April 3, 2025
Communication is one of the most important ways to make any business more successful. You need to communicate with all kinds of different people, including potential shareholders, employees, vendors, customers, and other businesses.This is how you build relationships and make sure that you have a productive office.
So, how can you make communication easier in your workplace?
Good communication involves everyone in the conversation. Or, if you prefer, it takes two to tangle. With some relationships, like customers, the only thing you can do is make sure that your communication is top-notch and as clear as possible.
But in the workplace, you can encourage people to communicate more effectively with you and each other. This involves creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortable communicating freely and transparently. You don’t want a potential problem to go ignored because your employees didn’t know how to communicate their concerns with you.
Of course, balance is required. You don’t want a workplace where people are rude or hostile to each other or where people try to throw their coworkers under the bus. Try to find ways to encourage respectful and constructive discourse, even if people do disagree or have an issue with something.
A good HR department can be helpful for this. You can also be as approachable as you can to employees so they can come to you for concerns or to offer suggestions. Employees, like everyone else, like to feel heard and as though you care about their opinions. Even if you don’t implement a suggestion, you can encourage them. After all, some people might have great ideas that just need to be listened to.
The gold standard for communication is probably talking face to face. You have multiple tools at your disposal, including your voice, your face, and even body language. You can have meetings where people take in information and ask questions there and then, allowing a good flow of communication.
When you can’t meet in person, the next best thing is video conferencing. This essentially gives you the same ways to communicate, like using your voice and even your face, but over an internet connection.
This is ideal for remote office setups, where some or all of your employees work from home. They can still have meetings and chat as though they would in the office, but from the comfort of home. If people are unwell and can’t come into the office or have a communicable disease, video conferencing allows them to still work as normal.
Video conferencing is also fantastic if you have an international business, because the only thing you really need to work out is the time difference. Whether you’re talking to other businesses, another branch of your business, or clients in another country, you can still make connections and communicate clearly.
Another way to communicate clearly and nearly instantaneously from a distance is with instant messaging and emails.
Some video conferencing platforms, like Zoom, also have the best live chat platforms to allow people to chat. Instant messaging is ideal for when you want to have a text-based conversation. It’s less formal and allows ideas to flow more easily.
Emails, on the other hand, make the ideal paper trail. You can still talk easily, but they’re better for conveying information and sending documents. Emails also save, allowing you to prove that you’ve had certain conversations and, if need be, find them again so you don’t lose that information. This makes them the electronic version of a letter, hence the name “e-mail”.
As well as communicating within your business, you need to communicate with your customers. There are a few ways to do this. Social media, for example, allows you to connect directly with customers and even gives them a way to communicate with your company publicly.
But what if customers want to get in touch with your company about a complaint or a query? In this case, it’s better to have an answering service for people who prefer to ring. You can also provide an email address and, if appropriate, a chatbot for your website to deal with basic questions.
This will add to the customer experience so they are happier with the overall service. Remember, happy customers are customers who are more likely to return to your business and buy more products, so it’s important to keep the lines of communication open.
