Improved Communication and Collaboration Equal Growth Opportunities

What’s Your Management Style?

Even if you are an introverted entrepreneur, you may have the uncanny ability to form meaningful connections with your employees. However, if you’re constantly micromanaging, your employees don’t have the autonomy to step away from their desks or veer from their given duties. Constantly critiquing every move they make can affect everything from employee engagement and progress to productivity. Micromanaging can even inhibit your employee’s ability to grow in their position. Before you make any changes to your company, evaluate yourself so that you know that you will lead by example.

A Big Burden

Sometimes, the problem is that your employees simply have too much to do, and they can never quite make it to the next step, which might involve other departments. Create an employee survey to find out where they need the most help. It might help to bring in contractors, consultants, or freelancers to handle “busy” tasks. An individual that can help here is a virtual assistant (you can find professional virtual assistants online through sites that offer reviews, costs, and a rundown of their experience). A virtual assistant can return emails, handle customer service, perform research, and perform other administrative duties.

Barriers

It’s true that there are many obstacles when you’re trying to cross collaborate. File sharing and editing is one that many businesses face. You can utilise online programs that allow everyone to work on files, even PDFs. A PDF file converter will reduce the time it takes to get input from other teams, and you can even edit in Word and re-save it as a PDF as many times as necessary to create a final product. Competitiveness, data hoarding, and physical separation are also obstacles noted by UXmatters founder Pabini Gabriel-Petit.

Tech Matters

If you have a remote team, collaboration can be even more difficult. Thankfully, technology is never more than a few clicks away. Invision lists several collaboration technologies, including Slack, Zoom, and GitHub.

Making Time Away

Your employees don’t necessarily have to be friends to communicate well in a professional environment. But, allowing them to have some time together outside of work can certainly help. When your teams have an opportunity to bond, they may feel more comfortable tossing ideas back and forth. To boost morale, consider sponsoring a company-funded retreat. This will also serve as a type of mini-vacation that will help your employees return to work less stressed and ready to tackle even large projects.

When in Doubt, Ask

Even if you already talk to your employees about their burdens, there still may be other issues that inhibit communication between groups and individuals. These might include mismatched personalities or a lack of direction from management. These and similar issues can result in workplace conflicts that can further take a toll on your company’s ability to function as a unit. Don’t be shy about sitting individuals down so that you can get a ground-floor view of issues that may be plaguing your productivity.

Ultimately, your company must be able to collaborate within departments so that you can run more efficiently. Poor efficiency equals stagnancy, so improving communication is imperative at all levels. The simple steps listed above, including changing your PDFs to Word files and dropping your micromanager hat, are a few great places to start your communication overhaul.

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About the Author: Derek Goodman is an entrepreneur. He’d always wanted to make his own future, and he knew growing his own business was the only way to do that. He created his site Inbizability to offer you tips, tricks, and resources so that you realise your business ability and potential now, not later.