Communication has always been the cornerstone of human development. It is not rare or uncanny to always see the impact of communication highlighted in every single aspect of life as the world knows it. Such premise serves as the foundation to assert that, given its scope and its nature, communication has always been present in every form of organization and, moreover, it has become the backbone and the heartbeat of any group irrespective of its size or functionality. As a matter of fact, a lot can be said in regard to the effects, both positive and negative, of an organization and its intrinsic relationship with their ability to convey information.
Simply put, the more effective a group of people or an organization communicates the more likely they are to thrive and succeed in the future. Of course, such scenario is much wider than what initially meets the eye: there are a plethora of challenges to be faced, both internally and externally, prior to claiming victory or, to a lesser extent, asserting that the organization is proficient at communicating. Donald Burns has previously highlighted the importance of improving the communicating landscape within organizations in general; and, honestly, in regard to the nature of the aforementioned challenges, if something can be learnt from Mr. Burn’s experience is that these challenges may seem overwhelming at first —especially for those small ventures and small-budget resource-limited startups—. Such businesses, unlike well-established companies, have to make a lot of decisions within little time, and, moreover, they have to decide what they ought to invest in so that they can thrive with excellence.
Be that as it may, and regardless of the previous conditions, every organization, irrespective of size, can improve its communicating juncture and circumstances; therefore, to make it right, it is important to be aware of the three types of communication: internal, informal-external and formal-external.
Internal communication is, perhaps, the easiest to address, for there is a myriad of different internal communication tools that have been already developed for such purposes. The following tools have proven to be used and live up to their promise when it comes to enhancing the communication state within an organization:
Slack
Slack is perhaps one of the most used, widely known, tools; it is truly the first choice when it comes to messaging for teams. It has proven to have entirely changed the way organizations carry out internal communication.
HipChat and Yammer
These are another great systems that organizations seem to be highly fond of. They allow users to communicate fast and, given their nature, to get rid of unnecessary processes commonly related with internal communication. Both have been adopted widely.
Flowdock, Honey and Templace
Flowdock is another great chat and inbox interface especially tailored for teams. Unlike the aforementioned tools, Flowdock has already started to see real and solid growth recently. And, last but no least, Honey and Teamplace serve as an excellent alternative.
So, as mentioned, internal communication is the easy part in terms of acquiring tools for improving it within an organization. The next step would be to decide how the organization should (wants) externally communicate, both formally and informally. The main difference between both aspects is the degree of control that can be developed. In order to provide a much better insight, here is an example: a team-based organizational blog (either running on WordPress, Tumblr or another blogging software) is a formal piece of external communication that owners and organizations in general use to convey information, ranging from simple news to big press releases.
Normally, the way in which the blog is used is less important than the content being featured. Consistently updating it is what is valuable to readers. The technology platform is not as important as the content, which is why the organization ought to pay special attention to this issue.
The informal communication strategy, however, is just as vital as the organization’s ability to harness both qualitative and quantitative networks of its staff and the community around the organization. An organization can certainly not control its staff’s use of today’s social media platforms, but they can certainly provide guidance for their proper usage. Sometimes it is as simple as requesting the staff to add the @insertbusinessnamehere to their profiles so the organization can capitalize on the natural benefits of their social media usage, or adding their current job or position to their profiles on Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These are just a few ways to increase an organization’s social optimization.
The goal of any organization is to have consistency: consistency in terms of both helpful and adequate information so that it can be properly conveyed; however, the reality seems to dictate otherwise: companies do not even have come up with a single strategy to make that happen.
* Featured Image courtesy of Pixabay at Pexels.com
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