By John Rampton, founder of Palo Alto, California-based Calendar, a company helping your calendar be much more productive.
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Great teams are comprised of individuals with varying talents, skills, expertise, experience and personalities. For such teams, diversity is their greatest strength. But when it comes to communication, diversity can also present some major challenges.
Remote and hybrid work arrangements can make effective communication even more difficult. While some companies are forcing everyone to return to the office full-time, most will continue to allow employees to perform some or all of their work outside the traditional workspace. There are reasons for this other than the still-persisting pandemic.
Companies of all sizes are taking advantage of the opportunity to expand their talent pools by hiring globally, while others are leveraging remote work to reduce their physical footprints. Moreover, Millennials, who now represent the highest percentage of workers, demand such flexibility.
All these factors suggest that where teams work will continue to vary, which means how they communicate is forever changed as well. As a leader, it’s your job to ensure that no matter where your team members are, they’re communicating effectively. Here are three ways you can improve team communication.
1. Choose user-friendly software and make sure everyone uses it.
Team communication in this day and age would be impossible without videoconferencing software like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and the like. They make locations, time zones, ZIP codes and dress codes nearly irrelevant. That means everyone can focus on the topic at hand.
Don’t confuse the informality of team video meetings with a complete absence of structure, though. You still need to employ productive meeting practices, such as having a defined scope for the meeting and an agenda that helps everyone stick to it. Meeting for the sake of meeting is never a good strategy.
You should also be using a team communications app like Slack, Chanty or Google Chat so team members can update progress, ask questions, get answers and keep projects moving forward in real time.
Just remember that merely implementing videoconferencing and communication apps is not enough. It’s your job to see that every member of the team is trained to use them confidently and that everyone participates in the conversations. If some team members never weigh in, talk to them individually to find out why and what you can do to make sure their voices are heard.
2. Don’t neglect in-person meetings.
Once the dust settled on Zoom meetings and Slack chats, it became easy for teams to do their work without ever seeing one another live and in person. Although these are effective ways to communicate remotely, they don’t negate the benefits of gathering in the same physical space from time to time.
How often you pull your team together in one space will vary, based on their current work arrangements. If everyone is working remotely, you may want to gather quarterly or twice a year. If your team members have hybrid schedules, putting them together in the workplace at least once a week could be ideal. You may need to experiment with different intervals to determine what works best.
Once you gather everyone, you’ll notice some of the things that have been missing, like nonverbal clues you couldn’t see in a head-and-shoulders Zoom shot. Team members will interact differently. For example, people can joke around more freely when they aren’t having to unmute their microphones or worry about talking over one another. These types of engagement bring the entire team closer, which leads to greater productivity.
Since in-person meetings will not occur every workday, they should incorporate social time and space. Cater a meal, put breaks in the agenda and, as a leader, spend some time with every member of your team. Such activities will strengthen team bonds when you gather and help maintain them when everybody returns to their own work schedules.
3. Facilitate inter-colleague communication.
Another way to foster team communication—and team performance—is to pair colleagues together to act as accountability partners for each other. Accountability buddies work in any situation where people have established goals.
As anyone knows, it’s easier to make progress toward a goal if you’ve told someone about it. If you let a friend know you want to lose 30 pounds, you’re far more likely to do so for two key reasons. First, you’ve put it out there in the universe. Second, you have someone who will support your efforts to achieve your objective, like offering to go to the gym with you when you’re tempted to go to happy hour instead.
Your first step, then, is to challenge every member of your team to set goals. Your second step is to make sure everyone has an accountability partner to help them accomplish these goals. The partner could be either a peer or a mentor. Partners simply need to be individuals who will monitor each other’s progress, check in with each other regularly to see how things are going and help each other find solutions if they’re hitting barriers to progress.
This isn’t about hand-holding. Effective accountability partners share mutual respect. Their relationships are primarily professional but can be personal as well. Accountability partners communicate regularly, provide assistance when necessary, cheer progress and celebrate wins. This buddy system can build successful individuals and teams.
In closing, everyone understands the critical role effective communication plays in team productivity and success. Working on these three areas is a great way to bolster that, but there’s one more: Don’t forget that, as a leader, you’re the conduit between your team and the C-suite. It’s your job to convey executive-level decisions and put them into context. When all your team members feel they’re in the know, they can approach their work with greater confidence.
