You can't have positive, productive workplaces without solid team communication. But great communication won't happen by accident - it has to be intentional.
Business success is not possible without well-organized team communication, which lies at the foundation of effective team collaboration.
The way team members communicate determines whether a project will be finished on time and whether the customer will be satisfied with its quality. Moreover, it affects the overall ambiance in the workplace - making it either positive, productive environment, or a toxic, conflicted one.
Effective communication is an art. But, luckily, you can learn it. Below we’ll discuss the importance of team communication in creating a high-performing team, analyze its components, and list the best tips for improving it.
A team is a living organism that depends on the interaction of its cells – team members.
When working individually, all you need to think about is your own skills, knowledge, pace, and results. In a team, however, you are tightly connected to the rest of the people working on the same project. And how you communicate determines whether your collaboration will be productive.
Effective team communication helps create a healthy working environment where people are satisfied with their job and work to their full potential. It’s one of the most important factors in creating a strong team culture where employees are respected and recognized, and therefore, more motivated.
In a team where people communicate effectively and respectfully, work is smooth and coherent – everyone knows their role and tasks, and information flows freely. There is no unnecessary drama and blocks, because people actually talk to each other. They are focused on work, not on conflicts, and show the best results.
Communication is a multi-faceted phenomenon that embraces various aspects of human interaction. There are many ways in which people can convey a message, and they can be used simultaneously, for more effectiveness.
Of course, communication in a team will differ from private communication, since their nature is not the same. Let’s deconstruct team communication into elements and see how exactly team members can share information with each other in the work environment:
This is the most obvious method of communication – by using words. At this level, you have the following options:
However, verbal, real-time communication is not the be-all and end-all.
According to studies, 70 to 93% of in-person communication is non-verbal. To convey information, we produce and perceive signals of our bodies, like facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, gestures, and eye contact.
This, by the way, is something that technological development deprived us of. We send and read instant messages and emails, but our words can often get misinterpreted because we are unable to inflect these messages with the tone and expression that we would do face-to-face.
Consider how hard it is, for instance, to convey sarcasm in an email or Slack message!
We’re all so busy, and writing an email or sending an instant message seems the most convenient way to reach each other that would not interrupt the flow of work.
Written communication can also include reports and feedback documents – basically, any information that is kept and shared in a written form.
The great benefit of written communication is that it can be referred to at any time, replied to asynchronously, double-checked for reference, and so on. Anything that's important, that you may need to refer to in the future, is best written down.
For many people, organizing information visually is their preferred method of communication. To share information, you use pictures or videos, making it brighter and more memorable, – for example, making a PowerPoint presentation or creating a short video on a topic.
No matter what type of communication we listed above you use, it won’t be effective without some skills and psychological knowledge. In this respect, we can mention three main communication skills:
Unfortunately, miscommunication is not a rare occasion in the workplace. Mistakes, duplicated work, and conflicts are often caused by a lack, or even absence, of communication, or simply by its ineffectiveness.
There are different factors that cause poor communication and, as a result, team dysfunctional behavior, so let’s take a look at the most widespread ones:
When it comes to communication, people in a team should not be left to their own devices. Without clear rules, communication can turn into chaos. That’s why team members should know when, how, and with whom they’re supposed to communicate. This is especially important for remote workers, and those who work in asynchronous environment.
Without clarity, people have to finish the overall picture in their head, making things up. That is not helpful.
When people do not feel safe in the workplace, they do not just feel less happy – they are also less productive. They do not share creative ideas. They do not dare correct other people’s mistakes, even if it’s absolutely vital. They prefer staying silent instead of being proactive.
And when they feel safe, on the contrary, they become more active and can even make a successful self-managed team.
That’s the obvious one. People who cannot listen to each other, who treat each other without respect and empathy, and who cannot make a coherent message will not be able to communicate effectively.
So what you can you do if you notice communication isn’t as good as you’d like it to be? The answer is simple – use an antidote to overcome each barrier, by doing the opposite!
Schedule meetings and one-on-ones. Define the means of communication for team members to use – phone, email, messengers, and written reports. Determine how often people must talk to each other and what information needs to be conveyed.
As an option, you could develop a team agreement where you state all the rules your team is expected to follow, including the communication ones.
Also, ensure that communication flows both bottom-up and up-down (from employees to leaders and vice versa,) as well as horizontally (among team members.) If there are many departments, it’s important for them to constantly communicate, too, to avoid silos.
It’s always better to over-communicate than to under-communicate. Do not just assume you’ve been heard – ask questions and, if necessary, repeat your message twice. Try to share information logically and let people clarify things they are not sure about. Break information down into logical chunks and present it coherently.
It would also be very useful to create a team plan so everybody clearly knows what is expected to be done on both the tactical and strategic levels, and a team charter, which includes team goals and values that would direct team members' work.
Create a culture of trust and respect in a team that would strengthen the relationships and help solve conflicts productively, or avoid them altogether. Make sure people do not act from a position of fear, scared to demonstrate their abilities.
This could include various self-development sessions, books and workshops, or even team mindfulness meetings – anything that would help people reflect on their ability to give and accept information, interact with people, and improve their emotional intelligence.
Thanks to technological development, there is a variety of team communication tools that can make communication even easier and more organized. Different tools serve different purposes, so you can find something that would work specifically for your team. For more effectiveness, you could use several tools at the same time.
Here is the list of the most popular tools that can help your team members communicate effectively:
Slack is a perfect tool for instant messaging where you can communicate individually or with a team in real-time. It was created specifically for businesses as an alternative to email, being better organized and more secure. In Slack, you can create, join, and search different chat rooms (channels) that are organized by topic. This way, Slack makes it easy to access information about anything going on in a company.
The number of remote workers continues to grow, and having meetings through screen, not in person, is becoming a must. Zoom is a great video conferencing tool that lets you host meetings, share presentations, and connect with employees and clients from different locations. In Zoom, you can easily set a meeting time, share a link for people to join you, and then just wait till they do – and if they cannot, you can always record the video for people to watch later.
Talking to each other is a necessity in a team, and so is sharing data. While you can still use email for that, this is not the best strategy – files might easily get lost in the inbox. In Dropbox, all your content (documents, videos, images etc) is securely stored in the same place. What is important, unlike email, here there is no file size limit, so you can share them without losing quality.
The very essence of teamwork is that every person works on a part of a project, and with Runn, you can make sure that the work of the whole team is synchronized. By centralizing your resource and workload planning in one place that is easily navigated, Runn gets the whole team on the same page about who is doing what, how busy everyone is, and what the next few months of workload look like.
By having a single source of truth for the team's capacity and availability, communication becomes a lot easier - as everyone is working with the same information.
Besides overcoming communication barriers, there are other things you can do to improve team communication - and, consequently, team efficiency:
Transparency in the workplace means honesty and openness between all the participants of the business process – leaders, managers, employees, customers etc. According to the principle of transparency, information about anything business-related (about internal changes, prices, values, and so on) must be openly and consistently shared. This helps build a healthy corporate culture where people feel respected and motivated to do their best, which leads to a high level of employee engagement.
The concept of conflict scares people by default as it’s associated with anger and frustration; however, conflicts can be a source of productive energy. By suppressing negative emotions and opinions, team members deprive themselves of a chance to find a constructive solution. It’s better to open the floor up to some debate and disagreement at times – just do it with respect and with an open mind.
Without feedback, doing your job feels like going in the dark – you simply don’t know if you’re moving in the right direction. People want to be recognized for what they do. They also need to know if they’re do something wrong. At the same, feedback is not just for team members – leaders and managers should also hear thoughts about their work, otherwise they might stay blissfully ignorant and have no idea about problems in the company.
Too many people dread meetings – and for a good reason. Meetings can be like a huge black hole where all your time goes. Do not hold meetings for the sake of meetings, because you feel like you’re supposed to hold them – invite only those people who need to be present at a specific meeting, set time limits, and develop a productive structure that would help you cover what needs to be covered.
Strong team communication doesn’t come by itself – you need to work on it. So take your time and analyze how your team members interact with each other and then, if necessary, reconsider your communication style and strategy. You will be amazed what results your team can achieve when they communicate effectively!
