Streamlining Team Communication and Collaboration
Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! Hi there. Ashley here with We Make Systems Sexy. And today I’m going to talk to you about ClickUp. Specifically, I want to talk to you about how you can streamline team communication and collaboration by using ClickUp.
So someone recently asked what I would say is the best practice for communicating with the team. And I have used a number of different tools to be able to do so. We do have Slack as a team, but we’re relying on it less and less as we rely on ClickUp more and more.
I can say from my own experience that it’s a wonderful tool to be able to have your project management within ClickUp and also use it for team communication. Let’s talk about a little bit of what that looks like.
You hear me mention all the time that ClickUp is our one source of truth. My team and I live in ClickUp. Everything that we can possibly do within ClickUp, we do.
And we use it even for task-specific questions. So that means that if a task gets assigned to a team member and if they have questions about that task, if they have issues, if they have things that need review, all of that communication happens within that task.
It doesn’t happen in a text message, an email thread, or a series of email threads, or anywhere else that you can imagine communication happening. It’s task-related, so it remains in the task. This is extremely helpful as well. If that task then needs to get dropped into another team member’s hands, and they have all of the history of the information that’s gone back and forth on a task, maybe a new team member is taking over those responsibilities, or another team member went on maternity leave, but the task isn’t completed, and so on and so forth.
A myriad of issues would require a task to be handed off to a different team member. Well, now they have the history of why that task wasn’t completed, why is it overdue, and where we are in the process of completing it. And all of that is right in the task, instead of having to go and search in some other channel or search keywords in an email inbox to try and find and piece together all of the information.
We’ve probably all had that experience before, where you remember something being said about Client X’s Project A but you can’t really figure out where it was said, because things are sent to you in so many different ways, so many other methods of communicating, and that’s not efficient. And really, you might be doubling or tripling up on the same conversations among many other issues with that.
You might be losing information that was valuable to the task or to how you do things in the future and so on. Keeping all of those things centralized and using ClickUp as a centralized communication hub is going to help you to be more effective and gain more time in your business.
Of course, having task-specific discussions helps to enhance clarity by keeping to this practice. It reduces the amount of time needed for context switching, right? And the distractions that come from going from the task in ClickUp to over here in Slack and then searching an email and getting distracted by the five emails that just came in and then they don’t even know what they were looking for to begin with, right?
Then as we’re talking about emails and reducing the number of emails that are going in and out, in and out, and trying to figure out which thread that was in and if I’m not the only one that thinks that threads can get really stressful in the inbox, then I will just excuse myself. But we can have real inbox email overload, right?
And we have a lot of people who will let their inboxes get to thousands of unread emails because it stresses them out, it overwhelms them to have to go in and deal with that. Why are we going to add to that when we actually have projects with deadlines that need to be completed?
Being able to communicate within the task, within ClickUp, et cetera enhances our accountability as well because we’re able to assign those tasks and comments directly to the person that shows up in their notifications, in their inbox within ClickUp.
And really for the team members who are assigning the things, the project manager who is keeping track of everything that’s going on, that’s really important because then that team member can’t say, well, I never got that. We’re going to be able to go back and say it’s right here with a date and timestamp of exactly when we had that conversation. And so that is really helpful for being able to just keep track of everything that’s going on as well.
In ClickUp, you can also update your notifications because sometimes it’s notification overkill, so what we usually keep on is anything that has an @ mention whether it’s in the comment, a task description in a document, or anything like that.
We make sure that anything that mentions our name is sent to an email to give us another heads up that we have a comment somewhere waiting on us. So again, it’s not notifying us for everything in our email, but we do get a double reminder to just check that. That doesn’t mean we’re responding in our email, it’s just saying, hey, make sure you check this comment and then we can just delete that email that comes in.
Well, if you can’t tell, we are pro ClickUp chat and comment feature for communication within our team. Again, we use Slack minimally for bigger conversations maybe planning and strategizing, doing any kind of analytics outside of actual tasks so that’s a bit different in terms of higher-level communication. But for the actual day-to-day work that we’re getting done, I highly recommend keeping that within ClickUp, where your project management is happening, where your tasks are happening, to make sure that you’re minimizing interruptions so that you have transparent project tracking, improved collaboration, and so much more.
You want to have an effective remote team if you’re working remotely, and this will be able to contribute to that effectiveness. So if you have questions about what it looks like to have your team communication within ClickUp, if you’re interested in being able to get this set up for your team, then you can feel free to shoot us an email or a DM. ash@wemakesystemsexy.com is our email, and of course, you have our social media here. You can shoot us a DM and ask us about our ClickUp setup.
We do ClickUp VIP days in a day, which means that after you give us the information that we need to build it, we deliver a product to you after a day of working with you and your team.
Then of course, there’s additional training that goes along with that because we don’t believe that you can just learn everything in one day, but it becomes a much quicker process, being able to do that in a day and gather all that information prior to the day. And then that way, once you have that product delivered to you, you’re ready for that actual training.
