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      FIGURE 2-8: You can find plenty of helpful links and information on the CASL home page.

The website has not only a lot of frequently asked questions and other helpful links but also a list of five compliance tips to follow — including a phone number you can call to ask for help. (We haven’t called it ourselves, but we expect that you’ll talk to a real person because it’s Canada.)

Honoring Boundaries

      The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated talk about setting boundaries in all communication, but especially with online communication. Health officials helped guide people in moderating their physical boundaries to keep themselves safe, such as by physically touching with a fist bump. Others suggest not touching at all because using the Vulcan hand salute from Star Trek as a greeting is clearly healthier (and hipper).

The most discussion about boundaries centered on understanding everyone’s mental boundaries, especially with the mental stress of many people forced to change their lives and daily structure. Though the boundaries we talk about in this section have no legal force (at least here in the US, where we are), understanding and setting boundaries are helpful goals if you want to avoid any legal misadventures.

      You may have read in Chapter 1 about how to communicate with people, and that’s fine. In this chapter, we review some of that material, in case you don’t want to go back (but you always can).

      Then we talk about setting boundaries, talking with your team to set policies in your business that work for everyone (or at least reasonably so), and why you should consider centralizing your communication online. Finally, we talk about using the right medium for the message you want to send.

      Communicating with people during work hours

      There are plenty of rules, stated and not, that you should follow when communicating with your employees during work hours. This advice doesn’t change when you connect online just because people work in different parts of the country and/or the world or because pandemic safety requires that everyone work from home.

      With that said, let’s quickly review the basics of communicating with people online:

So what, you ask? That’s basic stuff. But working online has also required a greater understanding about boundaries during work hours. After all, when someone works from home, their entire workday isn’t taken up by work. They have to manage their family (called the real job by some), go to appointments, and try to juggle the bowling ball, chainsaw, and dinner plates as best they can.

      Every employee and every manager is different, so you will experience policies created from your company’s unique priorities, expectations, and boundaries. Those include how you will communicate with one another, such as using Zoom for online meetings and using an app like Slack for project communication.

      If you’re a manager who will be developing your online communication policies, you need to resolve several issues:

      You may have guessed (correctly) that you need to bring your ideas to your managers and to your employees in order to craft an overall policy. That's best done in a meeting setting — maybe even more than one meeting — where you can finalize that policy. Be sure to come prepared to every meeting and communicate to your team that you expect them to do the same.