Good Communication is the backbone of our lives, whether it is your work or relationships, isn’t it?
It is considered as the oxygen of a distributed company.
Communication seems to be natural to us in our offices, but overnight this pandemic has turned things around. Something that was natural is now a crucial challenge for the companies. Communication has topped in the list of challenges for companies working remotely.
A study by Nextiva says that 83% of companies has lost a customer, missed a major deadline, or terminated an employee due to a communication issue in 2019.
It’s a challenge to communicate when you can’t see the people around you, isn’t it?
Definitely!
But we, the BIMEX team love challenges. Therefore, our team has come up with 3 communication strategies that helped us to skyrocket through the clouds of challenges while working remotely.
Here are the 3 Proven Communication Strategies that we use to overcome the biggest communication challenges:
1. Hold Virtual Meetings Monthly and Weekly
To ensure the direction of the work, it’s important to take up regular team meetings. Regular meetings are a great way to remove the barrier of miscommunication. It also helps everyone to be aligned in the same direction.
Video conferencing software such as Google Meet, Skype, and Zoom are usually used to host these virtual meetups.
Monthly team meetups are crucial to maintain the alignment of the work. It’s the perfect opportunity to keep an eye on the progress of the company towards the annual goals and vision. Key challenges being faced, new ideas, changes in strategies, targets, and objectives are the major things to be discussed in the monthly meetings.
Weekly meetings are the perfect way to track the regular progress of the ongoing projects. The main objective of these meetings is to decide the priorities and align weekly work to achieve each monthly goals. Day to day activities and progress of the past week can be tracked and the plans for the upcoming week is done during this meeting.
2. Use a Virtual Collaborative Software
What if someone from your team has come up with a unique idea that needs to be discussed, is there any way to share it? Team meetings won’t be the best way to do that, as coming up with new ideas and solutions are an everyday activity.
Therefore, building a virtual meetup space on the collaboration software is the best solution. These software’s are a great way to recreate the office culture while working from home. The collaborative software platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoho Cliq and many more can be an ideal tool to communicate ideas, queries, and even documents. And thanks to the instant messaging services for cutting down the extra gossip time on call.
3. Create an Online Office Culture
When everyone is working from home, it’s important to feel connected with your team. Therefore, building an online culture is crucial, to maintain the feeling of oneness amongst the employees.
Hosting virtual events like birthday parties, small success celebrations, best team awards etc. can benefit the team to stay motivated and work proactively, and especially to feel connected with their team members. When employees are motivated and happy, communication automatically becomes better. Building different channels for water-cooler gossips is important to build the office culture, as it is the foremost thing most the team members might be missing.
Here are 3 Bonus Tips to Improve Remote Working and Communication
- Do not Micromanage every hour to check the progress, as it is often irritating and builds a constant pressure on the team members. It will make them avoid communication to focus on work.
- Using Calendars and Project management software are particularly important to maintain the workflow during remote working. When everyone is aware of the deadlines and work accordingly, communication will automatically become better.
- Set the right expectation with the team. As remote working is not familiar to everyone, it is important to give them adequate time for a particle task.
According to the Global Workplace Analytics more than 4 million people are working from home at least half the time. Therefore, overcoming the challenges of communication is the first thing every organization needs to focus on. The above strategies have been fruitful to us and helped us to achieve great productivity results.
Did we miss anything? We would love to know your strategies to overcome this challenge?
