Your business probably relies on multiple avenues of communication to keep things running just right. Phone calls, emails, and perhaps even paper memos make their way across coworkers and departments. However, these are mostly used in businesses that haven’t recently reconfigured their communications to include appropriate reliance on the digital age.
If you’d like to modernize and improve your communications, here’s some food for thought.
Determine What Your Employee’s Needs Are
As a business owner, you know that it’s way too easy to spend extra money. To get the most value and avoid unnecessary or awkward expenditures, take the time to identify that perfect fit. Take the size of your business and the exact number of employees into account first. From there, add in other business relationships, like vendors, contacts, and clients.
List all of the ways in which communications presently occur across these relationships. Whether it’s conference calls or Twitter DMs, ensure the method is included here.
If you already have an idea of what you want out of a communication system, why is this necessary?
Simply put, it’s because it isn’t really about your preconceived desires. The Harvard Business Review tells us that collaboration is increasingly in focus in business, to the detriment of some employees who are becoming less productive due to the amount of time they have to spend “collaborating”. Therefore, you’re looking to streamline the modes they rely on now.
With that in mind, features and budget come into play. Picture what you’d like their future communications to look like – do they include audio or video? Do they require one to turn away from their regular, independently-completed work? Now you can check and see if the features you envision optimizing communications are worth the amount it will take to invest in them.
Leverage Technology for Effective Communications
Are all of these emails really necessary? Implementing things like internal blogs and discussion forums can allow employees to share project updates, ideas, and more on their own time, on any device. It’s also a way for you to share less time-sensitive info and company updates without getting lost in an inbox. If this isn’t a preferred option, an intranet may be ideal.
Intranet software that draws from content management systems can similarly keep communications flexible and inboxes easier to manage, especially if project teams aren’t all working in the same location.
Case tracking software can not only improve communications but make progress (or lack thereof) more clear to you. This, along with bulk SMS messaging, can be of value to businesses where customer service is of great importance. If you’re certain implementing SMS would help here, you can get Plivo now.
Finally, make sure you’re getting the most out of popular tools like Dropbox, Skype, Google Drive, and any chat clients employees use. One may have become redundant, and another – especially file-sharing services – may need to be reorganized.
The Bottom Line:
A successful business runs on effective communication. If everyone isn’t appropriately plugged in, deadlines get knocked back, recent hires become more difficult to train, and employees spend more time catching up than they do complete tasks. All of this places your communication system among the single most beneficial areas you can focus on to take your company to the next level.
