4 Ways To Streamline Business Communication and Improve Collaboration
Quality communication is one of the best tools you can equip your company with; it allows your teams to collaborate on important projects, quickly get to the bottom of problems and ensure that the product or service you deliver meets customer expectations. There are four ways you can improve and streamline communications in your company; virtual meetings, cloud work platforms, note-taking and active listening. The well-blended mixture of technological tools and conversation skills will allow you to focus more on the work than on miscommunication.
Virtual Meetings
While there is some validity to the phrase “this meeting should have been an email,” there are situations where seeing the body language of your team members and hearing the tone behind the words clarifies information and the intent behind it. There are also situations where a meeting is more productive than an email, such as brainstorming sessions. More companies are finding benefits in having a remote workforce, such as less overhead and recruiting talent worldwide. Having a reliable and streamlined way to conduct meetings and share information for a remote workforce is essential. This need has given rise to various types of Voice Over Internet Protocol services. Some services offer you all the bells and whistles of traditional business phone lines, just through the internet instead of the landline system. In contrast, others offer those things plus the ability to conduct video meetings and share documents with everyone present. Finding a suitable business VOIP service for your needs can be as easy as typing your criteria into an internet search and comparing the results.
Cloud Work Platforms
Company dashboard platforms on the cloud allow for important metrics and notifications to be shared with specific teams or the whole company with just a click. Many virtual meeting platforms feature dashboards and file-sharing capabilities through the cloud, so your technological solution may be perfect for multiple applications. You can even use cloud platforms as your primary work environment for coding or marketing projects as the work is updated in real-time as each team member makes improvements or adds information. Because progress and reports are shared automatically with team members, you can conduct fewer in-person meetings to go over the data and ask questions quickly with a text chat feature.
Take Notes
Whether in a business meeting or speaking one-on-one with a team member, it is important to note the critical information shared. This habit can help keep miscommunication issues from derailing an entire project and help your coworkers feel valued and listened to, building a better team with each interaction. You do not have to write down everything that your coworker says during a conversation to take note of the core message. Repeating essential elements in your own words will accomplish the same thing and ensure that you understand what your partner is trying to convey.
Practice Active Listening
Active listening is about more than just repeating essential information and making contact. It is about focusing your attention on the speaker to understand what is being said and how it is conveyed. Actively listening to your coworkers can help keep you from overreacting to situations or overcorrecting a problem. For instance, it is easy to think that someone is angry at you when they are just angry at a situation and escalate a discussion about frustrations into an active conflict. Active listening also fosters a creative and innovative working environment because the technique allows for a supportive sharing of ideas.
While streamlining communications may seem like a purely technological problem, the truth is that how you listen and take note of a conversation can reduce miscommunications over a variety of mediums. VOIP and cloud services for businesses can further streamline your communication by enabling voice or video meetings, file-sharing and dashboards full of relevant reports and information. You can further streamline communication by including a chat feature on your dashboard to ask questions and double-check understanding quickly.
