Solve team miscommunication in Trello with Threaded Comments

The quote at the top of the blog is by Dale Carnegie - lecturer and author of many books on corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. He wrote one of the all-time best-selling self-help books, "How to Win Friends and Influence People”, so he knew a thing or two about communication.

Even in Dale Carnegie’s pre-internet days, miscommunication was a significant problem. Apply this to modern-day online chatting, devoid of the non-verbal cues we humans often rely on, and the potential for miscommunication becomes even higher.

Now, let’s apply this thinking to how Trello users typically discuss work tasks inside Trello comments. If you stick to one simple task per card, free-flowing conversation is easy enough:

Here we have multiple topics being discussed in a confusing jumble on top of each other, often by multiple people. Keeping track of what the latest message relates to is not at all easy. And don’t even try to read back through a conversation to catch up. Your team will quickly become a pack of confused Tacos (Trello’s huskie mascot)!

By simply adding threaded comments to your Trello boards you can easily provide structure to multiple conversations and allow each conversation to exist in its own, easy-to-read thread.

Let’s compare the same conversation with and without Threaded Comments for Trello

We can see with Threaded Comments you can quickly find the conversation related to each Task and follow the discussion more easily. View the gif below to see this in action.

Before Threaded Comments for Trello, teams had been discussing their work on other platforms, such as Slack, Zoom or email. There are a few downsides to this. Firstly, it encourages communication silos to develop. Conversations often happen in private away from the rest of the team, creating communication bottlenecks and reducing the chance of real collaboration.

Plus, keeping conversations elsewhere means you need to always remember where they are - which can be a significant time drain: A McKinsey report found employees spend an average of 1.8 hours a day searching and gathering information.

Finally, when discussing tasks with team members outside of Trello you need to spend time copying and pasting links or explaining what you’re referring to before chatting. By keeping your conversations nearer to the work - inside a Trello card - you’ll immediately have the context you need to have an efficient conversation.