Symptom: Communication comes up as one of the main reasons why a small business is not working well together.
“We need better communication.”
“The departments are siloed, and it’s holding us back.”
“More cross-departmental communication would be beneficial.”
Significance: Small businesses can only have an edge over the big guys if they’re collaborating efficiently.
Treating Symptom: Schedule more meetings and include everyone on more emails. Though that could help treat the symptom, it could also have unintended side effects. You reduce the amount of time spent on the business, create email fatigue and confusion and leave staff frustrated that they have more noise and less time to do what they need to do.
Root Cause: You lack a communication strategy and probably a communication platform that supports it and saves time. Hint: Email will not work for this.
Solution: Write down a communication plan that includes a communication platform deployed with a strategy.
Here’s How:
- Interview your staff and department heads to identify the top 25 topics your company communicates the most around. Examples include: clients, partners, vendors, departments, locations.
- Select the top 5 that you will use to accelerate the adoption of a new or existing communication platform.
- Select your communication platform.
- Deploy the top 5 topics and announce to staff in all current communication platforms (i.e., email, newsletter, physical meetings).
- Use your recognition/reward system to kickstart the new communication strategy.
- Keep adding the rest of the topics, and further supporting with your recognition/reward system.
- Evaluate your communication strategy and adoption quarterly, preferably during your leadership team quarterly planning.
We offer an Engagement Alignment Plan (EAP) that can help get you where you need to be.
