4 Tips for Better Team Communication (and Improved Productivity to Boot)

Effective communication is a frequent stumbling block in most relationships, whether it’s personal or professional. How many feature films can be reduced to just a short if the two main characters simply talked to one another?

Unfortunately, poor communication in an office setting can actually negatively impact productivity and, eventually, your bottom line. Even if you’re communicating well with your employees or colleagues, it could be that they’re not communicating effectively with each other.

If you think that productivity in your office could use a boost, taking a closer look at communication could be a good place to start. Are people talking frequently, collaborating and being kept in the loop on relevant projects? If not, here are some tips to help you turn things around.

1. Increase Transparency Between Teams

Cross-departmental projects create room for miscommunication when work is kept in silos and other team members aren’t involved in the entire project lifecycle.

The nature of existing work infrastructures only reinforces this siloed approach — each worker has a locally saved version of a file that is emailed back and forth among team members, some of whom are in the dark on the status of the project because they weren’t copied on the entire string of messages from the onset. We’ve all been there.

A solution to all of this lies at your fingertips. A team communication platform can improve communication by breaking down those silos. Bringing your entire collective brain trust onto one platform ensures everyone is on the same page and enables the team to collaborate on files quickly and easily, search for projects and even eliminate cluttered workflows.

When everyone in an organization is working off the same platform, you can easily organize employees into groups and everyone gains needed transparency into relevant projects improving communication and productivity across the board.

2. Enable People to Identify Internal Experts

The value of being able to identify and easily access internal subject matter experts is often overlooked. Team communication platforms, however, enable all users to more easily find the right people you need to be talking to.

This saves a whole lot of time and confusion as project managers stumble toward the “right” person. For example, by grouping people into spaces and tagging them according to subject, makes it a breeze for knowledgeworkes to do a quick search and get connected with the best person for a task leading to increased productivity!

3. Streamline Collaboration

Collaboration, which leads to innovation, is essential for any company that wants to stay relevant and compete. Team communication enable co-workers, no matter how far apart, to easily work together and share ideas. Users can log in, create a “space” for a specific topic and start sharing documents, files and notes for feedback and brainstorming. Even those notoriously resistant to “teamwork” will find working together too easy to resist.

4. Make People Accessible

The new workforce is becoming more and more remote, which requires more flexibility. With team members working different hours from all across the world, it’s a perfect storm for compromised communication. Team communication platforms, however, offer the perfect solution: built-in team and private chat functions. Instant messaging and video chat enables employees to instantly be connected to anyone at anytime, anywhere in the world. In our opinion, that’s just as good as shouting to each other for updates over cubicle walls!

It’s a fairly linear connection between less than optimal team communication and a business that might be on the ropes. A team communication platform can get your teams talking and performing at higher levels.

With a solution that’s easy to setup and cost-effective, people have an intuitive way to immediately start improving communication that mimics social platforms they’re already using in their personal lives.

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Incentive is real-time communication with integrated Document Collaboration, Instant Messaging, Task Management, and Enterprise File Sharing.
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