Strong employee communication is the foundation of a good working environment and a successful business. They enable colleagues to know exactly what is going on, to realise each other’s strengths, and respond to changes in their environment - all things that are essential for businesses to grow. 

Having great employee communication levels with your team is hugely desirable and there are many ways in which you can constantly improve these - both in the tips that you and your colleagues use and the software tools you utilize. Here are the main reasons to remember why excellent communication is so important, tips to improve your communication levels and which tools can help you even further.

Why is good employee communication so important?

Having good employee communication throughout your company enables you to succeed in every other aspect of your business. It can improve your workflow by eradicating duplication of tasks and making you efficient. This in turn can be cost effective for the business as less mistakes are made and work is completed faster. Alternatively you can look at the impact of having poor employee communication in your business and can see that this can hugely hold you back in terms of your potential.

As the importance of good employee communication cannot be underestimated, here are some tips that you can adopt with your employees for effective communication throughout your business.

Tips for effective employee communication

Communicate clearly

Being clear in your employee communication saves time and removes the chance for misunderstandings with your employees. Saying directly what you want can also help to build better relationships with your colleagues too as knowing that there is no pretence between workers and you are then free to get down to getting the work done sooner.

Adapt your communication to your own employees

You might often hear of the success stories of other large businesses with their communication style, but what works for one company may not work for another. You should play to your own employees strengths and make sure to take note of the best ways in which they like to communicate with you. 

Blindly adopting the processes of others when they aren’t right for your business will end up negatively affecting your company, so if you know that your team prefers morning meetings and chat messages throughout the rest of day, you’ll likely get more out of your team by acknowledging their preferences.

Constantly communicate

Regular communication is key for the resulting work to be effective. In fact, inconsistent communications can leave colleagues unsure of exactly what is happening and arguably an even bigger waste of time than not communicating at all.

Frequently giving your teammates updates on where you are helps people feel included in processes and valued in their contributions. Regularly communicating also gives you the opportunity to revise your plans and improve your work as a result.

Tools that enable good employee communication

Having good communication practices that you and your employees use are a great way to help your productivity, but utilizing the best technology can help improve your communication even more. A client portal is an online workspace where colleagues can collaborate together on projects and enabling good communication is at the heart of the service it offers. Here are some additional technology tools that can boost your employee communication levels even further. 

Chat functions

Having a chat feature across your online working space is essential for keeping good levels of employee communication. Especially if working in an online client portal, it is much easier if you can use a messenger tool within your platform to quickly talk to your team members rather than having to use a separate chat service. 

Having a chat feature that is available in several formats across the platform you use is also incredibly useful for the different ways in which you’ll want to communicate with colleagues. For example, on Clinked’s client platform, you can chat to your teammates instantly through our direct messaging and group chat feature. There is also the discussion board feature to talk through topics broadly, and unique features such as the reach out tool to send messages across multiple different groups when wanting to reach lots of your clients at once.

Project management features

When working together with your colleagues on projects, good communication is important for ensuring the work is carried out effectively. Not only do you need to be constantly speaking to one another to ensure you are on the right page, but project management tools can assist you even further by reminding you of your responsibilities and tracking progress made on tasks.

Within Clinked’s client portal there are several project management tools. Tasks can be managed through the tasks feature, where responsibilities can be assigned to different members of the platform and there is also the ability to comment on individual tasks and mark its priority and percentage completed. Users of the portal will also have access to their activity stream, which is a live feed that shows what actions your members have been taking on the platform for you.

External portal notification tools

While working within a central place like a client portal can be great for keeping your employee communication levels strong, sometimes you will find yourself needing to use external tools, such as email and mobile apps. But with a platform like Clinked, these can still be connected to your portal and you can benefit from its great communication tools even when you are away from it.

Email notifications can be set up for users to give them updates from the Clinked portal. These can also be customized to match your company branding and even be sent from a custom email domain name. Clinked also benefits from its own white label mobile app, meaning your chat features and all of the tools available on Clinked are accessible to enable great employee communication wherever your colleagues are.

We hope this has exemplified the importance of great employee communication in your workplaces and how these tips and tools can help you achieve this. If you would like to try out the Clinked platform for yourself to see how this can improve your company’s employee communication levels, you can start a free 10-day trial today!