Running a business is no easy task, and you are not only responsible for your own future, but everyone else’s within the organization as well. Because of this, you should always be striving to make your business better and offer greater employee satisfaction, so that your company can continue to make optimal profits and ensure a comfortable future for all stakeholders. One way to do this is to improve the communications within your company, which is why we are here to offer this insightful article on 4 tips to improve your business’ communications.
Give your Employees a Platform to Communicate and Collaborate
When trying to improve communications within your business, you should begin by investing in tools that allow your employees to chat, discuss ideas and collaborate on projects. This not only encourages your employees to adopt and share the brand culture, but also helps create more personal, trusted relationships. Additionally, giving your employees a means to communicate to each other can also help them solve small problems that all slightly affect the overall profits of the business.
For example, someone working in a warehouse may be unaware of a small problem with barcodes on some of the boxes. While this problem is not necessarily important enough to bring to the attention of superiors, it could be easily solved if someone working in the store could simply communicate the problem directly to warehouse personnel. This solution is not only immediately effective, but also saves the time and hassle of going through the chains of command. Sometimes solutions can come from the most unexpected places, such as completely different departments within your organization, so never underestimate the value of giving your employees a voice.
Enable more Opportunities for Vertical Communications
Another great tactic to improve communication is to invest in video-conferencing-for-business platforms. This helps nurture more transparency between the levels of employees, ensuring that problems are never simply ignored, but rather fixed before they begin to affect the rest of the business. Oftentimes, employees don’t have any ways of communicating to higher-ups, and this can turn into a serious problem over time, as small problems become big problems and big problems can start to detriment the entire business. As such, giving each individual in your organization a way to express needs, desires or potential opportunities for improvement in vital. As an added benefit, this can also help each employee understand the value of their position within the business, providing greater job satisfaction and possibly encouraging them to strive towards the business’ goals.
Create a Communications-Friendly, Constructive Environment
Within a typical social environment, people may feel more open to sharing ideas, whether the ideas are good or bad, since the worst that could happen is that someone disagrees with them. Within the working environment, however, everyone wants to look their best, and people tend to avoid failure as much as possible as their career or future positions within the company may be jeopardized. This can be detrimental though, as some people may actually have good ideas but may simply be too scared to share them.
As Business.com succinctly puts it in an article relating to business communications and growth, the fear of failure is often the biggest hurdle to success. Therefore, by eliminating the fact that failure may lead to punishment, disappointment, ridicule, or any other type of social rejection, you can encourage every individual in your business to speak up more often and bring new ideas to the table.
Utilize Feedback for Analysis and Improvement
Creating communications channels within your business also offers the benefit of allowing feedback from all levels of employment. This feedback, as shared by The Balance, can enlighten you to many of the small problems that are affecting your business, as well as where opportunities for improvement may be. These can be truly insightful, especially if you run a massive company responsible for hundreds or thousands of employees. You can’t realistically check up on every individual to take notes on what aspects are doing well or failing, but you can give each of them an opportunity to bring such factors to your attention. From that point, you can make decisions to solve the problem – although, more often than not, simply discovering that a problem exists is the most difficult part of fine tuning your business.
As a final note, Bill Gates, who is arguably one of the most successful men in modern times, shared a deep insight when he said “I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other.” And if we take that statement and complement it with the continued success of his business, it suddenly becomes obvious how valuable communications tools can be within a business.
