Five Ways to Improve Office-wide Communication

Five Ways to Improve Office-wide Communication

 

Do you have issues with office-wide communication? Do you want to improve efficiency among your employees? Does it seem difficult to get your message across to your staff effectively? Do you find that no one responds the way you would like to memos, or that they seem to get lost in the fray? Here are a few tips and tricks for improving communication across the board.

  1. Use no more than two main modes of text-based communication: a group chat box, such as Slack or WhatsApp, and an internal office email system.

It can be difficult for employees to keep up with a million different group chats and email inboxes without messages getting lost. Using only two main modes of text-based communication will help to streamline your message and optimize readership among your staff members.

  1. Create a company-wide bulletin board, using websites such as Trello, for lists and updates.

A company-wide bulletin board will allow for both real-time updates and consolidation of to-do lists. It is helpful for teams who have a lot of projects and tasks, and for creating and sticking to effective schedules and timelines for getting more work done as efficiently as possible.

  1. Send out a weekly newsletter with memos, events, updates, positive shout-outs, birthdays, and more.

Instead of flooding your employees’ inboxes with incessant daily updates, establish a weekly newsletter in order to let your staff know about upcoming events, great things that are happening within your company, and birthdays. This once-weekly frequency will ensure that your employees open the emails instead of letting them sit in their inboxes.

  1. Set up physical inboxes for daily memos and printed information. These can be on employees’ desks or can be set up on a wall.

If you find that you do have a lot of urgent updates, or a lot of information that needs to be printed or in physical form, it is helpful to use physical inboxes, whether in employees’ own cubicles and offices, or in the form of a wall of mailboxes, to hold the printed material.

  1. “Office hours” or “Open door” two to three times per week for employees to ask questions, air concerns, and give and receive feedback on their work and the company.

Providing access to yourself and to your company’s administrative heads will give employees an established space to effectively communicate everything that they need to in order to keep their team running smoothly. This will also allow employees to come to you with issues while keeping an air of professionalism.

Do you have other advice, tips, or tricks for improving office communication? Let me know.