Misunderstandings are a regular occurrence in the business world.
Team-mates will often find themselves confused after misinterpreting an assignment, while managers will sometimes fail to communicate their expectations clearly.
As inevitable as these setbacks are, you can treat them as yet another opportunity to boost your business inside and out.
Most companies today predominantly focus on what they can do to improve customer-facing interactions. You can add another layer to that purpose by focusing on employee-facing workplace communication, too, and consequently improve all of your channels of communication for all parties involved.
To elevate your workplace interactions, you can rely on the following trusted methods, and use them to help your employees, partners, and your customers feel confident that each interaction with you will be successful.
Evaluate your workplace communication regularly
There can be no improvement without regular feedback and business-wide transparency.
These two elements are often considered the basis for employee happiness, but they also serve their purpose for proper communication that delivers results.
Develop a feedback cycle for your employees to evaluate their own communication in the workplace, to show you potential gaps and issues, and to help you understand their strongest qualities.
Different perspectives will help you understand what they are dealing with and how you can contribute to improving their day-to-day interactions. Don’t just throw tech at them, take your time to hear them out – after all, that is the very core of quality communication.
Weed out unnecessary tech tools
We live in the era of digital domination, so to speak, and more companies are gladly embracing tech tools in their everyday lives. This is a clear sign of progress, but also of lack of direction.
If you’re using more tools than necessary, you’re probably adding work to your plate without even realizing it, and you’re making it far more difficult for your teams to focus on actual work rather than reporting, sharing information, and updating each separate platform in your system.
By the time a single employee posts an update on their Asana task, after which they’ll send an email to the team members and to their client, and then move to update their Dropbox documents, they’ll probably lose valuable time.
Instead, you can scale back and use one or two key applications that will help you boost productivity and communication alike.
Upgrade your office communication channels
Inter-office relationships heavily depend on how seamless communication can be with your customers and clients.
If your phones are ringing off the hook constantly, increasing office pressure and tension, you’re inevitably preventing them from being productive and enjoying their jobs.
Instead, you can find a low-cost VoIP phone system for your particular business model to streamline communication with customers and provide your employees with ample comfort to interact without disruptions.
Make sure you’re using your phones to empower, not complicate communication in the workplace, no matter if it’s customer-facing or employee-facing.
Automate with chatbots
Some of the simplest solutions are often the most powerful.
For instance, adding chatbots to your website and social media can help your employees manage their workload more effectively.
They can easily provide run-of-the-mill responses to common queries while your teams handle more sensitive and complex questions and customer complaints.
Automation is by no means the holy grail of office communication – it’s merely a tool to help your employees delegate more effectively, and to give them more flexibility in how they interact amongst themselves.
The very fact that they no longer need to focus on pointless and repetitive assignments will enable them to structure their time better.
Create a protocol and educate your teams
Much like your sales professionals have a clear process of how to qualify leads, talk to existing clients, and create business proposals, your entire organization should have the same guidance for communication.
Your employees should know exactly whom they should talk to when handling specific tasks, who should be involved in each interaction, and the right protocol for every communication channel.
Simply put, your teams should know how to use office Slack chats and how to use their official email account when interacting with their team-mates.
Finally, since these protocols will change over time to be more refined, you should train and educate your staff accordingly. They’ll likely need to learn to use different tech tools to collaborate with your remote teams, implement new protocols, learn how to communicate your key brand messages, and the like – all the more reason to provide training regularly.
From ongoing feedback to clear protocols, your employees will have an easier time handling their workload and interacting with their team-mates.
Plus, your customer-facing teams will manage their work better, allowing you to handle your operations and focus on what matters most.
Once you improve workplace communication, you’ll pave the way for other improvements and overall business growth in the years to come.
