What is Communication Balance
Communication balance measures the extent to which team members contribute to a team's online flow of information.
Why Communication Balance matters
It is important to encourage diversity of perspective and opinion and address the dominance of individual team contributor(s) that may prevent quieter team contributor(s) from engaging. By ensuring team members have an online voice, team leaders are fostering a greater degree of psychological safety amongst the team.
What ‘good’ Communication Balance looks like
Teams rating between 45% -80% typically have more mature online communication practices. We rarely see teams rating between 80-100%, at least not sustained when they do.
Teams rating below 45% usually infer one or two people dominating online interactions.
How Umano measures Communication Balance
Umano determines the balance of a project's communications by looking at:
Messages sent in communication tools such as Slack
Comments in project management tools like Confluence and Jira as well as Source code management tools like Bitbucket
A perfect score (100) is achieved when all team members contribute equally to team communications on a given interval (e.g. 25%, 25%, 25%, 25% for a team of 4).
A team receives a score of 0 where team communications are dominated by a single team member on a given interval (e.g. 100%, 0%, 0%, 0% for a team of 4)
Practices that influence Communication Balance
Message count
Team members who haven’t interacted in the tools during the iteration period
Percentage difference between the dominant speaker and other team members
Communication pattern for each of the other team members.
What’s included?
Each model looks at specific activities within the tools. Below is a list of activities that contribute to Communication Balance and activities that do not have an impact on this metric.
Included | Not included |
All messages in selected public channels in Slack and Mattermost Comments on Jira tickets, Confluence pages and Bitbucket PR's | Direct messages or private channels Creating or editing Jira descriptions, custom fields, labels etc. Creating or editing Confluence pages Creating or editing Bitbucket PR descriptions Any communication from people outside of the linked team members. |
Tips for achieving balanced communication
Follow up in writing after a face-to-face conversation. It will not only help to document decisions but it will help with tasks ownership too.
Ask quieter team members for their input with specific questions rather than a generic "@here" or "to all".
Supporting Resources
Related Articles