Step Up Your Productivity Using Business Communication Tools

It’s a glorious time to be working in a business today. There are many apps and services available, computing devices have never been more powerful, and super-fast internet is quickly becoming available around the developed world.

It’s now easier than ever to work from home, the coffee shop, the office, or even the beach. It’s now easier than ever to work extremely long hours as well. There is now a lack of separation between work and personal lives that pushes employees to be available 24/7 and leads to burnout.

The actual problem is that most people struggle to manage their time between meetings, email, and long phone calls. What’s needed is a reorganization of how employees spend their time, collaborate with each other, and how businesses measure success. Most people put value on staying busy, but that’s working towards a solution that isn’t going to help them meet their goals. Time is the only thing that money can’t buy more of, so it’s critical to use every minute with maximum efficiency.

What Do Business Communication Problems Look Like in Your Office?

Ineffective and Wasteful Meetings

Meetings are the de facto way that most organizations communicate with each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re a remote team or an in-office team. In reality, meetings are incredibly time-consuming. If you consider the employee costs of 10+ people in a 1-hour meeting, it’s a costly process.

Meetings can often lack a clear plan, a real purpose, and end without any action items tracked for follow-up. Without any real purpose, meetings may not be productive. They’re keeping every participant from doing something else that might be more important and help the company drive their projects forward.

A lot of meetings happen regularly, so they lack any real point for happening. Because there isn’t a real point for them being held, they lack a clear focus, so conversations end up rambling on without accomplishing much. Most middle managers believe that part of their job is to report back on what their team is working on, but in reality, constant meetings that serve no prudent purpose are slowing their team down.

Meetings might seem like the best way to collaborate and move projects forward, but one has to ask: are meetings the best business communication solutions? Is there a better way to collaborate? Meetings aren’t the best way to communicate effectively in many situations. Only one person can share at a time, and it’s hard to keep everyone engaged during a long conversation.

Because meetings can drift off-topic, they can easily run into other meetings, so people have to leave before the first meeting has even concluded. Because of this, they end up missing the final moments of the meeting to discuss any action items or key responsibilities.

A key problem with most company meetings is the lack of documentation of what transpired during the meeting. If someone is not able to make the meeting, if action items aren’t documented, then others in the company won’t be in the loop of what was discussed.

The final aspect of meetings that most people aren’t clear on what was discussed or decided, so additional follow-up is often needed. As deadlines are not set with clear action items, more time will be wasted. A meeting that should have been an email will eventually lead to even more emails and follow-ups.

Unneeded Emails

Meetings aren’t the only problem when it comes to business communication, though. They are just the start. Another key problem that businesses face with their communication are emails that lack focus, ramble, and do not indicate required actions. Even though sending an email is free, an overload of them can break focus, cause strife, create confusion, and ultimately be a drain on company resources.

For instance, if you send unneeded emails to people that aren’t involved in a project, it can surface opinions that can potentially derail projects or cause missed deadlines. The saying “too many cooks in the kitchen” applies well here.

Before you send an email, stop and think about

1. If it’s necessary to send
2. What’s the goal of sending it
3. Who needs to receive it

Before sending the message, work through those three steps in order to properly value people’s time.

Projects Without Clear Actions

Another way that businesses create communication problems is by starting projects without clear actions. When a team starts a project, all steps must be scoped clearly, a DRI (directly responsible individual) must be assigned, and clear communication of what success means at each milestone must be laid out.

Remote Collaboration

When the toolset of a company is built around in-office communication, but it has a mixture of in-office, remote, and hybrid employees – communication suffers. Tools must be designed from the ground up to streamline communication when working remotely. One of the biggest problems with remote collaboration is with tool sprawl – meaning people have too many tools to use to do their work.

A tool like Spike that was built for remote collaboration that allows businesses to streamline their tools into a single workflow solves tool sprawl issues. Instead of one app for email, one for team chat, another for document sharing, and yet another for video meetings – Spike combines them into a single application to avoid the need to switch apps.

Video Meetings

With COVID-19, video meetings went from a “nice to have” to “must have.” Video meeting software and solutions have historically been clunky, cumbersome, and hard to use. When the need came for new video meeting solutions that met the needs of remote workers – companies stepped up and provided solutions. Spike’s Video Meetings was one particular solution that many companies implemented. Spike’s video conferencing solution was used for a handful of reasons:

1. No account needed
2. No downloads/plugins – all in the web
3. Includes built-in screen sharing for remote collaboration

What are Business Communication Solutions?

When businesses take a step back and look at how they manage employee productivity, they’ll often find that many of the existing solutions and methods they employ are actually not that effective and aren’t conducive to helping them meet their goals.

By rethinking how you communicate as an organization, you’ll create an environment where employees are happier, spend less sifting through materials, and still get their work done. By avoiding wasteful meetings, you’ll spend time doing the things you’re supposed to be doing instead of merely talking about them.

Business communication solutions are designed to help facilitate collaboration between an organization. They’re designed to house communication, collaboration tools, file-sharing, and more. Some solutions try to eliminate email, while others streamline with other tools.

Some business communication solutions work well on all devices (mobile, tablet, web, etc.), while others are mainly designed to be used in a web browser. Regardless of your chosen solution, it’s important to find one that works for your business. Let’s look into what features your business will need when it comes to communicating solutions.

What Communication Solution Features Does Your Business Need?

Business Communication Solutions Summary

The status quo in business communications will only lead to more countless meetings, more follow-ups, more missed deadlines, and more frustration. Take a step back from all of that and look to move to a culture where meetings are the exception for project management instead of the default.

Spike is purpose-built to replace meetings, keep everyone in the loop on tasks and projects all the while eliminating employee burnout and giving people more time to disconnect from technology.

Spike combines all of your tools into a single digital workspace so it becomes the best business communication solution for your team.

By combining email, chat, video calls, audio calls, voice messages, collaborative Notes, Tasks/To-Dos into a single (but powerful) workspace, your team will avoid meetings, meet project deadlines, and still enjoy less stress and more free time.

Work is hard enough with the right tools. Without the right tools, it can be nearly impossible. Download Spike today to get your team started.