Effective Team Communication Is Crucial for the Success of Businesses

Effective Team Communication Is Crucial for the Success of Businesses
By Sharon Thomson

Every business organization wants its employees to work hard for achievement of its organizational goals. A business may undertake various measures to extract the best out of its employees. But at times the results experienced are below its expectations. This is not because its workers are not working hard enough, but because of their inability to work together as a team. Due to lack of coordination among employees, tasks may get repeated, busy work can happen instead of real work and conflicts can arise among team members. This can take a heavy toll on the productivity of the concerned businesses.

If workers that are part of a team are not motivated enough, not aware of each others’ roles and responsibilities, not sharing ideas and practices with each other, they would not be able to effectively achieve their shared goals. Their productivity will wane. This means that team leaders were unable to communicate to their respective team members what efforts they wanted from each member for the achievement of organizational goals. They were unable to keep them on the same page over important matters. This can be due to leaders not understanding how important team communication is for the team’s as well as organization’s success or they did not know where the communication was lacking. They might not have done enough to streamline communication within their organization.

If this is the approach of team leaders, an organization is likely to witness more failures than achieve any real success. In order to achieve success, not only a team leader should be able to explain things quickly, clearly to his team members, but also members should be able to convey to the leader, other team members about what they feel and think over various common issues. So both entrepreneurs and team leaders need to acknowledge the importance of improved team communication for achieving organizational goals and objectives. They need to work towards maintaining smooth and efficient team communication.

Benefits of Improved Communication Within a Team

If team members are able to communicate well with each other, they can easily share ideas and practices with each other. Consequently their knowledge pool will increase. If they face any problems at work, they can readily bring them to the notice of other team members who can give their valuable suggestions for their redressal. They can better raise their concerns and find out solutions by collaborating with each other. With the help of better team communication, a team leader is able to make members aware of the organizational goals and guide them about what they need to do to achieve them. He can also convey to them the standards in place to which they must conform to for achieving organizational goals. Also he can make clear to them about what are his expectations from them.

A team leader can ask for suggestions, ideas which can revolutionize the way work is done leading to improved productivity. With improved communication, members working together on projects can complete projects on time and thus achieve specific goals and objectives. This enables a business organization to earn financial and other rewards. By completing projects on time, a business can win over trust of its clients who can spread a word about it in their community. Thus it is going to win over new projects in the coming times giving it a chance to earn and grow more.

By communicating well with team members, team leaders can seek members’ input. Due to this members feel worthy and happy over the fact that ideas are being invited from them and being implemented. In this way they are contributing towards organization’s success. Thus they would be keen to work even more harder towards the organization’s cause. Team leaders will also be taking necessary measures for boosting their personal and professional growth.

By communicating with the members and assessing their respective contributions, an organization can make out which members have got spark in them. So it can accordingly groom and promote them as future leaders.

How team members can communicate

In this modern technological age, there are some key methods which organizations are utilizing for streamlining communication. So team members can communicate fast and efficiently.

1. Face to face meetings

   Physical or face-to-face meetings can be employed by entrepreneurs or team leaders for discussing over important matters where they can highlight key points covered under a meeting’s agenda. The benefit of such meetings is that a team leader can instantly seek and get suggestions from team members. If matters under discussion need to be clarified, these can be clarified on the spot. But arranging such meetings can cost businesses huge sums of money for booking flights, venues and hotels. It becomes difficult to arrange and conduct physical meetings involving team members based in different geographical locations.

2. Email

   Emails are being extensively used for team and business communication. Messages sent through email reach the recipients quite fast. But people may respond quite late to email messages received by them and this can delay communication. Also it becomes difficult to organize increased number of emails in inbox. Finding important contextual information fast enough in email threads is not always possible.

3. Chat

   Chat is quite helpful for team members for communicating fast and conveniently at work. They are able to communicate quickly and informally with it as well as share suggestions and ideas. Also team leaders can convey work related instructions rapidly to members. So their productivity improves significantly.

By utilizing these methods, team members can communicate in a much better manner. But for achieving enhanced team collaboration in the organizational context, complete solutions are needed which can enable convenient, accurate and prompt interaction. Apart from enabling easy and speedy communication, such solutions should be able to track members tasks and activities, measure their performance at work and make them accountable for their work. These should allow members to share documents, files and enable them to schedule important tasks, milestones and events. These should allow team leaders to measure the time spent by team members while performing tasks assigned to them. Such solutions should be capable of significantly improving team communication, collaboration and productivity. So members are able to achieve success in the organizational projects and endeavors by working together in a coordinated manner.

A web based project management tools can significantly enhance team communication and collaboration among remotely based team members. So they can work collaboratively for achieving organizational goals and objectives. It will not only boost their productivity but also enable businesses to attain success in their projects, plans by improving their collaboration, organization and management.

Sharon Thomson is a Business manager of ProofHub,a SAAS based project management software that helps to manage, discuss and communicate with your team members and clients from anywhere and anytime. This online collaboration tool offers a centralized place providing features like to-do’s, milestones, timesheets, discussions, file sharing, online proofing, casper mode and inbuilt browser chat. ProofHub is the only project management software that provides In-built browser chat feature, Casper-Mode (Hidden Mode) and Proofing Tool.