8 Tried-And-Tested Ideas For Effective Team Communication
Before talking about anything else, take a look at the workplace that communicates effectively.
How A Healthy Workplace With Good Communication Looks Like
Employees who communicate effectively at the workplace are courageous, innovative and disciplined. These three factors are levers of performance according to the communication survey for 2009/2010 of Watson Wyatt.
A company where employees can voice their opinions, ask for feedback and talk to each other unhesitatingly is a team that communicates well. Every employee is given many chances to perform and communication is never compromised.
The manager of the team is the leader and not the boss and he tries to find the best solutions to the team problems without further ado. The name of the company that strikes my mind thinking about openness and information sharing at the workplace is HubSpot. It was nominated in the list of Entrepreneur’s inaugural top company. HubSpot creates a commendable & unexpected workplace culture. The company has redefined the meaning of transparency in business.
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What Is A Good Team Communication?
Team communication revolves around the team’s interactions and organizational transparency.
Good communication is just a stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Good team communication is an integral element of business success. Managers and executives are increasingly opting for a master’s degree in communication management to become a better communicator. Improved communication leads to healthy conversation among teammates and mitigates conflict. It is an underlying factor to increase employee engagement.
A company, which promotes communication among the employees, has happy employees. Good team communication is a lot more than lunchtime gossip, chat in the WhatsApp group and share your requirements. But it is to explain to them ‘why.’ It is not what you say, it is more of how you say it. The ‘how’ factor weighs more than ‘what.’
In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly. — Mark Sanborn
The quality of communication at the workplace evaluates a leader. It separates a poor leader from a true leader.
“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.” — General Colin Powell
Where Does A Team Go Wrong?
One of the most common reasons for project failure is the lack of proper interaction and communication within team members. Why not see it with an example. In a multinational company, the manager used to put his position ahead of the interest of everyone and always desired to be right. ‘Why’ he was honored with that position was of little worth for him. He remained intransigent and seeded precedence in his attitude and behavior.
Gradually, he started restricting his team members to share any information with other senior leaders. Consequently, other employees’ work started suffering. Nobody had the courage to clear their doubts. The work environment deteriorated and knowledge sharing dropped to an all-time low. The prolonged absence of the leader from the office and miscommunication led to missed deadlines. In this way, the team lost sincerity and its productivity dropped down.
What’s the lesson? Team communication and information sharing matters.
High-functioning and successful teams do not excel by chance. Successful leaders are not gifted. There are certain things they do and they have. They have trust, team identity, shared goals, and many other traits; clear communication drives most of them. Here are the benefits of having an ‘Always On Attitude’ in the team.
Why Team Communication?
Open the lines of communication in your team and see how carrying out the projects becomes plain sailing. You’ve smooth workplace processes. Until you don’t ask your team members’ opinions and ask them to share their viewpoints, you might miss some amazing ideas. It’s an opportunity to have a conversation with creative minds. Take all the steps to not let brilliant ideas go undiscovered. Clear team communication is important for -
- Mitigating Conflict: Misunderstanding is the root cause of conflicts. Conflicts may arise even when someone feels like they are communicating well. You are the commander of your basecamp; so you need to identify any tension or conflict among teammates and provide them communication training.
- Achieving Better Client Relationships: Do you have client-facing employees? You need to open the lines of communication even more effectively. They would be able to provide receptive information, readily understand client requirements and resolve conflict when they are trained to communicate. Most importantly, good communication and a better understanding of the workplace help them bail the client out selling the product/service preeminently.
- Creating Reachable Goals: All employees are aligned to the same objective when a company fosters goal-oriented communication and promotes transparency. So, you should communicate the goal clearly to ease the work process.
- Making Decisions: Groups that meet often are better at problem-solving and making effective decisions. The ‘Always On’ attitude can make teams perform well, think creatively, have new ideas and work strategies, especially when teams are diverse. The knowledge eases the employees, makes them comfortable and arms them to take challenging initiatives.
- Team Communication Also Affects Team Cohesion
Trust is one of the seven optimal functions and characteristics of productive teams. That’s why it’s important to build trust to increase team cohesion.
It is like a chicken-and-egg problem. It is hard to find if communication eases building trust in the team or its vice versa.
Trust + Effective Communication = Team Cohesion.
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Team Communication Strategies
Having strategies for better team communication is essential to avoid misunderstanding and confusion. It minimizes the challenges and confusions faced. “Who was supposed to do this task?” “What role do Karry have to play in this project?” Asking these questions is the thing of the past.
Technology has introduced itself to all aspects of life. It includes team communication with the help of communication tools that are in the market to ease building strong in-house and virtual teams. Tools help to communicate with the team in smart ways.
Below are the tips that you can practice to take your company to new and exciting heights.
- Easy Sharing: Knowledge hoarding is one of the important factors that accelerate success by sharing useful information with the team members crushing and taking out any malice (if any). Do you want it to become a common practice at your workplace? Switch to note-taking software of ProofHub. You can save project information, attach files, pin your team to access easily and communicate smartly.
- Express Instantly: Living in a fast-paced world, nobody wants to wait for hours to be answered. With the internal communication tool, share your ideas quickly sending instant messages. Have one-to-one or group conversations with teams and clients. You can specifically mention people in group conversations to avoid any confusion.
- Quick Communication: Create conversation threads without going through long email threads time and again. Use team collaboration tool to discuss different topics in one place. You can communicate with comments in the tool to share ideas or give feedback. The tool helps to avoid scheduling meetings during odd hours.
- Say No to Cultural Barriers: Do you have team members from different cultural backgrounds? Use an online project management tool that has no language barriers and makes task management simpler for diverse teams and clients as well. It makes intercultural communicating easy.
- Stay Connected: Now, everything is in your pocket. No need to worry about work and team management when you are upon the gad. ProofHub mobile app always keeps you updated. You get notified of every update. Use the email-in feature of the tool to be a part of the discussions and make sure none of the updates and important emails are missed. Scale your remote teams even when you are enjoying your vacations.
- Address Inclusion: Inclusion at the workplace means to nurture and harvest the best ideas from every team member. It is an important cultural trait to ‘include’ and communicate with team members to ‘say’ what they want. It will help you provide quality feedback to your team members and bridge the communication gap and help them create a shared vision and focus on objectives. How to do that?
-> Focus on Physical Proximity: One of the simple inclusive actions you can take is to prioritize face-to-face communication by scheduling team lunch; either make it social or informational.
->Equip Them: Share your intentions and expectations from the project and improve workplace culture.
7. Welcome Reciprocal Feedback: The main motive of the feedback session is to make it constructive. Also, the parties involved must get clear details instead of saying “this needs amendment.” Kudos to you if you have the courage to document the feedback in the presence of everyone “respectfully.” Why it’s important to do that? So that others can learn from it. Being the manager of the team, you need to be open to accepting feedback too. Constructive criticism, if handled properly, can be the backbone of a company. It can keep the fire of working hard alive.
8. Promote Clarity: Create communication that is:
- Relevant: The information you impart to the team members must be crisp and directly related to the topic.
- Equitable: Make the information accessible to every team member and each one of them should have the liberty to voice their opinions.
- Prompt: Make sure the team members get timely feedback to implement it.
- Fluent: Promote interruption-free communication among team members.
- Complete: The content of communication should cover all the important issues.
Choose a facilitator or a moderator to effectively prepare for a fluent and topic-centered meeting. The person should also ensure equal opportunities to all the team members so that they can easily participate and contribute to furthering the discussion. Create opportunities and cultivate such an environment that fosters knowledge-sharing and interactive sessions.
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