Strong communication, both internal and external, is the key to an organization’s success. A study by McKinsey Global Institute reveals that the productivity of an organization with connected employees can improve by 20 to 25 percent.
This means the organizations can potentially increase their revenues up to $1.3 trillion per year across different sectors. However, in spite of knowing the importance of communication, employees and team members seldom communicate or collaborate with their peers.
- 39 percent of employees believe that people in their own organization do not collaborate enough
- Even though 75 percent of employers understand how important team work and collaboration is for their organization; only 18% employees are evaluated for their communication skills during performance reviews
- 97 percent of employees and executives believe poor alignment within a team is the main reason for unsatisfactory outcome of a task or project
Organizations must encourage communication in all forms (written, visual, electronic, etc.) However, it is easier said than done. By implementing effective communication practices within and outside of the organization, you can boost your productivity and efficiency.
Improving Internal Communications
More and more organizations are pushing their boundaries and going global. Collaborating face-to-face might not work as well as it did in past years. It is important for the organizations provide its employees with a single communication platform which ensures seamless sharing of information and allow communications to happen wherever and whenever it is needed.
By adopting advanced technologies such as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), cloud communication services, or unified communications, organizations can go a long way.
1. Involve Employees and Respond Promptly
It is important to keep employees informed about the vital business decisions. 90 percent of employees believe decision-makers must seek other opinions before making a final decision; about 40 percent of employees agree their employers failed to seek other opinions.
Intranet is a useful tool that can be used to keep the employees informed about various within the organization. Intranet can also be established within the organization without hassles, so businesses may not worry about increased overhead costs.
Moreover, 49 percent Millennials support the use of social tools for workplace collaboration. Therefore, it is important to provide employees with a platform where they can communicate effectively, without inhibitions. As one infographic explains:
When an employee or customer puts up a question, make sure the concerned persons respond quickly. Establish an open-door policy to encourage effective communication. Offering appropriate training for the management level executives, as knowing how to communicate with employees and peers is a crucial part of improving internal communication.
2. Provide Regular Feedback
This is important especially for the younger employees. In order to know the status of work and communicate your expectations, it is best to provide a weekly status report specifying priorities and projects that they’re working on along with short and simple feedback from the reporting manager and executives.
This makes the employees feel connected with the rest of the team and get motivated to put in a further effort to improve the outputs. Since emails are one of the top five internal business communication tools, this can help a lot in that scenario.
Improving External Communications
Customers are the lifeblood of organizations both big and small, so by communicating properly, you can strengthen the customer relationships and win more customers. Here is how you can aid strong and impactful communications with your customers:
1. Help Customers Communicate Conveniently
Provide the customers with options that will help them contact or reply to you quickly. Offer easy-to-find email links, social media links, and phone numbers and let them know about any other communication channel that they might use to get in touch with you. When you are firing newsletters and updating websites or social profiles, make sure the points of contact is clearly mentioned. Ensuring your business is using up-to-date technology is crucial to efficient communications. For example, businesses using VoIP technology save 32 call minutes per day on average.
2. Leverage Social Media
With more than 1.91 billion social media users across the globe (as of 2014), there are high chances that your targeted audience would be found on one of the many social media platforms. By identifying the specific platform you can engage in impactful communications, promote products and services and clear out confusions, just as Domino’s Pizza did.
Conclusion
Improving business communication system is very important in order to improve the overall productivity and efficiency of the organization. If you still rely on age old methods of communication, it is time that you start considering upgrading the communication system.
