Adequate and proper communication is one of the most crucial factors for a startup’s success. It is often the driving force towards growth, commitment, and innovation. Without it, your startup can suffer from slower growth or utter failure before your business even takes off.
If you want to improve internal communication in your startup, here are the best strategies that you can follow:
1. Get the right technology
Communication is much more efficient and easier to conduct today than in earlier years, where communication technology still had its limitations. Today, some business PBX systems allow employees to communicate efficiently with multiple options. And that does not only include voice calls. There are also video calls, SMS, and conference calls that connect employees at all times, even during a power outage.
Choose the right system for your startup. Aside from a telephone communication system, look for the best application that your employees can use to chat, send files to each other, and collaborate with minimal confusion and misunderstanding. However, avoid using too many communication channels, as this can do more harm than good when it comes to efficient communication.
2. Conduct regular face-to-face meetings
Despite the sophistication of modern communication platforms that are available nowadays, face-to-face meetings are still vital for both communication and employee relations. Schedule a regular meeting, say, a one-and-a-half-hour session every week, to discuss the most critical matters that require face-to-face interaction.
At the same time, these in-person meetings will give your employees the opportunity to bond, which, in turn, helps establish a healthy culture in the workplace.
3. Make documentation a habit
Writing things down is more important than you think, even if you’re confident that everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing. Documentation provides a reference that employees can use when they need to know who is working on what, which tasks should be prioritized, and other crucial matters.
Encourage the habit of documenting things on paper for all employees, whether it’s during a scheduled meeting, an ad hoc meeting, or during a brainstorming session. Aside from serving as a reference, documentation can help settle misunderstandings when someone or something strays from what was agreed on.
4. Align objectives across different departments
For a startup to reach its full potential, everyone should be working towards a common goal. Without proper communication, departments can have objectives that are not in line with each other, which can cause a reduction in productivity or worse, a lot of time wasted.
While each department will have specific objectives of their own, those objectives should lead up to one common goal. For example, if the goal is to reach a certain number of sales for the month, the marketing department must come up with better promotional strategies, the operations department should be working on ways to make workflow more efficient, and so on.
Communication is one of the most common growing pains for startups all over the globe. And if you don’t establish healthy communication habits early on, your business might crash before it even takes off. Thus, as you’re building your startup from the ground up, strive for proper and efficient communication in the workplace, not just on the executive level but within the entire organization as well.
