I had an end of year review at work (I'm fairly new, only been there 3 months) and as part of it we receive feedback from colleagues for things that went well and things we could improve on.
For mine, the improvements were all quite similar and that is to increase my communication with the team. It was also flagged in my earlier probation review meeting and my manager has said he has definitely seen me take on that feedback and he has seen an increase in my communication, so I was kind of upset to see it flagged again as something to improve as I thought I had already been quite good at communicating.
For context, it's an office job where I work in a team made up of people who have a specific skill who do the tasks (me and 2 other colleagues) and people who work on the accounts and project management side. The project managers will give me a task or a set of tasks and I will then do them, usually working with my other colleagues as we all review each other's work.
Tasks are given either during morning meetings which are then emailed out as a list of tasks for that particular day, or they are small ad hoc requests sent via Teams.
For the daily list of tasks, in the meeting I will say things like 'yes I can do that today' or 'yes I can do that today, but I have X project to do first which needs to be finished by Y time' or 'I've also got X, Y and Z to do, which should I prioritise?' (I do prioritise tasks myself, but sometimes priorities change and the accounts team are best placed to tell me what to prioritise) and then I will go and do the tasks and then once I am finished I will email it to the relevant colleague, CCing the whole team to let them know it's finished and often quickly message in our team's group chat to let them know too.
For the ad hoc requests, I also reply saying something like 'Yes I'll start on that now' or 'I'm just finishing Y and then can make a start' or if I'm really busy I'll write out what I have to do and ask which they'd like me to prioritise. I'll often write things like "just emailed across project X, I'll start on project Y now". I also work in two teams so sometimes I will say something like 'tomorrow is looking very busy for work for Team X'.
Like I said, I've only been there for 3 months and this is also my first job in this field. I follow the lead on what my colleagues do and say and I match the frequency of their messages/updates to the team. In fact, I would say I now message a lot more frequently than some of my other colleagues (who are also fairly new). The tasks I do are quite time-intensive and can take several hours where I need to concentrate, but I'm wondering if posting something like 'just to update, I'm still working on X and hope to be finished in 2 hours' would help? I've never seen a colleague do this though.
Please can you help advise me? I have spoken to my manager about it and he advised directly asking my colleagues what they actually want from me in terms of communication, but I want to let the dust settle after the annual reviews before asking first in case it comes across as me disagreeing with them/being argumentative.