Agree a one-page communication charter
Write the rules down and share them on the first day. Revisit them after a month, when you know what actually happens.
Communication charter (example)
Chat (Slack or Teams): quick questions and coordination. Reply within two hours during your working hours.
Task tracker: every piece of work, with an owner and a date. If it is not in the tracker, it is not a task.
Email: external contacts and anything that needs a record.
Docs: processes, decisions and anything that will be read more than once.
Calls: decisions with trade-offs, feedback, anything sensitive. Booked, with an agenda.
Urgent: a phone call or a message marked urgent, only for what cannot wait until the other person's next working hours.
The urgent line matters most. Without it everything becomes urgent, and nobody switches off.
Write messages that need no follow-up
A message that is read hours later has to stand on its own. Compare:
Before and after
Before: “Hi, got a minute?”
After: “Can you move my call with [name] from Thursday to Friday, any time after 14:00 my time? If Friday does not work for them, offer Monday morning. No need to check with me.”
Before: “What about the refund thing from yesterday?”
After: “Order [number]: the customer asks for a refund outside the return window. The policy says store credit; I suggest a full refund because the parcel arrived late. OK to go ahead?”
- Put the request or the question in the first line.
- Give the context and the link, not “the thing from yesterday”.
- Say what the other person may decide without you.
- End with a question that can be answered with yes, no or a choice.
Agree response times, not instant replies
Remote teams do not need instant replies; they need predictable ones. A simple default is chat within a couple of hours during the recipient's working hours, email within one working day and tracker comments by the next daily check. Anything that needs to be faster is a call.
Respect the other side's hours. Sending a message at your midnight is fine; expecting an answer before their morning is not. Scheduled sending helps when you work late.
Hand over at the end of every day
When one side ends its day as the other starts, a handover note carries the work across and replaces a morning call:
End-of-day handover
Done today: with links.
Open and moving: what will be finished tomorrow, and by whom.
Blocked on you: the decision needed, with options and a suggestion.
Heads-up: anything that might surprise you tomorrow.
Read it first thing and answer the blocked items before anything else. That one habit keeps a remote hire's day moving.
Keep a decision log
Decisions made in calls or chat get forgotten, or remembered differently. Keep one running document with the date, the decision, the reason and who decided; your assistant can own it. When a question comes back, the log answers it, and new people can read it to understand how the company works.
Use recordings for explanations
Explaining a process in writing can take an hour; recording your screen while you do it takes ten minutes. A short screen recording, with the steps written underneath by the person who watched it, becomes good documentation quickly. Loom, or the recording built into your video call tool, is enough.
Keep live calls for what recordings cannot do: feedback, disagreements, planning and getting to know each other. Our guide to working-hours overlap helps decide when those calls happen.
Pitfalls to avoid
- Three channels for one topic: chat, email and a task comment about the same thing. Pick one.
- Decisions in direct messages that the rest of the team never sees.
- Long threads instead of a call: after three rounds of back and forth, talk for five minutes and write the result down.
- Silence as a reply: a quick “seen, will answer by tomorrow” beats no answer at all.
Questions
Is Slack or email better for working with a remote assistant?
Use both, for different things: chat for internal coordination, email for external contacts and anything that needs a record. The tasks themselves belong in the tracker.
How do I stop being interrupted by messages all day?
Agree response times and an urgent channel, and turn notifications off during your focus hours. If most messages are questions, the documentation is missing something.
What should be a call rather than a message?
Anything with trade-offs, feedback, conflict or a lot of uncertainty. If a thread passes three rounds, switch to a short call and write down the outcome.
How do I make a new remote hire comfortable asking questions?
Say clearly that questions are expected, answer them quickly in the first weeks, and turn repeated answers into documents. Our guide to managing a remote assistant covers the weekly rhythm.
General information for small employers, not legal or tax advice: check contracts, tax and data rules for your country with a qualified adviser. Figures carry their sources below; our own prices are on the pricing page. Spotted a mistake? Write to hello@stafka.com.