Establishing Effective Team Communication on a Daily Basis

It’s no secret that the success of a project largely depends on regular and effective team communication—but hitting project milestones isn’t the only outcome of proactive interactions with your team. By communicating productively on a day-to-day basis, you get a chance to discuss and reflect on team culture, company values, processes and policies, and other key workplace factors that can occasionally be neglected when working on tight deadlines. 

Whether you’re interacting with your team in-person or remotely, the ground rules you establish for team communication go a long way in helping your team members bond while respecting individual differences. This, in turn, builds a more successful team that can set and achieve project goals together. As a project manager, it becomes your responsibility to plan and implement different ways to establish effective ways of communicating as a team.  

How to Establish Effective Communication with Your Team

It’s important to remember that you need both strategies and tools to establish effective team communication. You might research and plan solid communication strategies extensively, but unless you are equipped with the right tools, such as a project management platform or a chat application, your efforts may meet some roadblocks. Here are a few ways to facilitate more productive conversations among your teammates:   

Focusing on quality of communication

Scheduling face-to-face meetings is a good communication practice to keep everyone in the loop. Whether it is a group meeting or a one-on-one, it helps you understand the problems your team members are facing and how you can better support them. However, you need to emphasize the quality of communication and ensure that the meetings are fruitful for everyone onboard. Too many meetings can distract your team, take away the focus from the actual work, and impact productivity. 

Streamlining communication with the right tools

One of the best ways to achieve effective team communication is to utilize the right tools. Multiple conversations happening simultaneously and in many different formats can cause unnecessary confusion among your team members. For project-related communications, it is particularly important to keep a track of conversation threads in real-time to avoid the loss of any valuable ideas, links, or resources. 

Whether you are in a physical office space or working remotely, chat applications can help you implement your communication strategy with ease, and having everyone on the team working from a single platform ensures that nothing gets lost in the shuffle.     

Providing a centralized workspace for task-related conversations

A centralized workspace such as a task management platform or a project management platform can help you organize all of your task-related conversations as well as relevant resources and links in one place. This further improves collaboration among the team by transforming work communication into actionable steps that lead to project goals.  

Dedicating specific communication channels for casual conversations

Effective team communication is not only about work-related conversations. Casual banter is equally important to build healthy team dynamics. Anything from watercooler chats, weekly happy hours or trivia nights, and team lunches are a great way to improve overall relationships among team members. In a remote work environment, dedicating specific communication channels for casual conversations and virtual celebrations provides an opportunity for team members to get to know each other on a more personal level.    

While you initiate productive team conversations with the help of various tools and applications, you need to consider the ease and comfort of your team while using these tools. Are they taking too much time to learn how to use a chat application? Is your team feeling stressed out while switching between different tools to communicate? The intent of effective team communication should not be lost in the stress and confusion of using several communication tools at once. This is why you need an integrated project management platform to help you execute your team communication strategy.   

Effective Team Communication with an All-In-One Platform 

Project management tools with robust features such as an internal chat application, video conferencing tool, task management software, and a secure cloud server for storing resources can strengthen your team communication strategy. With the help of such an integrated platform, it is easier for you to track workflow, facilitate collaboration, and establish effective team communication on a day-to-day basis. 

Actions such as delegating tasks to your team, getting updates about the progress of the project, sharing resources, or giving feedback do not necessarily require scheduling calls or meetings or even sending emails. With a project management platform, you can cut down such unproductive conversations by easily assigning tasks to team members, uploading resources under respective task folders, and sharing feedback and updates through comments. You can also receive summarized notifications on everything related to the project. As your team focuses better on the actual work, it can create a more enjoyable workspace for everyone and increase overall productivity.  

With Flow, you can improve team communication while facilitating better team collaboration. Our dynamic project management platform helps your team connect in real-time and enjoy more productive interactions. Sign up for a free trial today!