Five Tips For More Effective Team Communication

May 28

Communication at work has never been trickier. With distributed teams, remote employees, way too many communication apps to choose from, and of course inter-office dynamics to keep in mind, it’s no wonder 80% of workers feel stress on the job, nearly half say they need help in learning how to manage stress and 42% say their coworkers need such help!

Well, if we at 912 can impart one piece of wisdom upon you, it is that communication is the problem, and EFFECTIVE communication is the solution.

We dedicate a lot of time coaching our clients on communication styles — in fact that is what Level I: Base Camp of our flagship service, The 912 Experience, is all about.

If you find yourself in a position where you have gaps in communication at work, your team is feeling scattered or there have been multiple dropped-balls when it comes to your team’s output, then read on for our five tips for more effective team communication.

Understand Your Team’s Communication Style

The communication style you prefer may not be the style others on your team prefer. And that is ok! As a leader you already know that different styles of communication are always going to be part of working in a cross-functional and multifaceted team. It’s just the way it is.

By truly understanding your team members (and your own) communication styles, you can break down barriers and work more effectively together. As business coaches, we subscribe to the DiSC and Five Behaviors methodologies — again, a core element of Level I: Base Camp at 912.

We recommend completing DiSC assessment for all teams we work with.

What is DiSC, you ask?

Put simply, DiSC is the simplest way to understand what drives you and your team at work. The DiSC Assessment is a short questionnaire that will give you insight into the inner workings of your organization and team.

Once you know your own communication and work style, you can better understand what drives you. Even better, once you know your team’s style, you can better understand how to make great things happen… together.

Using DiSC will help you communicate more effectively with your team, improve employee morale, boost productivity and enable your team to grow.

Contact 912 Today About Communication Assessments and Tools like DiSC

Practice Active Listening

Speaking is only part of communication. Listening is the other part — perhaps even the larger part. Listening is twice as important as speaking and is an absolutely critical skill to acquire and improve in business communication.

What is Active Listening?

Active Listening is a style of listening which involves active participation in a conversation. Someone practicing active listening is not just there being spoken to, they are actively engaging with the presenter or speaker, understanding their words and taking context into account.

An active listener is concentrating fully on the conversation and shows it by reflecting what they hear back to the speaker to ensure mutual understanding. They also will show active listening by asking questions and giving feedback and even using non-verbal cues like nodding or taking notes.

Why is Active Listening Important?

Active listening will have many positive and lasting impacts in your business. By employing active listening in your conversations, you’ll have a better understanding of what is being asked of you which will lead to a better quality product and faster turnaround times. In addition, your colleagues will feel more respected and comfortable working with you.

Share Your “Why”

As author Simon Sinek says, great leaders share their vision (their WHY) before they share what they do or how they do it.

When you share your vision with your team, projects and directives don’t just feel like busy work — they feel like a path to get to a shared goal and desired outcome.

Look, people don’t want to be told what to do. They want to make an impact. Knowing the vision — the WHY — empowers people to do their best work and know the impact it will make.

If you haven’t shared your vision with your team, we recommend you do that. If you don’t have a defined vision, we recommend you start there!

By sharing your vision, you’re showing your team that their work matters!

Pick Your Communication Tools Wisely

Communication at work has never been trickier. Sure, there are a zillion tools available to keep in touch with your team… but no one wants to hear a Slack chime, an Outlook notification, a Teams call, a text message, and a knock on the door all within an hour. Yet, that is precisely what happens in many offices (and home offices) these days. As with most things in life and business, quality will always beat quantity when it comes to communication.

Communication overload causes real issues at work. We recommend choosing a “stack” of communication tools for your organization and sticking to them. You also may find value in identifying what type of communication is best suited for each platform.

For example, if your team uses Slack or Microsoft teams it may be helpful to create specific project-focused channels to use for quick communication with your team. This way your team can be more selective of how and when they look through their notifications and not feel they are “drinking from the fire hose” in an unorganized group chat thread.

A modern team should have a modern communication tech stack that accounts for the following use-cases:

Meetings / Group Video Calls
Quick Chat (IM)
Project/Client-based Work Communication
Project Management
Voice Calls

At the end of the day, if you don’t have the proper communication channels set up for your team paired with guardrails on how and when to use each, you will have trouble keeping organized and communicating effectively.

Know You’ve Got to Give to Get

As a leader one of the most important things you can do is empower your team to get better every day. One way to do this is by giving more. We always say this at 912, but you’ve got to give to get.

Give more time to your team, give more feedback to your team, give more resources to your team. In other words, if you want respect from someone you have to give them respect as well.

Empowering your team to achieve the results they are capable of is one of the great opportunities of modern leadership.

We Can Help!

Empowering your team to leverage their unique strengths and gifts will create a healthy, collaborative culture that allows people to show up as their best every day. We want to help you tap into the power of teamwork, harnessed at the human level.

Jim Laudato