Your communication strategy has a measurable impact on productivity. Do you have a plan for improvement in place?
It’s easy to pay lip service to the importance of employee communication. The C-level suite and department heads can preach the virtues of keeping teams aligned with little effort, but eventually every organization faces the same question: is your company actually improving its communication strategy?
If you’re struggling to come up with a solid answer, it might be time to find a solution. Why? Bettering your company’s communication leads to higher productivity, lower turnover and improved time management. It helps drive your entire organization in the same direction and keeps the group together amidst tough times. And top organizations empower its leaders with strategies to constantly improve communication with employees rather than stay complacent.
For those companies wanting to achieve measurable productivity increases, keep reading. Here’s what we’ll examine in this post:
- How poor communication can kill productivity
- Why a measurable communications strategy is needed
- How to decrease your company’s turnover rate quickly
- The tasks each manager and company leader needs to take responsibility for in order to improve time management
Higher productivity rates
Clear directives inspire better results. According to Towers Watson’s Communication ROI Study Report, “effective employee communication is a leading indicator of financial performance and a driver of employee engagement.” The study found that companies with strong communication efforts delivered 47 percent higher returns to shareholders compared to the organizations that communicated least effectively.
At a management level, when you consistently define objectives and ask your team to do the same while regularly assessing results, you are setting your group up for a clear way to determine success.
How to make it work: Measure, measure, measure. Define your weeks with key objectives and results that your team can report on even daily, if needed. Towers Watson’s reports that companies that communicate less effectively are three times as likely as highly effective communicators to bypass formal communication measurements.
Lower turnover rates
Employees that are properly informed are likely to stay. Communication keeps your team engaged and motivated. And organizations with engaged employees produce as much as 202 percent more than their competition, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, The National Research Institute reports disengaged employees waste $370 billion annually and, to make matters worse, are eventually likely to leave—costing businesses 11 billion a year in turnover expenses.
Managers and company leaders that make an effort to motivate individual employees earn the most out of their teams and waste far fewer hours in the long run on refilling vacated positions.
How to make it work: Keep your employees accountable for their weekly results. Respond immediately when a team member raises their hand for help. Find out what roadblocks are preventing each individual from achieving objectives faster and more effectively and make removing it your responsibility.
Improved time management
When your team is informed and expectations are clear, less time is wasted. But it’s remarkably easy for employees to become confused or feel misguided in any growing organization. Why? Employees can find themselves overwhelmed by a flood of emails without knowing which communication strings deserve priority. We also invest countless hours into routine team meetings, but your team can often leave the room without a clear understanding of what’s needed to make the subsequent days a success.
Imagine the guessing game your less vocal employees are likely to play in the absence of clear objectives. Speculative work on unnecessary projects can skyrocket while essential tasks go ignored. Company leaders may not be informed until it is way too late.
That can be compounded when interdepartmental communication gaps grow. If you can’t access other team’s goals or understand what they are working on regularly, overlapping efforts become more likely and time is lost when coordination is more difficult.
How to make it work: Establish regular follow-up protocol on each meeting and deliver accessible key takeaways. Make it your responsibility to reinforce what’s needed and understand each team member’s role in accomplishing each goal. Keep different departments in regular communication with each other about individual objectives and results without requiring unnecessary meetings.
Also, use essential one-on- one meetings to ensure that each team member understands your communication process and your team’s software and has a clear idea of the necessary objectives. As we’ve mentioned before, every time you meet one-on- one with an employee be consistent, avoid distractions and conclude with next steps to guarantee progress. It’ll save everyone time in the end.
At Jell, we’ve seen extraordinary results occur with simple communication improvements. Establishing the importance of regular updates for your team members gives them the chance to reassess every task they take on to make sure their efforts will achieve the goals they need to accomplish. And with easy access to see what everyone is working on in each department—and on an individual level—everyone quickly becomes more productive and better focused.
In Conclusion:
Communication is measurable – Your team has daily, weekly and quarterly objectives and achieves results you can define. If goals aren’t met, your employees are either performing poorly or you’re not communicating properly. You can determine who the culprit is by looking back on your commitment to a communications process.
Process is essential – Relying on irregular communication leads to disastrous results. Keep yourself accountable to a daily strategy for keeping team members on tasks and regularly assess weekly results. Develop time for one-on- one meetings and make yourself available for questions. Find the right tools to keep everyone on the right track and invested in the same process.
