If you are a business owner, many things need your attention. However, none of them are arguably more critical than securing efficient communication between your workers.
How to Improve Internal Communication in Your Workplace
Employees are the backbone of every organization. They are the ones who interact with your customers and create the products and provide the services you sell. In order to work efficiently, they need to be able to communicate with each other. As such, you should take some time to transform your workplace into a place of dialogue.
Content Summary
Establish a Proper Channel of Communication
Send Internal Communications More Frequently
Train Your Employees to Communicate Better
Train your managers
Encourage Your Employees to Communicate
Set Up Recurring Check-In Meetings
Create an Open Office Environment
Stay in touch with everyone
The Takeaway
Establish a Proper Channel of Communication
Imagine this, you have three employees who need to communicate with each other. However, those employees aren’t in the same department. They are located in different parts of the company and they don’t even know each other. How are they supposed to communicate?
You should establish a set channel of communication. This can be an online platform, like Slack or TeamWork. Or (and the two are not mutually exclusive) you can set up a unified communications system – integrating all channels into one. You can explore this article to find out more about what is unified communications.
Send Internal Communications More Frequently
Internal communications are often the only thing that can keep your employees in touch with one another and help them work together smoothly. If you want to make the most out of your internal communications, you should make sure that you are sending them regularly.
Sending internal communications regularly makes your employees feel connected, like they are a part of something bigger than themselves, and that they are an important part of the team. It also goes a long way toward establishing good company culture, as the employees feel they are in the loop. This presents an air of transparency to the organization, which is important for employee morale.
Train Your Employees to Communicate Better
Start by explaining to them what communication channels are available and how they should use them. Establish best practices for how you want communications to be carried out. Set parameters and guidelines for the employees to follow.
The key here is to make the entire workplace feel like one united team. That can only be done if your workers learn to work together and understand each other.
Train your managers
Even if you invest in regular communication training for all your employees, you shouldn’t forget about the managers. They are the ones who teach your workers how to communicate with one another.
Communication training should include sensitivity training as well as technical training for the platforms and software you use.
Encourage Your Employees to Communicate
You should encourage your workers to communicate with one another. This can be accomplished, in part, by celebrating or rewarding communication. For example, when an employee makes a productive post on your online platform, don’t forget to like the post or comment on it. Employees need to feel they are being listened to, and the communication channel you’ve set up should make it very easy for you to do so.
Also, create an easy-to-use channel for them to voice their suggestions and or concerns. This way you will be in a position to solve potential problems before they become unmanageable.
Set Up Recurring Check-In Meetings
Depending on your organization, these meetings can be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. They don’t need to be long, but they offer your employees a forum for them to share their thoughts and/or ask for clarification on relevant issues. Make sure one person doesn’t dominate the meeting. It’s a good idea to ‘make’ everyone share at least one thing with the group – for example, what problems have you come across since our last meeting?
Create an Open Office Environment
The physical layout of the workplace will go a long way towards contributing to the company culture. An open space (physically) will often translate to an open culture, one where productive discourse is encouraged practiced.
When everybody knows what’s going on in the company, there is no room for secrecy or confusion. This means that you should avoid closed offices and cubicles. Instead, go for an open office concept, which will allow your employees to see and talk to one another.
Stay in touch with everyone
You have heard the old saying “no news is good news”. Well, this doesn’t apply when it comes to business communication. In a business, “no new” for an employee can lead to feelings of worthlessness or not being rightfully appreciated.
Instead, you will want to stay in touch with your employees even if there is no news, per say, to share. Simply connecting and sharing trivial matters has its advantages. Try to make some time every day to socialize with your employees. This might not be possible for all business owners. In these cases, schedules meetings can be a good alternative.
The Takeaway
Improving internal communication in your business is a very challenging, yet vital task. The principles to keep in mind are – maintain a reasonable yet high frequency of communications; make it clear how employees should communicate (the various platforms and best practices your company uses); and encourage communication through positive affirmations.
