Communication is the essence of any business. Without effective communication, all your efforts to improve your organization will fail. You need to do right by your employees by giving them what they need to effectively communicate with you and each other.
Here are 5 useful strategies to improve workplace communication:
1. Train your workforce
There’s no use of having the right tools in place and improving your communication skills if your staff stays immature. You need to train your staff to evolve with the changes you’re implementing. Make sure they are trained to pay attention when spoken to.
Make sure there are no distractions to drive their attention. Take the help of body language when explaining something. Avoid technical jargon and induce casual humor throughout the conversation. After a while, your employees will get habitual of the way you talk and understand all you better.
2. Modernize
A team can hardly be a team without clear communication. Subsequent misunderstandings can put an organization in serious jeopardy. A lot of resources are wasted and conflicts arise as your so-called teams fall apart. Organization nowadays are adapting to newer and better methods of workplace communication to eliminate these misunderstandings. Since everything is recorded and accessible in real time, the chances of miscommunication are very low.
How to modernize communication in your workplace:
- Get rid of irrelevant compulsory meetings. If there’s no need to have a group meeting this week, skip it. This will keep the meetings relevant and important for participants. Plus, it saves a lot of productive hours.
- Use mobile communication systems to promote 24/7 availability on your fingertips. This enables cross-departmental communication, which further speeds up the workflow.
- Make use of a task management software to assign and manage all work-related tasks.
3. Encourage Feedback
Sometimes your employees know what’s better for your organization more than you. Being the closest eyes and ears to the problems in hand, they’re your best source of information. Encourage your employees to share their opinions. How they think you can achieve your objectives and fulfill your expectations. It can also invite constructive criticism, so be prepared for it. Don’t take it personally and appreciate their input.
4. Resolve Conflicts
As a manager, you need to be an expert at resolving conflicts among your employees. Make sure that everyone can address their concerns and be a good listener. If conflicts go unresolved for too long, they can severely hamper organizational growth. Your employees won’t collaborate their efforts as they should be, and the optimal performance would stay low.
You need to step at the moment you suspect a conflict arises among your subordinates. Use your experience to guide them through their problems and let them that your door is always open to address such concerns.
5. Employ an Anonymous Reporting System
Detecting these conflicts however can be very hard sometimes. You need a secure communication system. Employees are not very forthcoming about issues they have with their coworkers. Nobody wants to be a rat. Also, you need your feedback process to be completely honest in order to be of any use. Provide your employees with an anonymous reporting and feedback system. Employee YourSafeHub in your organization. It protects your employees from the fear of retaliation and motivates them to come forward about sensitive issues.