Every successful company knows how important good communication is. Having strong communication throughout the workplace will inform all members of the team about what they are working towards and how their work contributes to the company’s entire goal.
Aside from that, great communication also establishes trust, builds relationships and creates a more productive environment. Meanwhile, poor communication results in frustration, confusion, and lack of trust. Don’t let the communication in your workplace turn bitter as this will only lead to absenteeism, staff turnover, and lower levels of customer satisfaction. This can also become a hindrance to the growth of your company, revenue, and development.
If you don’t want this to happen, we’ll share with you some tips on how you can improve your internal communication.
1. Give the reason to the ‘why’
Your employees will have a difficult time delivering the intended result if they don’t understand why they’re doing it. To completely communicate a task and meet the desired end goal, you need to explain the why.
You must carefully explain why you have given a particular task to that specific employee, why he or she needs to accomplish it in a certain way and why the task is very important to the overall goals of the business.
When your employees see that you are communicating well with them, it only shows how crucial the tasks are. This will also motivate them to work hard on the task, so make sure that you can positively communicate and discuss the task effectively, and how working on it will contribute to wider goals.
2. Provide constructive feedback
When an issue arises or when you’re reviewing a project, giving useless feedback and criticising your employees will only create frustration and can affect the trust that you and your employees have. You may want to avoid this and focus on why these might have happened instead of criticising them.
A great leader would want to help their employees and learn from their mistakes. Offer constructive feedback because this will not only stop employees from making the same mistakes but this can help employees maintain a sense of trust for openly communicating with their manager.
3. Following up all meetings with notes and expectations
Most of us hate meetings, right? Especially if the meeting becomes long, loses its direction, and if you do lose a bit of your concentration, you’ll be missing out on all the crucial details.
It’s important that you follow up on all meetings with notes and expectations. This gives you the chance to clarify any actions such as additional points that may have been missed and assure that everyone understands the key takeaways.
This will give those who were present a chance to ask any questions that may have emerged since the meeting.
On the other hand, if it’s a group meeting, we suggest that you put the names next to tasks in your follow up to make sure that everyone gets a clear focus in bringing clarity and efficiency to what they do.
4. Be smart with how you communicate
Now that we live in a world of slack and email, sometimes we have already forgotten the art of face-to-face conversation.
It’s a bit hard to communicate the tone of voice digitally and other people are less receptive to particular types of communication. Don’t completely depend on communicating online.
But if you’re talking in person, make sure that they see that you’re listening through your body language. Don’t try to multi-task and provide your full attention as employees will most likely come to you again if they feel that you care about what they need to say.
5. Important news and company updates must be shared
When other employees hear second-hand company updates from a colleague and not from a manager, it can make them feel out of place or undervalued. Updates and news may affect what employees are communicating with customers or impact the targets and goals that they are working towards, so it’s important that they have this knowledge.
If employees are updated with any important happenings, they will not only be able to perform their job properly, but they will also feel more engaged. Make sure that you communicate this with the HR solutions department so they can help you deliver these updates to the employees.
6. Ask regularly for feedback and put real actions on it
Asking for feedback from your staff is one of the most ideal ways to maintain and improve communication. However, as much as you may like to check in with how all of your employees feel about all the different areas of your business on a daily basis, it would be hard to do it in person.
What you can do is invest in a fast pulse survey tool. Employees feel more confident and honest with answering short and frequent confidential surveys as there are some things that employees may not feel comfortable discussing in person.
