How quickly do you need to respond?

How long can you go offline and work without interruption?

What are the norms in your team? How quickly do you need to respond to an email, text and chat message?

When I ask participants these questions in the Better Ways of Working training, responses vary wildly. But most agree that it hasn’t been explicitly discussed and agreed to.

You and your team need a strategy, because:

• Undefined expectations create problems.
• It’s difficult to concentrate if you are worried about conscientiously responding to every message as it lands.
• Constantly checking and responding to new chats and emails, costs you time and energy. It makes it difficult to get much else done.

Dedicating a team meeting to clarify and agree on expectations can be a game changer. Try these prompts to kick start discussions.

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Within business hours

What are acceptable response times?

After business hours

• What are expectations for checking and responding to emails/chats sent after hours?
• Are expectations different for clients, senior managers, or stakeholders in different time zones etc.?

Communicating high priorities

• Which is the best channel to communicate urgent messages? Phone call, chat, other?
• What business matters typically qualify as being urgent?

Working offline

• How long can we go offline and not check emails/chats/phones?
• Are there preferred times to work offline? E.g. days of the week, mornings vs. afternoons?
• When we are working deeply, who do we need to advise?

Next steps

• What else might be useful to discuss as a team to support our focus and productivity?
• What would be useful to document?
• How will we share our ‘ways of working’ with others?

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If you have a team discussion about response time expectations, I’d love to hear how you get on.