This Article comes to you courtesy of Donna Powell

In the previous video tip I talked about external communication – with customers and suppliers. Equally important is how you communicate within your organization, i.e, with your team members or your staff.

Starting Out
When you first start building your business you’ll probably be a one-man (or woman!) band – doing everything yourself – answering the phone, responding to emails, managing the website, writing all the copy, doing the accounts etc etc.  But as you become ever more successful, you’ll employ or contract people to carry out various parts of your business for you.  This means you can stay in your flow and focus on the things you want to.

Why You Need To Communicate With Your Team
As you grow, effective communication between you and the members of your team becomes more and more vital. Why?

  • So everyone in the team gets exactly what they need to know to do their job effectively
  • You can inspire and incentivise your team making sure everyone is heading in the same direction towards your vision
  • To teach and train your team
  • For team connection and bonding

How Do You Communicate With Your Team?
Within Shift, we have employees in Australia and the UK. This means that somewhere in the world there is someone working on the business 24 hours a day.
One of the questions I’ve been asked a lot is how do we manage that? So here’s a peek behind the scenes of what works for us and 4 of the tools we use for effective internal communication:

The 4 Steps To Effective Communication

  1. Email
    We use emails to send tasks to members of the team. This is usually information requiring immediate action or filing for future reference.
  2. Calendars
    We use Google calendars managed through one central place to ensure that everyone can easily access calendar information about Joey and Greg’s schedules. We have one person responsible for updating the calendar and it displays information in two time zones so we can coordinate the UK and Australia easily.
  3. GoToWebinar
    Many of you have probably been on a webinar with Joey using GoToWebinar where she’s delivering content and product information. It’s certainly great for communicating with your clients and it can also be used within your business just as effectively.
    We have a structured weekly team meeting using GoToWebinar. We usually do a training session on the call and record it and store online for staff to access for future reference or if they miss a call.
    Webinars are great to use for meetings or training session where you want the other people on the call to be able to see your screen, or you want to switch between various people’s screens (you can do this by changing the presenter). I’ve used them for everything from meetings with the accountants to other staff.
  4. Skype
    Skype is great for both phone calls and chat where you don’t have long messages to be sent. Email is usually better for messages that someone may need to refer to later as it’s easier to search. But Skype is great if you need something urgently that needs action now.  Skype calls can be also used for meetings, including conference calls and can also be recorded if you have the right software on your computer

Summary
There are many tools out there that you can use in your business to communicate with your team. For us, having a variety of options available allows us to pick the right one for the situation and gives us the flexibility to ensure we can communicate dynamically and stay connected as a team.  
So, why not focus on how effective communication would benefit your business and then see which of these above tools you could implement now.  Good luck!

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