Collaborative Post¦ If your business has a team that’s any larger than just one person alone, then communication is going to play an important role. If your team can’t communicate easily with each other, or with that outside of the business, then it can lead to all sorts of problems, such as making errors, not following the top priorities, and crossed wires that can slow your operations right down. If you’re looking to streamline your business, then making your communication much more efficient is going to play a vital role.
Make meetings worth it
If there’s one thing that can really slow down a productive day like nothing else, it’s an unnecessary meeting. If you’re considering making a meeting, especially with multiple people, ask yourself if it is really worth it. Are there some people who could simply be sent an email instead? If it’s a one-sided instruction or a request for future feedback, rather than something that needs an immediate answer, that might be the case. If your team is across different locations, then remote meeting software might be a much more logical answer instead. Sometimes, a face-to-face meeting is the most effective and efficient way to “hash things out”, but you have to be ready for when that isn’t the case.
Don’t lose what you were just talking about
Another common problem is that following a meeting, conversation, or phone call, it’s very easy to be fully in the moment and actively listening, but to forget key details such as actions you want to take because other things come along later and knock them out of your head. Whether you’re having a meeting, phone call, IM discussion, or otherwise, you should make sure to follow up on your communications. This can include using note-taking software to make it a lot easier to jot and save what you talk about, but you should also send an email over to the other parties, covering the main points, which they can verify or respond to if necessary.
Ensure the person you need is always in reach
If you’re sharing an office space with multiple people, it’s important to make sure that when someone uses the phone it’s easy to find the right person. Not only can this help outside callers find the help that they need, but it can streamline your internal communications, as well. IP Phone Systems are phones that effectively use the internet to route calls often through a company with several receivers, which can help make calling the company a lot more efficient. It can remove unnecessary waiting times from your callers’ day, making them a lot more likely to stay on the phone and, as a result increase your chances of retaining them as a customer at the end of the day.
Alternatively, if you work on a construction site for example, and need to reach each other internally two-way communication can be a quick and easy way to do so. It allows you to communicate fast with just the press of a button or an app on your phone, without either of you needing to be at your desk. You can find out how these apps and devices work on this page and how they can streamline communication within your company.
A few templates can save you a lot of time
How much time do you spend writing emails each and every day? How about the members of your team? While hand-typing emails can give them certain importance and show your clients or other contacts that you’re taking the time to communicate with them directly, constructing them from scratch every time can be very time-consuming. With the help of email management software, you can create templates that you can use to format, style, and even construct a large bulk of the text of the emails that you send, getting them out into the receiver’s inbox much more quickly. Even if you’re planning to write from scratch every single time, you can at least save yourself the time that comes with the format and style.
Keep conversations in one place
If your team includes five or more people, then conversations can start to get complicated. Different individuals can communicate to share resources and information specific to them, and different combinations of people might be involved in different joint projects. As such, it can start to become important to ensure that people are able to track and follow conversations in those different groups and that nothing gets lost. Breakdowns in communication don’t help you to grow your business! Workplace communication software can help make this a lot easier, putting everything to do with internal communications on one platform, rather than spreading it across emails, IMs, and various other disparate communication platforms. This way, losing the information and conversations you’ve had so far becomes a lot harder.
The tools above can help you streamline communication in your business a lot, leading to a more efficient business as a whole. However, it’s important to make sure that you’re using training, not just tools, to help your team communicate.
Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.