Your employee’s communication skills have a direct impact on business success.
According to SHRM, a survey showed that companies experience an average loss of $62.4 million per year due to poor communication.
Additionally, surveyed employees shared that at least 13% of their time at work was wasted due to disorganized communication. This disorganization leads to lower productivity rates amongst employees.
As an employer, you want to engage with your employees in a meaningful way. However, you may not know what the best course of action is.
In this article, we’ve outlined steps to take when building an office culture that promotes transparent communication. Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of open communication and how you can get started in your workplace.
Why Does Transparent Communication Matter?
Before getting started, it’s important to realize why communication is important for your team. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Does my team have a habit of communicating openly with one another?
- Can employees be honest with one another when providing feedback?
- Is it clear that everyone on my team respects one another?
These questions assess your team’s ability to communicate but, most importantly, their ability to trust each other. When employees don’t trust one another, it’s also likely that they don’t trust their employers either.
Without trust, communication doesn’t occur when it needs to—this lack of communication results in less clarity for employees and limits productivity.
Transparent communication matters because it helps foster a genuine feeling of trust amongst employees. By building a foundation of trust with your team, you create a space where employees feel welcome.
Nurturing Transparent Communication at Work
Ensure the Team is on the Same Page
One of the first steps to take when implementing clear communication is to see if your team is on the same page.
When your team is on the same page, they can easily collaborate on any given task. Additionally, each team member’s efforts will remain in alignment with team goals and the company’s vision.
The best way to ensure everyone’s on the same page is to set forward clear goals. Once everyone understands your long-term goals, you can create short-term goals that help your team meet those objectives. Thus, your employees have easy-to-understand goals that communicate the company’s path and their role in that path.
Examine Your Current Communication Habits
Another step to take when improving workplace communication is to examine current communication habits.
How open are you as an employer? Do your employees feel comfortable approaching you with questions or feedback?
One way to encourage employees to share their opinions with you is through regular feedback sessions.
In these sessions, it’s important for employees to feel their voice will be heard. Without that assurance, employees might not openly communicate with you because they don’t feel their voice is valued.
Creating space for employees to communicate with you freely is also beneficial for employee engagement. Employees feel active in their roles and have a better understanding of how their work makes an impact.
Support Smooth Communication With a Shared Inbox
In today’s workforce, email remains an open standard for communicating with employees. However, an employee’s inbox can easily become cluttered and hard to navigate. An important client email might get lost, causing your team’s project to fall behind.
What ways can you streamline this standard of communication so that employees can improve daily communication processes?
Using a shared inbox tool like Threads, you can compile all business communications into a single platform. Instead of flipping between inboxes, your employees can use a single platform to find the information they need.
Threads also benefits your team by reinforcing a transparent and hyper-organized environment without major changes to existing practices.
When using a shared inbox, it is also important to implement best practices. These can include the proper use of tags within Threads, the creation of client folders, and other practices. With the proper guidelines, you can ensure your shared inbox experience helps elevate the hard work your team accomplishes.
Searching for a suitable transparent communication solution for your office?
Contact the team at Threads to learn how your team can benefit from a shared inbox.