There are numerous driving forces behind long-term success and growth in the modern business world, and communication is definitely one of them. Internal and external communication is essential in maintaining employee productivity, ensuring efficiency in the workplace, as well as managing thriving customer support and PR departments. Without a strong communication strategy in place, though, you can expect numerous key processes in your business to suffer over the long term until you start losing lead and conversion opportunities, and employee satisfaction starts to diminish.
For these and many other reasons, focusing on improving and upgrading your communication strategy as a whole should be one of your top priorities in 2020 and beyond. This is especially important for companies that are now managing remote teams in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. With all of that in mind, let’s delve deeper into the five key ways you can improve business communication to facilitate growth and success.
Create a positive workplace culture
Firstly, you can’t hope any of your new solutions to generate the desired results or surpass your expectations if you don’t have a positive workplace culture to motivate your employees and incentivize early adoption. Effective and timely communication necessitates a positive work environment that nurtures the right values and boasts a satisfied employee collective. Otherwise, ensuring accountability can be extremely difficult. This is why you should start by defining the core values that will shape your internal culture. And this cloud culture will keep the environment to improve communication skills.
These values should include honesty, transparency, equality, trust, co-dependence, accountability, and passion for innovation and success. Once you have these key pillars in place, creating a strong communication strategy and adopting an innovative communication system will become a walk in the park. Be sure to integrate these values into the workplace through your leadership skills, team-building events, personalization and acknowledging the individual, and by resolving interpersonal problems quickly and to everyone’s benefit.
Build an efficient communication hierarchy
Now that you have the framework for your workplace culture in place, you can start devising an efficient and effective communication strategy that will minimize risks, cancel out the noise, and ensure that the right information reaches the right people all the time. When you don’t have a strict communication hierarchy in place, you will have a difficult time maintaining productivity and output, simply because you can’t guarantee that the right information will reach the right person.
This typically leads to your inbox exploding with emails that don’t concern you, and data that clearly should have gone to other team leads in different departments. This will invariably hinder performance across the board and will make your job that much more difficult, so make sure to implement a clear hierarchy that specifies where each piece of information should go, whom your employees should report to, and whom they should communicate with on a daily basis.
Upgrade your old phone system
Of course, you can’t expect to fix all of your communication problems with a positive culture and a strong hierarchy, because there’s only so much your employees can achieve without the right communication tools at their disposal. If you’re still running your company on traditional phone systems, the time has come to upgrade to a modern cloud-based solution like VoIP.
Voice over internet protocol is the best communication system for the digital business world, as it brings numerous key features to the table to facilitate seamless internal and external communication. When choosing a VoIP provider, be sure to check honest VoIP ratings and reviews online to find the plans that offer features like video and audio conferencing, call forwarding, transcription, full mobile optimization, advanced analytics, and more. These digital features coupled with VoIP’s low call fees make it the perfect tool for modern in-house and remote teams.
Improve communication through project management tools
Effective communication is not just about the smart use of phones and messaging apps (more on that in a bit), it’s also about effective collaboration in the online world, particularly when employees are working together on complex projects. You can’t expect emails and chats to create a productive work environment for complex projects that include numerous tasks and employees, which is why you need to invest in a reliable project management tool.
This tool should provide your employees with numerous handy features that will facilitate timely and effective communication and collaboration, including workflow visualization, intuitive task management, scheduling and monitoring, performance analytics, and more.
Standardize the use of messaging apps
Lastly, consider the fact that employees are nowadays using messaging apps to talk about business, but also just to send memes in group chats to take the load off during the day – this makes messaging apps a valuable tool to boost communication, productivity, and team cohesion. Be sure to standardize the use of workplace messaging, and have your employees use the same app to ensure complete data encryption when they’re exchanging business-related information and materials.
Wrapping up
Communication is one of the key elements of long-term success, so improving your communication strategy should be at the top of your list of priorities. With these solutions in mind, you should have no problem building a better communication system that will take your company forward.