

We have a team forum on our website, as well as an email list. Part of your responsibility as a team member is to regularly (daily) check your email and/or the forum for important announcements.

I'm pretty much with these two posts. I'm not interested in doing postal mail, tweeting, Myspacing, IMing, Facebooking, telepathy, calling on their cell phone or skywriting just for a roboteer that can't be bothered to look at the website for important info once a day.

It's their job to know what's going on, they need to make an effort to find it out. If they can't be bothered then tough.

This is number one on my peeve list. I had a person that insisted, and was very vocal about me sending them an email for every update. I put them on ''monitor this page'' on the wiki where announcements are made. Page gets updated they get an email saying "New changes on the Announcement page. " Problem solved!

[MasterRobot]

Originally Posted by Trent B

We have also been looking at 37signals "Basecamp" has anyone used this product before?

I've used some of 37 signal's products, and they do work very nicely and are quite professional. You may want to look at other solutions that might be free (we use google groups, and were using a project plan based off of Google Docs + Google Forms), but from what I've heard and seen, Basecamp is actually fairly comprehensive in project planning, discussions etc. If you're willing to pay per month, and can make sure students use and check it, it looks like it is a good system to use.

[Collin Fultz]

Originally Posted by Jared341

We have a team forum on our website, as well as an email list. Part of your responsibility as a team member is to regularly (daily) check your email and/or the forum for important announcements.

This is the same format Cyber Blue 234 uses. We live in a digital age and the students are part of a "technology" based group. Checking a forum once a day should not be too much to ask.

[Madison]

Many of our students do not have computers or internet access at home.

We work with their schools to allow access to our team wiki and update that regularly with information about tasks and meetings.

At meetings, mentors give index cards with important information to student leaders and they pass them out to students at school.

It'd be awesome if everyone were plugged in all the time, but in our case, it's just no plausible to expect that.

[Trent B]

A little discussion among captains we have come up wtih emailing and also making a bulk email to phone list (eg 5555555555@vtext.com and the similar services for other carriers) to notify people that they need to check their email or the site as well as of meetings in advance and a second reminder the day of.

We have also decided to get rid of the email@team2502.com except for captains and mentors who want it.

Now we are trying to figure out the best way to have discussions.

[Chris_Elston]

Originally Posted by keehun

What do you do for your team? How do you manage communications?

Should we communicate with parents? Would that help?

I did a presentation on this at the Indiana Forums.

Matter of fact, all the presentation from the forums are downloadable here at this "temporary" domain name...long story...

http://www.indianafirst.itap.purdue..../downloads.cfm

Mine is this one:
http://www.indianafirst.itap.purdue....?downloadID=16

In there you will find two things we do.

One is an e-mail lister. I have several groups. "All Team", "Students" "Mentors" "Parents" "Alumni" then I have an SMS Text e-mail list. Generally I send e-mails but if it's important, I send TEXT. All the students have text. What you'll find is you need to communicate with adults via e-mail and students via text. About 50% of my students check e-mail regularly. But they get text instantly. I use the single e-mail lister to send e-mails and send bulk text messages.

During the build season, we use dot project. We keep tasks loaded up in the robot and it builds an online ghantt chart as we go and turns task "RED" for the whole team to see when something gets behind. Also when tasks are marked with progress, and e-mail goes direct to those sub team leaders etc.

Other than that, good old fashion face to face meeting is required for anything major, and often times I find myself repeating myself in an e-mail several times. I am use to it now. I could sent the same information in three e-mails and I will still have someone say they didn't know anything about it. I also try and keep our team calendar up to date. I've heard of several of our team members that use the calendar on our website so I've tried to keep that updated as well.