Improving Office Communication

improving office communication by steve moyeBusinesses focus a lot on how to communicate with their customers, yet that doesn’t mean anything if they can’t tackle internal communication.  If there isn’t any healthy dialogue between the people in your organization, then that needs to change.  Communication fosters morale, independence, collaboration, execution and diversity, altogether forming a stronger company.  I recently read an article that shared five tips for improving communication.  Here’s what it had to say:

Small talk: Small talk is simple enough, but it goes a long way by helping build trust.  It might seem cheap and pointless, yet it makes people feel more comfortable with one another, which opens the door for more meaningful conversations in the future.  Next time you see somebody you don’t know well, talk to them, whether it’s about how their day is going, a game they watched or maybe their plans for the weekend.  

Team building exercises: If there isn’t much communication in your company, then maybe trying a direct approach could help.  One great way to do that is through team building exercises where coworkers need to collaborate.  These are especially useful for building relationships and improving communication in new teams.  

Clear communication channels: Sometimes people are bad at communicating with each other simply because they don’t know how to.  Every individual in an organization should know who they’re reporting to, who reports to them and how that looks in the larger company structure.  When this is clarified, then sharing ideas and collaborating becomes a lot easier.  

Feedback loops: Traditional annual performance reviews are outdated; the workers of today need instant feedback, not annual reports.  A regular “feedback loop”, simply a process that defines how actions are evaluated and assessed, is essential for getting constructive criticism and encouragement on a regular basis.  Most feedback loops regularly happen in daily conversation.  

An open-door policy: While most people think of an “open-door policy” in the literal sense, it goes far beyond a boss keeping their door open throughout the day.  It means that anybody in the organization can talk to anybody whenever they need to.  It’s the idea that the new intern can ask the CEO a question.