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Evolve

Leadership

5 ways to enhance communication with your team

old-style telephone on a desk

In my opinion, good communication is the vital contributor to aiding retention and motivation of the team. However, good communication can be a huge challenge: in order to foster an atmosphere of trust and positivity you have to communicate frequently, effectively and openly with everyone in your company.

If people feel that secrets are being kept from them, water cooler gossip and discontent can creep in; be inclusive, and be honest. However much communication you think is enough, you should probably do more! At least some of this communication should be in person—especially anything particularly important—or if you are a lean startup with a team spread around the country/world then you can use something like Zoom to get as close to an in-person experience as possible.

At Inspire, as a result of our rollercoaster journey of scaling up, we developed a five-pronged communication strategy as follows:

1. Monday morning stand-up

people in a meeting room
Photo by Redd on Unsplash

Every Monday morning, we had a short, fairly informal get-together where everyone in the company gathered round and we shared the good and the bad of what had happened in the past week, and what the week ahead looked like. It was led by the directors and senior managers, but it was an open forum where anybody in the business could openly communicate and share things if they wished.

This is a great, regular way to keep face-to-face contact between the senior members of the business and the team at large, and to make sure everyone’s on the same page. These meeting usually only lasted around ten minutes, and we had a member of the support team take notes and write out the key points as bullets, which were then shared so that anyone who wasn’t around could see what was discussed.

2. Instant messaging

Email has pretty much become the new snail mail system. Just as letters used to clog up in-trays, now emails clog up inboxes. For quick, informal communication between team members which doesn’t need to be recorded, we put in place an instant messaging system so that hundreds fewer emails could be sent and inboxes were kept much tidier.

We also set up a discussion thread on this system for every client, so that quick bits of news and information could be shared to everyone in that project on a company-wide basis. It’s a really efficient way to get those snippets of information out there quickly.

3. State of the nation

group of people gathering in room
Photo by HIVAN ARVIZU @soyhivan on Unsplash

This is something that many businesses do—the twice-yearly big company meeting where the entrepreneur stands up in front of everyone and gives a full rundown of everything that’s happened and what hopefully will happen. We used to do the same thing at Inspire, but the response in these meetings, even though we put our all into them, was zero. For us, the point was to generate feedback, engagement and debate, but we realised that it was simply too daunting an environment for people to feel they could contribute—too many people and too formal.

As a result, we changed tack. We still held these meetings every six months, and it was still a presentation of what was going on in the business, but now we held four separate meetings in more of a discussion style, breaking the team down into four smaller groups. And these were not divided by department—rather we had a few people from each internal group, so that each had a nice cross-section of the company.

From then on, we got great engagement and feedback, and had some illuminating discussions and learned invaluable lessons from these meetings—lessons we would never have learned through a more traditional, whole-company meeting.

4. Have fun

As an entrepreneurial business, you should always be thinking about how to do things differently. Communication can be dry and dull, to the point where people stop listening. At Inspire, we decided to inject some fun into things. We had a member of the team who was very passionate about videography and keen to use his talents, so we began a humorous monthly video blog, based around a different theme within the business every time. It featured a rundown of the news in the company, including funny things that happened that month.

It went down really well, and was a bit different but still shared some useful information for the team. You don’t have to use this particular idea, but try to be innovative and create fun in the business and in your communication methods.

man with earphones looking at his laptop and laughing
Photo by Emilio Garcia on Unsplash

5. Don’t shy away from key issues

Many business owners seem to be scared of sharing the long-term aims, goals and ambitions for their company, perhaps because they don’t want to raise expectations in case these things don’t work out. But from our experience, sharing these goals gives the team focus, ambition, motivation, and an incentive to stay. If the future is one big unknown, then all the team has to focus on is their day-to-day work, which is usually much less inspiring than the big picture.

This brings us onto the final point—don’t shy away from communication, especially when it’s about something difficult and important. And if it is something difficult and important, then do it face-to-face. It’s so easy to retreat to email to try avoid confrontation where there is bad or difficult news to share, but your rule should be to share everything—the good, the bad and the ugly—in person. This builds trust with your team, it shows that you actually care, and it ensures that you keep the lines of communication open.

Entrepreneurial businesses are usually small enough that you can do a quick get-together of everyone in the business, or you can walk around pod by pod talking to each team. People really appreciate this personal touch—it could well be a big part of the reason they chose to work for smaller businesses. In this way, you can see their reactions and respond appropriately. If people receive bad news by email, they may well shut down and not say what they have to say to you; rather they’ll say it behind your back to other team members, with growing resentment.

Being able to respond in that moment when the news is received allows you to give your team members confidence and reassurance, explain why this has happened, what you are going to do about it, and that, in the end, things are going to be okay.

  • This is an excerpt from Warren’s book, Evolve to Succeed, which is available here.

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