Taking Steps to Improve your Internal Communications: Streamline Channels

This is part 4 of our series helping you to improve your internal communications, check out part 1 here.

In the world of communication, efficiency is key; every year, US businesses waste $37 billion on excessive meetings, $37 BILLION. But meetings aren’t going anywhere. They are an integral part of internal communication, and they can make or brake a team. Finding a way to balance a sufficient level of communication will not only help your bottom line, but also relieve a tremendous amount of stress from your employees.

Employees do not have hate meetings, according to Atlassian, 45% of employees felt overwhelmed by the number of meetings they attended, and 47% complained that meetings were the number 1 time waster in the office. By decreasing the number of meetings, or limiting attendees to only the key employees needed in the meeting you can drastically cut back on time wasted and employee stress.

It is clear that we need to drastically cut back on the number of meetings in order to streamline our communications and keep employees happy, but we still need to keep in touch with our employees. There are a number of ways to complete this task, but as the employee population changes, so do the techniques. In the past email has dominated the landscape, offering a quick, reliable, and easy to use channel to encompass the entire office within a few seconds. But as marketers amass emails and managers continue to send out irrelevant content, employees are slowly turning away from email.

In its stead, texting has become commonplace within the office. As it stands, 80% of people are using texting for business, this is due to the speed at which millennials open texts and the consistency with which they respond to them. As I’m sure you’ve heard a thousand times: millennials are taking over the job market and now maintain a firm majority within the workforce. Until they completely overrun the workforce we would advise using a mix of email and text, allowing for all parties to become accustom to the new changes.

Beyond appealing to the new trends of incoming employees, texting also provides an incredibly fast means of relaying information to your team or office.

Now there are drawbacks to texting. It is incredibly hard to convey tone or send detailed instructions; it can also get lost in a sea of texts from friends and family to the inexperienced texter. But the speed and convenience of texting on top of the preferences of the new employees lands texting atop a the totem pole that all managers should utilize.

Beyond a new means of communication there are other paths to drastically reduce time wasted communicating. Limit emails to only the necessary information and reduce the number of employees you CC on emails. Cut back on the formalities of the channels and train your employees to do the same.

If you enjoyed this, read

Part 2 here

Part 3 here