Communication within a company is often at the heart of both success and failure. Poor communication can result in an increase to business costs, project failures, and an atmosphere of dissatisfaction in your workforce.
Rather than waiting for business failure to drive change to communication channels and culture throughout your company, following a few simple steps to proactively change the culture before it becomes damaging is key. Utilizing avenues for communication, like employee reviews and feedback surveys are just some of the tools you can leverage for better interactions in the workplace. Keep the following tips in mind in order to make internal communication fast, efficient, and genuine.
Clarity of Vision
Having a clear company mission statement and vision makes your goals and ambitions for the enterprise clear-cut. Doing so also allows workers to easily understand what it is your company stands for. If not already defined, employees can be left wondering what the point of their work is and unsure of where the company is headed.
Gather together your company leaders and ask them to answer some searching questions about your business: what are your collective goals? What do you all value in your work? How do you plan to maintain relevance?
Once answered, distill all responses into a few concise sentences and distribute them to all levels of the business. Your company mission and vision is the first important step to instilling commitment and a shared vision for all working at the company.
Start as You Mean to Continue
How are new employees greeted on their first day with your company? Showing new employees to their desk and leaving them to get on with their work without introducing them to colleagues, explaining processes, or the overall workings of the business, shows little regard for them or the work of the company as a whole.
To ensure new recruits fit in and understand the culture of your business, it is important to have them start out with a short introduction or orientation that familiarizes them with the whole business, their role, and their responsibilities. By helping them to acclimatize to the new position, you are able to imbue a sense of belonging and encourage a culture of cooperation and collaboration from the start of their career with you.
Be Available
There’s a lot to be said for open door policies: they encourage employees to share their thoughts, insights, and inspiration with managers. Feedback from employees is important to the business, just as support from managers is integral to employees feeling they are valued members of the team.
By letting your teams know that the leaders and managers of the organization are always available to listen to concerns and feedback, you build a culture of open collaboration and support feedback loops that can help your business advance.
Build Stronger Connections
Workplace relationships are the basis of good communication within a company. Working together on company projects help to build these relationships, but without additional interaction they can be somewhat hollow and lack a deeper bond that gives rise to trust, honesty and open collaboration.
Team-building exercises that get your employees out of the office and into unfamiliar environments help to provide another facet to their relationships and encourage stronger bonds which will be carried back to the workplace. These bonds in turn improve internal communication and engender stronger and more resilient teams.
Shared Resources
All companies have processes that are common among individual teams and may need to be referred to on a regular basis. The development of the internal references and shared resources employees are able to access negates the need to answer similar questions over and over again. These references can be added to and amended as required, and all employees should be empowered to not only access the resources, but also to be a part of developing them further.
Effective internal communications give rise to efficient and committed teams who actively support each other and the business to meet common goals.