Negosentro.com | 5 Ways You Can Streamline Communication for Your Business | Spending hours a day fielding calls and emails can greatly inhibit employee productivity and stress people out. Streamlining communications can prevent people from getting bogged down trying to answer questions and allow them to focus on completing important work. Here are five ways you can streamline communication for your business.
1. Understand Which Communications Work Most Effectively
You may have heard comments along the lines of “this meeting could have been an email” before. While these comments tend to be tongue-in-cheek, there is a grain of truth to them. Employees can oftentimes feel as though their time is being wasted in endless meetings, which may take up large chunks of the day or interrupt an employee who is in the flow on a project. It’s vital to productivity that everyone at an organization understands which methods of communication work most effectively at which times. There are times when meetings are necessary, such as the initial planning of a project. There are also times where an email works better, such as when a deadline is approaching and everyone needs to work on individual assignments. A daily scrum is a good hybrid approach. The team can hold a short standing meeting every day and people can opt out if they’re too busy.
2. Leverage Management and Development Tools
There are many different types of tools to help teams and organizations communicate more effectively, from intranets to DevOps tools. There can be all kinds of different projects and communications between projects on a daily basis, so having a well-designed and organized tool is quite helpful. With such tools, you can incorporate tags, link projects or teams and utilize comment threads. These aspects help people navigate complicated or time-sensitive communications more quickly and effectively than communications sent solely through email.
3. Utilize Integrated Communication Apps
A great way to streamline communication for your business is to introduce an integrated communication method. There are several apps and software options available that allow employees to access the same communication features across devices and communicate in several ways via the same app. These apps typically host audio, visual, and text functions. Many also offer message board features, where people can post relevant messages to various teams at your organization without needing to create a groupchat or email blast. These apps make it easier to communicate more effectively because employees only need to familiarize themselves with the app and the company email system, rather than different tools for phone, instant message, email and video communication. Using one integrated app also makes it easier to provide tech support and security than several different tools.
4. Introduce a Newsletter
Many organizations hold town halls periodically, which help employees understand where the organization is going, how it’s doing and other kinds of feedback. Another way to provide this information to your employees is to introduce a company-wide newsletter or blog. You can provide this kind of information more often, in smaller, more digestible chunks since an emailed newsletter can be sent out more often than town halls can be organized. You can also offer a spotlight to more people and groups at your company and help employees feel more in-touch with company culture and the executive suite.
5. Create a Strong Internal Communications Policy
Creating strong policies for internal communication is particularly effective when it comes to streamlining communications for your business. Once you have a policy in place, you’ll know what tools are most likely to aid your streamlining efforts and how best to educate employees on how to communicate more efficiently and effectively. You can begin to develop company-wide strategies for disseminating important information, such as end-of-year assessments or benefits renewals. You can also work on implementing programs that provide employees with communication training to help collaboration, better engage your employees and provide them with opportunities to speak up and offer up organizational feedback and ideas.
Streamlining and making communications more effective across your business can help make your employees more productive and projects go more smoothly.
