How to communicate effectively as a team
Communication can be an underrated topic in the workplace. Teams often assume there is no specific need to evaluate how they communicate; it is a skill taken for granted with not much thought to ensure its overall effectiveness.
Communication within a team mustn’t be solely focused on transmitting information but also on interpreting and providing a platform for improvement. According to research, the smartest teams are not the most productive, but those with excellent team communication outperform every time.
What makes a successful team? The answer is easy, it’s down to collaboration, and you can’t collaborate if you are not effectively communicating. Effective communication enables a team to understand the common goal, share ideas freely, and resolve any challenges or mistakes far more quickly.
What is effective communication?
Effective communication is when information is clearly communicated and can only be measured as successful when each team member completely understands what the team and themselves need to achieve. Once a unit has a clear understanding, the collaboration will take the task to the next level.
Communication can also only be effective if team members trust each other enough to be honest. Trust is an easy value many companies put on the door, but what does it mean? Having trust within a team is imperative as only then will team members feel confident enough to share the challenges they are experiencing and contribute ideas. You can only build trust through effective communication.
Team members who effectively communicate work seamlessly and smoothly as a team, are more creative, possess greater agility and are more focused. All of this leads to enhanced performance, and often an unintended consequence is improved efficiency and a reduced workload. As any team leader will know, hidden mistakes are your worst enemy, but those unshared creative and brilliant ideas may cost you more.
There are a few easy ways to improve communication within a team and improve interactions with other groups.
Laying the foundation
Teams working in the technology space are often heavily reliant on work produced within their teams and work created by external groups and vice versa. Focused communication is needed to prevent unnecessary delays. A key attribute of successful teams is laying the foundation for how they will communicate and how they work individually.
When it comes to how individuals communicate, research has shown that this often happens in bursts of high activity followed by periods of low or no communication. Those periods of ‘silence’ are when team members develop their ideas and work. These bursts help focus the team’s energy, resolve questions, and enable a team to successfully move to the next step.
A team should coordinate their work routines as much as possible to communicate for shorter periods when everyone can respond immediately and effectively. Constant communication detracts from focus as you spend time responding to emails, texts, etc., instead of focusing on the job at hand. The bottom line is to recognise when to schedule those rapid-fire communication sessions with your team and stop sending out constant emails with everyone cc’d.
Transparency is another essential requirement; fail on this attribute, and your team is unlikely to be successful. Delays inevitably occur, but the danger is when there is no communication, as you will more than likely see the domino effect rippling across your team.
Teams need to establish upfront how they will communicate challenges and delays. You will most often find that when a team knows of a potential delay, they can work on another aspect of the project instead of just sitting on their hands waiting in anticipation. Transparency also builds trust as everyone knows there won’t be any horrible surprises, and they can adjust their workload accordingly.
Team members often forget that you may not have the answer or solution individually, but when communicated with the team, a solution is more likely to be found. Bringing the perfect solution or idea to the table is everyone’s dream, but teamwork takes ideas and solutions to the next level; each team member has insights, questions, and ideas that others haven’t considered. That’s what collaboration is — building on each other’s strengths.
How we communicate
As a team, you have to lay the foundation for communication. Emails that go out to everybody without response are bad enough, but another email trend that can accidentally cause miscommunication is too much information.
Focused communication should also apply to emails, and research has shown that emails that focus on a small set of topics are far more effective than emails that cover a vast range of information. It will lead to multiple emails from colleagues, each covering different aspects of the first email — it becomes an email management nightmare.
So instead of sending one long email covering four topics, rather send four separate ones. Small bits of information are easier to digest. The fewer ideas/questions/tasks that are involved make it easier to have discussions around the topic, as opposed to searching endless emails trying to find the information relevant to that task/topic.
Productive meetings
There is nothing worse than being invited to ‘those’ meetings, which carry on for hours and leave you wondering why you are there. Successful meetings require focus and a purpose.
Meetings are supposed to get everyone on the same page, disseminate information and share thoughts, yet research shows that around 70% of people who attend meetings find them unproductive and inefficient.
There are some simple ways to keep meetings productive and communication flowing.
· Keep meetings short. Anything over an hour and you will start losing people’s attention. Longer sessions often involve people repeating themselves and not staying focused.
· When sending out that meeting invite, only include the people who need to be there.
· Clearly define the agenda or purpose of the meeting beforehand and communicate it to the relevant team members. If you change your agenda items into questions, you are more likely to have engaged attendees. Our brains are wired to solve problems — questions make our brain subconsciously come up with a solution. So instead of making an agenda item like Team Communication, you could instead say, how do we improve our team communication?
· Always end a meeting with a summary of action items and expected deliverables so that there are no grey areas.
Effective channels/productivity tools
There are many tools that teams can use to reduce the need for unnecessary communication immediately.
Project management tools are especially effective as teams can quickly identify when tasks are due, the progress made, and at a glance, understand where the project is overall.
Simple tools like shared calendars are often not utilised to their full potential. Teams can schedule individual and group focus times. There isn’t anything more annoying when someone calls to see if you are free when they have access to your calendar.
Interestingly recent research has shown that people are more inclined to engage and focus during Zoom/Teams meetings when not on video.
Discussions that had teams concentrate on the relevant document on screen as opposed to each other led to engagement from most of the group instead of just a few team members.
Progress updates
Teams should effectively communicate goals, targets and deadlines. Any grey areas can lead to missed deadlines and frustrated colleagues.
It’s important to schedule regular progress update meetings. Just remember to keep them short. These sessions ensure that everyone is on track and free to share any new ideas, concerns and challenges.
Teams can function higher when everyone is in the loop.
Effective communication is the foundation of any successful team. Focused communication in an environment that supports every member’s contribution is vital, but at the same time, culture will play a part. A culture that punishes mistakes and ridicules ideas is never one that will lead to outperforming teams.
Effective Communication = GG EZ ;)
