Top Tips for Effective Communication

No matter how large a company is, team communication is an important part of working efficiently. Without clear communication, confusion and chaos are common. It is also important that all members of the team are always up to date and have the feeling that they are always informed about changes or problems. Good team communication promotes the productivity of the employees, whether in the office or at home.

To prevent projects from getting bogged down and conflicts from arising, here are a few tips to improve team communication and help your team work more efficiently.

1. Use the Right Tools

There are a lot of software and tools that promise the best collaboration. It is important to choose tools that the team can work well with. For example tools that allow audio and video conferencing are helpful. And also tools for project management, such as Jira, also help the team to maintain an overview. You can find tools for agile project management on our blogpost: 4 agile project management tools.

2. Communicate Clear Expectations

As a project manager, the goals and the process should be formulated and communicated to the team at the beginning of the project. This way everyone in the team knows what their tasks and responsibilities are. Everyone on the team should know what meetings are coming up and what they need to know about.

3. Conduct Regular Team Meetings

Whether virtual or in-person, you should schedule regular team meetings. This allows the team to improve communication with each other and trust. Another way to strengthen the team spirit is talking about hobbies or personal things. This can also improve teamwork.
For example, in addition to team events, we have a daily-standup every day. This is a 15-minute update meeting in which every team member participates. There we discuss what’s coming up for the day and if there are any issues with various tasks.

4. Encourage Transparency and Honesty

The team should feel that the stakeholder and project manager accept the feedback they give. To achieve this, you can introduce various meeting formats in the team can discuss projects and goals with supervisors.

Final Thoughts

With a few principles and tools, you can easily improve the team communication. To make the selection easier, it helps to have a look at the individual tools beforehand. And also the experiences of team members can help you to find the right communication strategy.