After you’ve made sure to avoid these 7 things when starting your business, one of your next steps should be to identify your business’ communication strategy. Effective communication is the key to the longevity and success for any business. Therefore it is important when starting any new company that you set a strong foundation for open communication. To help aide with that process, here are 4 tips to ensure your business communication skills are up to par.
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Make Necessary Information Accessible to Everyone
Business communication styles of old used to function with each department of the organization working by themselves and having a wealth of information within their department. This caused other departments to be excluded from that knowledge, igniting a culture of confusion and a lack of transparency.
Nowadays, most companies have realized that the previous business communication styles were inefficient and cost them thousands or millions of dollars more than necessary. They have replaced those old styles with updated systems like shared databases that centralize all information pertinent to the companies’ employees. These shared databases contain things like policies, benefits plans, marketing materials, mission and vision statements, organizational workflow charts and goals of each department. Making the database easily accessible to anyone at anytime promotes transparency within the organization and simplifies the sharing of information required when multiple departments coordinate to accomplish a task.
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Promote Healthy Dialogue
Setting up your business in a way that promotes healthy dialogue between your employees, management and customers is very important. This starts at the hiring process when onboarding new employees. Make it clear that open communication is an integral part of your company culture from day one to save yourself a lot of time and money later on. From the beginning, remind these new workers that any colleague will do their best to help answer any and all questions that arise. From there, any time an employee is confused or unclear about something, they’ll feel comfortable asking fellow employees for help, rather than spending thirty hours trying to figure it out on their own or work around it.
Open lines of communication allow everyone to unify under a common goal, which will result in the goal being achieved faster. That unification simply cannot happen without healthy dialogue between everyone in the organization. Open communication has the added benefit of boosting trust between members of the organization, which is a key component in building a strong company culture.
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Ask for Feedback
Closely related to the promotion of healthy dialogue, providing a comfortable way for customers and employees to provide feedback is crucial for management. The only way for management to know if their product or service is being received well by customers is by giving them a platform to share thoughts and opinions. For example, if your customers love your product but find that it comes in too large quantities, the only way to be aware of this is by offering a way for your customers to provide feedback.
On the other hand, there may be issues internally that your employees find are decreasing productivity or the quality of the products and services you provide. These are issues that could easily go undetected, and could unknowingly cost you money. This illustrates why it is imperative that you provide an easy way for employees to offer honest feedback.
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Save Time with Integrated Communications Technology
Now that we all live in the Digital Age, we have seen technology become integrated with almost every aspect of business, and communication is no exception. Rather than having miles of phone lines running all over the building, the overwhelming stress caused by frequent maintenance requests, lengthy repair times, consider choosing integrated communication tools instead. Unified communications tools, like those from 8×8, allow you to communicate seamlessly with your entire team whether they work upstairs or across the country. From virtual call center software to visual voicemail applications, the lack of excessive wiring associated with these tools makes business hassle-free. Messaging tools, such as Google Hangouts, allow work to be streamlined and done on multiple devices by creating a platform that allows any employee to quickly communicate with others. Implementing these tools into your business will provide you an easy way to keep communication clear and consistent within your team.
Anyone starting a new business should develop a plan to incorporate communication technology from the start, if they want to be as productive and cost effective as possible. After executing these tips, you should be well on your way to starting a successful business that is positioned for sustained growth and longevity. Just like building a house, the stronger the foundation, the longer the home will last and building your business no different. Ironing out the details for a solid communication strategy will set your business up to be here for the long haul.