Effective Communication in Business
When you run a business, you want to make sure all parts of it are flowing and working together. When bad communication becomes a part of the process, your business and sales suffer in the long run. Staying on top of communication in your company can feel like an overwhelming job, especially if you have a larger business or multiple departments, however, it’s not an unattainable goal. The more you strive for excellence, upfront, communication, the better your business will be.
Keep Employees Involved
When a business decision is made, it typically affects everyone in some way or another. The last thing you want is for your employees or customers to feel blindsided by a change. Preventing panic and getting everyone onboard, starts with communicating before the change takes place. Video conferencing like UCaaS is a great way to get your in-house and offsite employees up to date on upcoming changes with your company. Whether remote or in the office, a quick update by a meeting can keep people informed and allow them to jump in with any questions they may have in mind. Successful communication includes planning and preparing. It’s always a great idea to think of how any changes you make will impact each department. When preparing employees for the new update or change, don’t forget to mention how this change can benefit them and why it’s being put in place. Keeping everyone on board and aware can prevent panic or unhappy employees.
Communicate in Advance
Change, especially large changes, should happen in stages. If your business needs to go through a new system change that will alter how things are used, you need to communicate well before the new system is onboarded.
Bigger changes that impact processes will require a learning curve. Although the impact may be highly efficient down the road, your employees may not see that in the beginning. If they feel like the change is happening far too rapidly, you’ll again be faced with widespread panic which will trickle down to customers. Your employees are the face of the company and you want to make sure they are confident in how your company does business and the processes they need to use. To prevent employee frustration and a high turnover, ease your employees into changes ahead of time. Focus on drumming up excitement for streamlining processes and helping their job become more manageable with the changes that are coming. If you can keep a positive spin on the changes and why you’re implementing them, you’ll have an easier time getting everyone on board.
Train for Changes
Communication comes in more forms than just a meeting or email. When it comes to effective communication, you’ll want to have training in place for those updates that have a big impact. A few things to remember when involving training includes having your training department up to date on the new processes and being confident in their ability to educate the employees who need to learn them. Training should be done in increments. Start with the departments that will first handle any new processes or updates. Educate on the changes and make sure the process is understood fully and able to be repeated, before moving on to a new process. Some stages come with training, and communicating effectively will help your training stick. Keep in mind that people learn things differently. Have a variety of ways to incorporate awareness and learning for updates. Include hands-on techniques after educating and showing how the new process works and allow plenty of time for the process to be learned before pushing your employees live with the updates, feeling as though they haven’t a clue.
Communicating is a huge part of every business, and being able to do so effectively will help your company foster an environment for growth. Healthy communication keeps happy employees, and you can bet that happy employees keep your customers smiling too.
