You’re a leader. You’re great at what you do, and you have experience- and data-driven ideas for improving your company and helping your employees become more productive.
But those ideas can only become reality if you have great methods and tools for communicating them to your company. Your communication needs to be easy to send to your people and simple for them to receive.
Here are four ways that leaders and managers today are thinking about and practicing communication with their people. What would work in your organization?
1. Plan for a Culture of Good Communication
Great leaders and managers have a plan for everything. You know that communication is vital to your success, so deliberately plan out how to best perform it. In a written plan, you can decide on:
- The technological tools that will assist you (like a mass texting service, Slack, etc.)
- What types of news you’ll share in mass communication
- What types of information you’ll share one-on-one or only through public speaking
- Who will be in charge of disseminating relevant news—and who decides if it’s relevant
- The standards of professionalism and conduct that all your people should adhere to
The goal of a great communication plan is to ultimately create a corporate culture in which employees expect and count on trustworthy, timely, relevant communication that never wastes their time. If you consistently use communication only to help them in their work and lives, they should start to imitate your methods, especially if those methods are written out and shared.
Of course, creating a culture of open and clear communication can help as well. Public speaking courses can really boost the ability of your employees to work together and stay on the same page. Consider investing in this for those employees that you plan on having around for a long time.
In addition, if you bring new and useful communication technologies into the workplace and make them part of employees’ everyday work, they may get used to them and never want to stop using them.
2. Slack
Slack is a tool for group collaboration and real-time conversation. Online text chats are organized into channels—which can be public to all employees or require a personal invite—where you can share files with your employees and check in on projects and assignments.
Direct messages in Slack facilitate one-on-one communication, and customizable notifications let each employee focus on what’s most important to their projects.
3. Google Suite
Google Suite offers tools such as Docs and Sheets in which employees can directly create and work on projects in the cloud. They can collaborate within those files with you and with other employees in real time, leaving comments, suggestions, and edits for each other.
Google Hangouts lets you chat online with team members individually right in their email browser window or on the Hangouts app on their phone. Sending a chat request is more immediate and personal than an email and less intrusive than a phone call.
Some of your employees may already be using Google to save files and work on documents. You can integrate their existing accounts into your workflow, or you can pay for an enterprise upgrade to Google Suite, which provides more storage and additional features.
4. Mass Texting
Using a mass texting service has become easier and more popular in the last few years. When you need to get messages through to your employees very quickly and effectively, you may want to send mass text messages.
SMS text messages can reach almost any cell phone, even those without smart features, apps, or an Internet connection. Since most employees carry a cell phone at all times, mass texting can quickly update them in emergencies, remind them of vital deadlines, and much more.
Great Leaders Have Great Communication
As a leader who is already excellent at communication yourself, you can probably think of even more uses for these technologies and the other tools that are available. This post may just stimulate your thinking.
It could also remind you to build a culture of communication that will last in the long term, helping your employees to be more productive now and in the future.
