Falling victim to miscommunication in the workplace can show you how significant it is to have effective communication skills. Things like project delays, confusing conversations, missed meetings, or any other type of miscommunication are a pain to deal with.
Every minute counts when you’re running a business, which is why even the smallest issues get out of hand when things aren’t communicated clearly. When things are going smoothly and communication is clear, your team becomes more innovative, engaged, and there’s an increase in productivity.
So, how do you establish effective communication channels?
All it takes is a committed leadership team and the right strategies to make good communication customary within a company. In this article, we’ve explained seven strategies that can be leveraged to improve effective communication within an organization.
1. Encourage Anonymous Feedback
There are numerous ways to get honest opinions from your teammates or employees. You can conduct group interviews with teams or team leaders, and consider allowing team members to respond anonymously via survey feedback forms. These days, the Zoom call feature, allows the admin to create polls and teammates can vote anonymously, giving the company the honest feedback required. Other strategies for encouraging anonymous feedback include:
- Requests and Help Cries: This may seem absurd, but many companies would be shocked at the number of requests made by their employees if monitored by managers or the company’s leadership. As managers, get to know what your teammates need assistance with, what it is that they are satisfied/unsatisfied with, and what they consider important in an organization.
- Discussion Forums: Let’s be honest here, not everybody is bold enough to join an open discussion and express their professional opinions. This is why platforms, such as anonymous online forums allow and encourage employees to share their problems and offer solutions.
2. Conduct Meaningful Meetings
In the hope of being labeled as a “young and fun company,” several meetings are wasted in frivolously gossiping and arguing. This leads to wasted employee hours where no real work gets done, and of course, the company loses money. Here are simple but effective tips for conducting meaningful meetings:
- Some organizations have group discussions which very often, lead to unnecessary arguments. To create more purposeful meetings, ensure that the core purposes of these group discussions should be to have a solution-driven mindset, a safe environment where employees can address shortcomings and also devise practical solutions. Doing this would also show that the employers are genuinely concerned, and that employee feedback matters to the organization.
- Routine information and EODs shouldn’t be discussed over lengthy meetings. Instead, internal communication tools like email and Slack can be leveraged.
- If a meeting has been scheduled, there should be a defined goal. What will be discussed in the meeting? Cancel it if there’s nothing that needs to be urgently discussed. Aimlessly having meetings with no particular agenda will result in utter confusion and employees will end up wasting time, again.
- For rescheduled meetings, there must be a defined time limit. The meeting, however important, shouldn’t go on endlessly.
- End the meeting with a clear plan and workflow. This will help the employees gain clarity on what exactly is to be done after they leave the meeting.
- Conduct a short 10-15 minutes meeting in the morning to briefly discuss employees’ to-dos for the day and their backlogs. Encourage them to make a to-do list that lists tasks to be completed in order of importance or urgency. This will allow them to dive right in, without forgetting about what to do first.
3. Have Routine One-on-One Meetings
One-on-one employer-employee meetings are an amazing way to establish understanding. These meetings would also make it easier for an employee having issues to freely express themselves with their immediate supervisor.
An organization with a diverse workforce will have employees with various personalities. For example, an introverted employee may not be very comfortable participating in group meetings and would shine when participating or sharing ideas during one-on-one sessions.
These meetings also allow a supervisor or employer to understand an employee’s perspectives, how to address those ideas, and how to tap into their underlying potentials and talents, only to unleash it, bringing the best out of their employees.
4. Deliver Bad News with Empathy
Every organization has to relieve its employees and lose clients once in a while. But, how do they make this unpleasant announcement bearable? Here are strategies to navigate this:
- Be Honest and Direct: Everyone in the organization has the right to know everything that’s going on. Be honest with your people without beating around the bush or twisting the news in any way.
- Include a Plan of Action: Explain what the company thinks and how it plans to take action, if any. Make sure the company fulfils the actions they decide to take.
- Practice Empathy and Compassion: Understand that employees may need time to process the information, and may also vent. Empathize with them, show compassion, and give them time to wrap their heads around whatever has happened.
5. Encourage Team Building Activities
Hiring people and assigning them to work is the easiest, but building a team that the company can rely on can take ages. Employees need to take time off work and just be silly together. No matter how unnecessary it may seem, it’s worth all the time, energy and money spent. Here are three important reasons for encouraging team building in an organization:
- Removes Communication Barriers: Being silly together helps the team to transcend beyond the senior-junior, employer-employee, and manager-executive relationships. This, in turn, helps to boost effective communication and openness.
- Healthy Interpersonal Relations Affect Work: This newly gained comfort within the team helps the employees to overcome their apprehensions and communicate more freely – coming up with creative and lucrative ideas that everyone can work on.
- Increases Efficiency and Productivity: It allows the team to seamlessly work together, and to their highest potential, without little to no friction.
6. Optimize Internal Communication through Technology
Lack of communication, even today, remains one of the issues that leads to low employee engagement. We recommend that you use best-in-class technology to optimize internal communication.
The ideas given below may help you –
- Digital workspaces emphasize effective communication resulting in innovation, and enabling the teams to converse, curate, and share creative content.
- Online collaboration software platforms like Zoom, Basecamp, Slack, and Asana assist team members to manage all internal communication, projects, overall workflow, and deliverables.
- Business apps like Proko can tweak the team’s communication, internally, as well as with clients and prospective customers.
- Get inspiration from social media to provide the organizations with a user-friendly intranet hub that enables employees and leaders to share information, brainstorm ideas, and establish a strong sense of community in a safe environment.
7. Develop Communication Management Templates
Developing and formalizing a communication strategy into a written plan is challenging, however, it’s worth the time and energy investment it takes. A well-executed, tailored strategy gets everyone within the organization on the same page about communicating the company’s mission statement.
These templates and communication formats can be:
- Newsletters for your customer base to send out important information, such as updated Covid policies or the company’s policies on anti-discrimination.
- Email templates can also be created to announce sales and discounts that the company may be offering at the time or soon.
- Get Feedback from the internal team as well as your clients. These formats and templates can be used to address main points and reduce all the unnecessary information.
- Using these for the EOD reports can also be useful. The team leader would only read the point-wise tasks done instead of lengthy, unnecessary paragraphs.
- Monthly client reports can also be precise by showcasing only the metrics achieved by the company; alongside brief strategies to further optimize the ROI.
Final Thoughts
Opening up can be difficult, especially in larger organizations. However, effective communication is also critical in building a positive work environment and fostering an inclusive company culture.
Brainstorm on how your organization can make positive changes to break the ice within each department, as well as across your company.
Unlock potential and redefine your organization’s purpose with Brandemix – the best Digital marketing and branding agency in New York City. Brandemix can help your organization attract the best talent and optimize its internal communications.
Contact Brandemix to transform, tweak your ROI, and bring your company to life through a new, untapped method – employer branding!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.
