6 Easy Ways To Improve Team Communication: Tried and Tested

Effective communication is an absolutely essential project management skill. If your team members don’t communicate well, you’ll likely experience delays, errors, and even project failures due to miscommunication. You’ll also miss out on potential productivity and innovation gains, and you could even see team members leave your business as employee satisfaction plummets.

The good news is that there are proven strategies for helping your team communicate more effectively and work together more collaboratively. Keep reading to learn about our six favorite ways to improve team communication.

In this guide:

• Key Takeaways
• 6 Ways To Improve Team Communication
• Final Thoughts on Team Communication
• FAQs

Key Takeaways

Here are our six recommended ways to make your team’s communication more effective:

1. Use multiple communication channels
2. Organize regular updates
3. Clearly define team members’ roles
4. Foster two-way feedback
5. Build community within your team
6. Encourage overcommunication

6 Ways To Improve Team Communication

We’ve tested out dozens of approaches to achieve more effective collaboration at our company, so we know what works and what doesn’t. Based on our experience, here are six strategies you can use to address poor communication and make your team more successful.

1. Use multiple communication channels

It’s important to remember that everyone on your team has different communication styles. Some team members might prefer short, more frequent communication by text, while others may like to hop on a video call to discuss problems.

Using all the communication channels available to your team — including in-person meetings, email, phone, chat apps, texting, video conferencing, and more—encourages communication and reduces barriers for employees who strongly prefer one channel over another.

Still, information mustn’t get lost in the cracks when using multiple channels to communicate. Consider using automations to duplicate messages across channels and automatically add tasks to your team’s to-do list and calendar.

2. Organize regular updates

Regular status updates are a great way to bring your team together and ensure everyone is in the loop on progress. They offer a formal opportunity for team members to share what they’re working on and ask for help from colleagues. They also provide a timely opening to praise team members for a job well done.

One method is to hold short weekly meetings to review status updates. Another method, which is preferred by high-performing teams, is to have written updates in a chat group or by email because it offers more flexibility than meetings.

It’s also important to give employees regular opportunities to talk with you privately, discuss their performance, and raise any concerns about other team members. We recommend holding one-on-one meetings with each team member monthly or quarterly.

3. Clearly define team members’ roles

Clearly defining the role of every member of your team is important for a variety of reasons, including ensuring that work is divided up appropriately and that employees feel ownership over their work.

It’s also key for effective team communication since employees need to know who to go to with questions, to bounce ideas off, or to get feedback. If team members aren’t sure who to talk to about something, they’re less likely to speak up.

Defining team members’ roles can also make meetings more effective. For example, if everyone knows who’s running a meeting, the meeting organizer can send out an agenda and invite team members to input their ideas. When meetings feel consistently productive, employees are more likely to look forward to them as an opportunity for positive communication.

4. Foster two-way feedback

Two-way feedback involves team members giving praise and criticism to one another, regardless of their relative positions on your team. Encouraging constructive feedback is a powerful way to foster a culture of openness, honesty, and accountability.

Ideally, two-way feedback will happen organically as team members work together. However, to get this pattern of communication started, it can be helpful to create a formal feedback process. Consider asking employees to create a list of praise points, constructive criticisms, and potential solutions for one of their colleagues, then have them share that list with you and their colleague to discuss it further.

5. Build community within your team

A team with members who genuinely get along, trust one another, and feel like they’re working towards a common goal will always communicate better than a team with members who feel like strangers to one another. So, it’s important to build a sense of community within your team.

There are many ways to do this. Some ideas include:

• Hold in-person meetings (or by video chat for remote teams) to bring employees into the same space. This lets employees make eye contact and read each other’s body language.
• Dedicate the first few minutes of weekly meetings to an informal chat and encourage employees to share something about themselves or their interests outside of work.
• Hold team-building activities like going to a trivia night or making pizza. However, always ask your team members what they’d like to do for a team-building event rather than decide unilaterally.
• Celebrate team wins with social events, like an office party or lunch.

6. Encourage overcommunication

Overcommunication — sharing as much as possible, as frequently as possible, across multiple channels — may seem like a step in the wrong direction. However, turning up the dial on how much your team talks can have benefits that are hard to get otherwise.

For example, the quietest members of your team will feel more empowered to speak up, and employees will be more likely to communicate about hiccups in a project before they become major impediments to progress.

Setting a good example is key to encouraging overcommunication. Share what you’re working on frequently, and repeat important messages about upcoming meetings and deadlines multiple times. It’s also helpful to praise employees when you see examples of good communication between team members.

FAQs