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Advice from leading experts, interviews with incredible teams, and ideas for achieving more together.

We’ve all been there—what begins as a minor miscommunication or a simple human error ends up ballooning into a much larger problem, and you wish there had been a better system in place from the get-go. Communication breakdown is often the cause of failure when it comes to project management. In fact, a recent Project Management Institute (PMI) report revealed that inadequate and poor communication is the primary reason for 29% of project failures.
Finding more efficient tools for facilitating and improving team interaction is a key market driver for reducing project inefficiencies. Four out of five survey respondents in the recent PMI report answered that “soft skills, such as communications, leadership, and negotiation, are more important today than they were just five years ago.”
That’s why it’s critical to understand essential internal communication tools—such as chat messaging, task management, commenting and email in order to achieve maximum team productivity and success.
5 Essential Internal Communication Tools
When considering the best internal communication tools that are essential for progress, an all-in-one task and project management platform will easily and seamlessly bring everything together.
Accessible tools for in-house and remote teams should be accessible from any location via a laptop, phone, tablet, or desktop computer, combining preferred apps and programs for simple team integration. Here are the 5 tools your team shouldn’t go without.
1. Internal chat messaging
Individual, team, and project chat built directly into your task management platform allows you to direct message your team and project members without an outside chat program.
Using a chat tool enables you to remain in the loop with project collaborators and followers. You can make use of specific chat channels for subgroups like your writers, editors, or graphic designers who wish to convene at their own “watercooler.”
2. Video conferencing
Video is not generally built into a project management system, however, setting up bi-weekly or weekly video calls is helpful for internal communication. The ability to catch up with coworkers face-to-face and screen share when discussing work is invaluable for team collaboration.
3. Task management and commenting
Creating tasks and assigning them to key team members is only a start. You will also need to incorporate notes related to the project, as well as any important files.
Through threaded comments, you can store all relevant details about a project so all team members can review when they are added, and everything will be located in one central place.
4. Email task creation
Email functionality for task creation should be a quick process and should be as simple as emailing details to a specific email address. This is especially helpful for those who prefer using email more frequently and power users who want to maximize efficiency. A task management platform that allows for multiple task-creation options will help your team adapt the software to their unique workstyles, rather than the other way around.
5. Calendar integration
A system that allows you to integrate different calendars will simplify project management, ease team communication and help set clear expectations around roles and responsibilities.
Integrating your team’s tools goes a long way, and below are some tips for using those tools for meaningful collaboration.
How to Use Tools for Effective Communication
Identify your project and team members and get them involved in the project management and planning in the following ways:
Provide a collaboration app that includes:
- Multiple ways to view project details including simple lists, kanban boards, and timelines.
- Real-time updates with customized notifications for team members to manage projects with ease.
- Tags and bookmarks to filter your tasks by one or more tags and reduce project disarray.
Make project management interactive and fun for your team. It’s no secret that greater team engagement and workflow experiences lead to better team performance.
You can boost positivity among team members when you:
- Create themed chat channels that may be outside the scope of your project work but related to specific hobbies or interests of your team members.
- Start a company book club related to techniques for project management or another common area of interest. Start by:
- Appointing a team leader to manage the project and assign a task to that person, followed by including any folks who may want to pitch in.
- Appointing a team leader to manage the project and assign a task to that person, followed by including any folks who may want to pitch in.
- Appointing a team leader to manage the project and assign a task to that person, followed by including any folks who may want to pitch in.
- Set your team goals via video conferencing and project chat channels enabling team members to get to know one another, as well as work on projects more successfully.
These tips will help you improve team communication. A streamlined project management platform will simplify your project collaboration and provide a central space for all of your tools, chat channels, tasks, and calendars to live.
Integrating Tools via a Collaborative Dashboard
Forbes relayed in a recent report that “strategy is defined by the projects that drive the business,” taking into account a look at the creation, strategy, and implementation of projects.
This study of 163 CEOs, senior strategists, and project management professionals stated that 82% of all project failures can be prevented. So why not determine how to improve your team processes with essential internal communication tools to help prevent project mix-ups?
When a strategy is built around effective team collaboration and emphasizing project productivity through a commonplace for all of your team tools, then you have the right solution for moving forward in complete confidence.
Flow provides a feature-rich, all-in-one productive collaborative tool that helps improve team communication and workflow. Sign up for a free trial today!

Rennick Palley is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Stratos Technologies. Prior to founding Stratos, Rennick worked as a Research Associate at Sanders Capital — which manages over $40 billion in global equities. To date, Stratos Technologies has made 16 investments with an aggregate transaction value of over $250 million into companies like Rezi, Tala, Dave, Compound Finance, and Clearbanc.
In Part 1 of this two-part interview, Rennick and I discuss the war of growth vs. value investing, the concept of reflexivity, and Stratos’ approach to investing across the capital structure in early-stage technology companies. In Part 2, which will be released next week, we zoom way out to get Rennick’s thoughts on everything from the recent boom in SPACs to his interest in DeFi movement and investing in the crypto space.
📻 Listen and subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Breaker, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform.
“I think every stock that has future growth can be value, and every stock that is value can also be growth. They go together.” – Rennick Palley
Chapters in this interview:
- 00:00:16 – How Rennick got his start at investing
- 00:05:43 – What Rennick learned as a Research Associate at Sanders Capital
- 00:19:23 – The story behind Stratos Technologies
- 00:25:26 – George Soros’ concept of Reflexivity (and why it’s applicable today)
- 00:30:02 – Why venture backed technology companies are under-levered
For more, explore the full text transcript of this episode.
Links from the Episode
- Connect with Rennick: LinkedIn | Stratos Technologies
- Sanders Capital
- Lew Sanders
- AllianceBernstein
- Sanford Bernstein
- Gamestop and its stock frenzy
- Puerto Rican sovereign debt
- The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
- Airbnb
- Alex Danco’s writing about SaaS lending
- Benedict Evans’ presentation: The End of the Beginning
- Rezi
- YCombinator
Investment Terms:
- Short position
- Growth investing vs. value investing
- FANG stocks
- Valuation multiple
- Current cash yield
- Debt deals
- Upside
- Reflexivity
- Safe note
- Preferred equity investment
- Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC)
- Series A, B, C funding
- B2B SaaS
- Leveraged Buyout (LBO)
- Tech bubble of the early 2000s
- Life-cycle investing
- Seed Capital
- Credit fund vs. equity fund
- Russell 2000 Index
- Private equity vs. public equity
On Outliers, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they’ve mastered and what they’ve learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today.
Explore all episodes of Outliers, be the first to hear about new episodes, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

After an incredible 2020, the Flow team is back to kick off 2021 with a round-up of new features. Since December, we’ve shipped 4 brand new features and many fixes and improvements. Some of the highlights include inline editing, Flow Solo, and a toggle for task metadata. Read on for all the details!
Check out everything new on the Changelog
Embrace change with Inline Editing
Making updates to tasks and subtasks just got a whole lot easier. The latest updates to inline editing allow you to change task and subtask due dates and assignee with a single click. You can also delete, duplicate and convert subtasks to tasks while viewing their parent task, and paste a list to quickly create subtasks in bulk.

Strike out on your own with Flow Solo
Flow has always been great for teams, but now it’s equally great for individuals. With Flow Solo, we’ve jettisoned all the team-specific functionality while retaining the intuitive design and powerful features of Flow to help enterprising individuals do better work. Read all about it here.

More details at a glance with Task Metadata
With a simple toggle, you can instantly learn more about your tasks. Just click “Show” in the Tasks view and toggle on Task metadata to see info about what team, project and section the task is in, as well as quick options to bookmark or follow tasks you want to keep an eye on.

Notable Improvements
On top of these features, we also spent some time on improvements that users just like you (or maybe it was you) requested. The two we’re proudest of are:
- Onboarding for invitees – We spent some time updating the the onboarding process for users who were invited to existing Flow organizations so it was clearer they were being welcomed into an already well-oiled machine and not building one themselves.
- App Alerts for Failed Uploads – Everyone loves a success message, but we can learn a lot from errors as well. This month the team updated the app alert that lets you know when an attachment fails to upload because it exceeds the 100MB limit. Lesson learned!
A lot of what we build starts as a simple request from Flow users, so if you have a feature you’d love to see us build next, head over to our feedback board to share it. We’re particularly interested in requests for our Public API these days, so if you currently use it (or want to start) let us know how we can make that experience even better.
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January 12, 2021What’s Flow?
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