How to Improve Team Communication: 4 Tips and Tricks

Effective communication is key to building a successful team. If you can communicate better with your teammates and help them understand their roles and tasks, it can significantly improve everyone’s overall productivity. Valuable communication at work is not only about specific projects or tasks, though. Casual conversations are equally important for helping team members grow a sense of connection. When team members have stronger relationships, they are more likely to take ownership of their work to ensure projects are successful. This is the main reason why managers often contemplate the best strategies for team building and communication. 

4 Key Ways To Improve Team Communication

Whether your team is sharing the same office space or working remotely, it should be your top priority to build and maintain strong working and personal connections among teammates. Though in-person team communication can sometimes be easier than virtual communication, the need to facilitate meaningful conversations remains the same in both environments. The following are some of the best ways to improve team communication:    

1. Build a culture of transparent and proactive communication

Transparent and open communication makes everyone on the team feel more involved, which leads to better team collaboration. A significant part of team communication lies in exercising candor, avoiding misunderstandings, and respecting individual differences. Actively communicating shared values and developing a cooperative culture encourages your team members to proactively exchange ideas and help each other achieve project goals successfully.   

2. Set clear expectations around roles and responsibilities

Transparent communication about a project’s objectives is as important as setting expectations around the roles and responsibilities of the team members involved. With the help of a task management tool, you can share timelines and assign task due dates to keep everyone in the loop. Once your team understands the priority of the tasks and the respective deadlines, it becomes easier to streamline the workflow.      

3. Offer solid tools for conversations

This is one of the most crucial aspects of improving team communication. Without the right communication tools, your team members can feel isolated or disconnected, especially if they are working remotely. Internal chat tools help organize work-related conversations—facilitating spontaneous interactions, and saving critical information and ideas exchanged among team members in chat histories. Separate chat channels connect you one-on-one with team members as well as initiate casual group conversations.    

4. Create opportunities for team bonding

Setting aside time for non-work related events helps your team remain engaged and motivated. Recognizing and appreciating a fellow teammate’s contribution to the project, celebrating personal achievements, and scheduling weekly happy hours or shared lunches go a long way in building strong team dynamics and increasing productivity. 

Improving team communication with these tricks and tips can be aided significantly with the help of the right collaboration tool. In a rush to build a successful team, managers often make the mistake of choosing a random platform with features that serve their immediate requirements. Unfortunately, testing these platforms only adds to confusion and stress that impacts the entire team. 

Successful teams are not built overnight. As your team grows and projects change, your preferences for different features in your task management solution may change too. And that is why you need an all-in-one platform with flexible features that can grow and change with your team’s needs.     

How To Improve Team Communication with an Integrated Platform

When it comes to choosing a particular platform for team communication, it is important to understand your team’s preferences. It’s very common for teams to prefer certain chat applications or tools over others mainly due to their ease of use. Your team members might not feel comfortable using a new tool and can end up switching between different platforms to communicate and collaborate. This distraction takes away the focus from work, impacting the flow of work.

A significant part of improving team communication lies in streamlining your workflow and bringing your team together. Here are some key features you should look for before committing to a communication tool:

• An all-in-one platform: Choose a platform that lets you integrate the apps that your team already uses and loves. 
• Organized team conversations: With the right chat tool, you don’t need to feel lost between different conversation threads. Instead, you can organize your team’s conversations into topics or under respective tasks. 
• Separate chat channels: Separate chat channels for group conversations, direct messages, and project or company-wide updates help align and improve team communication without unnecessary confusion.
• Conversation-inspired tasks: Work-related chats can become more productive by sharing links, images, files, and creating tasks directly in chats. 

An integrated platform with these key features can improve team communication, ease collaboration, increase productivity, and help your team reach its full potential.    

With Flow, you can enjoy all of these features plus powerful, built-in communication tools like chat that are simple and easy to use. To learn more about how to improve team communication through our platform, start your free trial today.