5 Amazing Business Communication Strategies to Connect Better With Your Team
Today, the most crucial yet underrated factor responsible for a team’s success in the workplace is “effective communication.”
Communicating effectively is more than just putting across your ideas. You need to pay attention to certain key aspects, such as your tone, body language, and much more.
It may come as a surprise, but communication holds the ultimate power to either make or break a project.
As per the latest statistics, 86% of executives and employees cite ineffective communication or lack of collaboration for workplace failures.
Needless to say, communication forms an essential part of any business strategy. Skillful communication is what makes it easy for the members of a team to effectively coordinate with one another.
If you are looking for some easy-to-implement strategies for both you and your team members to take your conversations to the next level and make them more rewarding, then you are at the right place.
In this post, we’ll discuss some amazing business communication strategies that will help you connect better with your team. But before that, we will address some common questions.
Let’s dive right in:
What Is a Business Communication Strategy?
Let’s understand the definition of a business communication strategy this way:
What is communication?
It can be thought of as an activity involving the exchange of information.
Now, how this information flow takes place is determined by the business communication strategy you put in place.
What Does It Take To Develop a Solid Communication Strategy?
Effective communication ensures you achieve your project objectives and goals. And for this, you need to implement a solid business communication strategy. But before we discuss the types of effective business communication strategies, let’s discuss what it takes to develop such a strategy. Take a look:
1. The Strategy Should Serve a Goal
You should create the strategy in such a way that it serves an organization or a business goal.
2. Set Clear Objectives
Whether it’s an organizational goal or a marketing campaign, setting clear communication objectives will elevate your strategy. They will lead to quality communication among your team members.
3. Take Help of Other People
While creating your strategy, involve as many people as you can. When your team members give their input on how to create a communication strategy, it can result in creating a more effective one.
4. Assess, Assess, and Assess
Check what works and what doesn’t after you implement your strategy. This will help you tweak the strategy as per the requirements. Even if you find success with your strategy, keep evaluating, enhancing, and refining it.
What Are the 5 Types of Communication Strategies?
We all know that members of a team need to communicate with one another every now and then. Good communication is key in facilitating the entire process of information-sharing. It even further deepens the bond with your team members. Take a look at the most effective types of business communication strategies you can put in place so that you and your team communicate and coordinate in a productive manner:
1. Do Some Preparation Beforehand
When you have to share some valuable information with your teammates, ensure you prepare beforehand. Make a list of every important point that needs to be discussed. You don’t want any important information to get skipped, do you? So, make it a point to meticulously follow this strategy.
Also, when you present some important information to your team members, ensure you do so in an engaging, harmonious, and interesting manner.
2. Encourage One-To-One Communication
Encouraging one-to-one communication is one of the most effective business communication strategies. It helps you know and understand your teammates better. Also, when you connect with them on a personal level, you develop a bond with them. You even learn to examine their body language.
Do you know what’s the best part about communicating one-to-one with a team member? You get to know the communication method they are most comfortable with.
Tip: Having one-to-one communication is best if you want to talk in private with someone or need to get some suggestions on a matter from only one person in your team.
3. Ask For Feedback
As communication is a two-way process, you need to ensure that there is a bidirectional information flow. What we mean to say is, whenever you share some information with your team, ensure you promote feedback during the communication session. When you ask for feedback, you enhance the overall effectiveness of your communication. It is one of the proven strategies for effective communication. A common example of feedback includes asking questions at the end of the presentation.
Feedback can also be in the form of suggestions, doubts, or thoughts after a message has been put across.
Note: Use an online form builder software to create feedback forms that you can share with your team.
4. Note Down the Important Points of a Discussion
When you communicate with your team, particularly during a meeting or a discussion, you may witness a strong flow of ideas and information. Now, if you don’t jot down all the important points that are being verbally shared in the discussion, you may lose parts of the conversation that can bring productive results. Hence, a great practice is to make a list of all the valuable points in a discussion.
5. Throw in Some Humour!
A communication session that is too serious or stressful can put your team members in a not-so-positive state of mind. It can also negatively impact how they perceive the information you share.
Additionally, a conversation that becomes too serious can make the team members want the meeting to end soon, hampering the information flow in the session.
But then, what to do when the information you need to share is going to be intense for your team members?
Well, we recommend that you start with a joke. This can create a relaxed atmosphere at the start of the session and can then work to retain the interest of your team members for the rest of the conversation.
How to Avoid Ineffective Communication?
It’s important to know about some common communication mistakes that can result in ineffective communication. Before you implement the strategies to improve communication, ensure you are not committing these communication mistakes:
- Not paying attention to the tone: The tone of your voice matters a lot when you are verbally communicating. Ensure your tone is educating, confident, and gentle. Never communicate in an annoying or harsh tone, as it can negatively impact your listeners.
- Holding back your thoughts: Share your ideas and thoughts so that your requests and issues get noticed. Communicating what’s on your mind is important so that a conversation doesn’t reach a dead end.
- Getting distracted: For a successful conversation, paying attention is paramount. You need to keep distractions at bay.
- Not listening carefully: Communication is not only about transmitting information. You also need to listen and receive the information. So, in order to understand things, carefully listen to others and extract the correct information from a conversation.
Conclusion
Teams communicating through video conferences, texts, face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and email is a common scenario in any organization. Hence, it’s safe to say that good communication skills are vital for becoming successful in a workplace. Ensure you practice different types of business communication strategies to effectively communicate with your team members. The strategies we discussed will make your team conversations both fun and rewarding. They will also help bring productive results in the end.
Before you implement these strategies, ensure you don’t disrupt the overall communication flow by committing common communication mistakes. These mistakes could include not paying attention to the tone of your voice or easily getting distracted.
