Flexible Solutions: How To Properly Manage Your Company’s Communications

As the world evolves and develops and your company grows and reflects societal changes, you will likely find that communications are something that is in need of a semi-regular update, how people interact and share information changes rapidly due to trends, technological developments, and access to existing technologies. The following will explore a few solutions to common communications problems within businesses.

Long Wait Times For Responses

If people who are trying to get in touch with your business have to wait too long for a response, they will move on to one of your competitors. Today, speed is expected by everyone; this includes paying customers and potential customers. Whatever communication methods you have open with your clients and customers, be sure someone is answering in a timely manner. An email should be answered no later than the following workday. A phone call, if during your open hours, should be answered immediately. If someone needs to be on hold for more than fifteen minutes, you don’t have enough people answering phones. If you don’t have space or staff, look into call centre options. If you accept text messages or other direct chats, you should be answering within a few minutes within opening hours.

Open Yourself Up For Internal Communication

Many businesses spend time focusing on how they can keep their employees up to date and well informed. Not enough businesses focus on ensuring that they can hear from their employees. All communication needs to be both ways. Staff need avenues to express ideas, suggest changes, report problems, and know that their voices are heard. There should be options for both anonymous communication and identified communication depending on the employees’ needs.

Express Appreciation

It is all too easy to get caught up in only spending the time to communicate when something needs to improve. While this can help address problems in the workplace, it’s not enough to keep the best employees working on your team. Communication should be used to thank and express value whenever the situation is worth it. This could be done in the form of verbal acknowledgment in the hallway. It could be a thank-you email. Feel out your company’s culture and figure out how to express gratitude to your staff when they knock it out of the park. A little thank you goes a long way.

Don’t Overdo The Platforms

A common error when it comes to communication is opening too many different avenues. If you have an app that everyone uses as well as email as well as phone as well as the company instant messenger as well as a productivity tracking document where people leave notes for each other, there are too many things going on. Just checking all the different platforms could take up the entire first hour of someone’s workday. More than this, there’s a higher chance that a message will be missed if one department almost never checks the app as 99% of the messages aren’t for them, and another department uses it consistently and needs to get in touch with that first department. There should be a small enough pool that it’s easy for your employees to stay on top of each communication method.

Don’t Loop People On Emails They Don’t Need To Be On

If you start a habit of CCing people who don’t need to read what’s in the email, you can bet that after a while, people are going to start skimming emails. Then they’re going to skip over certain chains altogether to save themselves time and keep things productive. Avoid this mishap by having only those who need to be part of the conversation in the email. Create a company policy where it is acceptable for someone to say: I don’t think I need to be included in this thread. I’m going to hop out. This way, everyone knows who is reading and who isn’t reading, and if it turns out that person is needed, they can be readded, and they’ll know to pay attention in that case.

The Dreaded Meetings

Similar to the above point, if meetings are overdone and include too many people and too little information, you’ll end up with an hour where everyone zoned out as two people talked and that third person, who actually needed to hear only one piece of information didn’t catch what they were looking for. Keep meetings to a bare minimum. And again, allow a company policy of leaving meetings if the information doesn’t apply to you.

The above tips should help you avoid common communication pitfalls when managing a business. It is also crucial that you conduct regular audits where staff can talk about what is working for them communication-wise and what isn’t. Adjust accordingly.

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