Verbalist

What exactly is Business Communication?

Information exchange in the workplace and with outside is referred to as business communication. To achieve organisational goals, managers and employees must interact effectively in the workplace. Its goal is to make organisational procedures better and cut down on mistakes. To accomplish excellent corporate communication, it’s critical to improve on both your communication abilities and processes.

Business communication is significant since it helps with:

1. Presentations/Meetings
2. Pitching new ideas
3. Decision-Making and Execution
4. Sales
5. Feedback to both employees and consumers

Why should you know about Business Communication?

Your skill in communication, coupled with the communication structure of your employer, is the cornerstone for every key decision taken in your team/for the entire organisation. This might involve everything from technical communication to administrative communication. And if communication breaks down, the foundational components of the business might collapse.

What happens if the communication channel between teams is weak?

Take for example- you are working in team A and there is a team B that you’re working alongside with. Team B is your key stakeholder. Both the teams are working together to deliver a key project for the organisation. What is happening now is that Team B is giving you fresh set of deliverables to work on. These are significant for the overall project to be successful. This information was supposed to be given to you by your direct counterpart, but somehow they missed to tell you. What happens after this?

You get to know about the new deliverables much later than you should, and this delays the entire project.

How do you think business communication helps with this situation? Could Team B have solved this issue by building a clear communication strategy? Let’s discuss how to approach this strategy of communication while in business.

This is important for anyone who is a team lead, a project leader, or even simply a team member who deals with execution during most of their work hours.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s consider you to be the team lead. Here are 5 Steps you can take to set up your Business Communication Strategy:

Create objectives- Why should you communicate with someone?:

In our example, why should Team B communicate with Team A?

Just so that Team A is aligned with what the company is supposed to achieve.

The following may be some other reasons for introspecting your team’s strength in communication:

• Either low or high staff turnover
• Rapid expansion that causes knowledge to get lost
• owing to distant employment, there is a lack of information transparency

Determine the main members in your team and how they interact with one another.

Consider your team’s structure and all the other teams that contribute to a certain project. From here, take into account the job responsibilities they fulfil and the outcomes anticipated of them. Draw out a plan for how they should communicate to accomplish their tasks. Give yourself plenty of time because this might be a big undertaking depending on the size of your team and the number of stakeholders.

Define communication techniques:

Next, decide on communication channels that support both your communication objectives and internal interactions among your team members. Review the list of communication channels we reviewed previously, and be sure to include those that are particular to your business:

• Online communication
• telephone conferences
• Visual conferences
• meets in person
• Reports and government paperwork
• Presentations
• Discussion forums and FAQs
• Surveys
• tasks for managing customers

Which of these are necessary for your team to achieve its objectives? Which ones should be simplified because they run the danger of adding too many tools? Be truthful to yourself about the needs you have.

Pick the appropriate tools.

Outlook or Gmail. Google Drive or Dropbox. Slack or Nextiva Chat. The conflicts persist, but only you and your employees can decide which path to take.

Document your process:

Finally, keep a record of everything you do throughout this setup and add it to a shared document that is accessible to the whole team. This allows each member to decide on the appropriate course of action for their particular circumstance by consulting a communication strategy that has been carefully designed. Additionally, the process will make it simple for newly hired personnel to understand all the resources and ideal communication techniques. To remind yourself and your team to review the document once every three months, you may set up an automated calendar reminder. By doing so, you may check to see if the strategy is still effective and, if not, revise it.

Other issues that efficient Business Communication can solve:

1. Email overload and lack of clarity and productivity in work: People in many organisations are simply overloaded by the volume of texts they get each day. We frequently lose track of important details or altogether miss them. Companies may eliminate digital distractions and make room for ideas and thought by putting in place a structure for corporate communication.
2. Low staff engagement and employee turnover: Your company’s capacity to service consumers is placed at risk if you lose the best employees. It is also pricey. Although losing an employee might cost up to double that person’s yearly pay, businesses that communicate well are 50% more likely to report turnover rates that are lower than the industry average.
3. Unsatisfactory client service: When it comes to customer service, bad communication in a company results in two things. First, staff members in customer-facing positions won’t have the knowledge they require. Second, unhappy consumers will be made aware of poor employee morale. According to one study, raising staff attitudes has a positive effect on customer satisfaction, which in turn raises income.

Non-verbal business communication:

Your tone in an email to your facial expressions are all examples of nonverbal communication. Almost all of our corporate communication involves being non-verbal since it occurs asynchronously—that is, whenever there isn’t a 1:1, face-to-face meeting—via email, project management task boards, or chats. As a result, it’s crucial to practise non-verbal communication as well.

Hot tip: read anything aloud before hitting that “send” button. This is a helpful gut check to see how well others receive your message.

Liked the blog? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Take a look at our other blogs on listening and speaking here.