Ten ways to improve communication in your small business

Communication greatly affects business in different ways. Effective communication is an important necessity that would greatly improve productivity.

Problems might arise between your clients and co-workers in your business; being a good and effective communicator helps you resolve these issues quickly. It also helps to note some unknown errors you weren’t aware of at that moment.

Poor communication can reduce productivity greatly, and conflicts between employees – cause a high turnover of employees, which would greatly affect your business. Although there are other effects, it still develops gradually – a hostile work environment, revenue loss, and loss of clients.

Being a good communicator can help mitigate stress levels and, at the same time, be more productive in executing team-related tasks quickly. It also helps increase productivity among employees as there is clear communication on what should be done and executed. Apart from this, there would be an increase in your clients, which would improve the revenue of your business.

Communication is highly needed as it bridges the gap between your employees and clients and solves some unforeseen circumstances. Tips will be listed to help you improve your communication in your small business.

Table of Contents

1. Listen properly and avoid distractions

To be a good listener is quite easy, and it depends on how you discipline yourself to do it. We often want to multitask everything together but forget there is a high possibility of not giving the person our full attention. However, this might be possible due to the activities you have given your brain to do, limiting your full attention to the person.

There are different ways to tackle this, but it depends on you. While listening, give the person your 100% attention. More so, there’s a high probability of missing out on some important information during the conversation. Don’t multitask while trying to listen to someone; handle one task at a time.

Use verbal prompts to keep the information flowing continuously; this ensures you are following what is being said. Lastly, avoid unnecessary distractions while listening to either your employees or clients.

2. Ask the right questions

Asking the right questions helps you achieve things easily and be productive. To achieve this, you must first of, be a good listener. If you aren’t a good listener, as it unravels some important information that would be useful in the end.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions while your employee is discussing with you. Look closely for some phrases and terms you might not know and ask them questions so you can be clear on them. This helps generate ideas and unravel concepts that would be highly useful to the business.

3. Don’t rely on meetings for information

Meetings are a great place to get people to talk about what is going on. Unfortunately, not everybody will come to the meeting with that mindset as issues are being tabled and individuals start being defensive. This necessarily doesn’t produce good results at the end of the day.

Instead, if it is on a topic, it is better to discuss it in a meeting. There are other ways you could ensure possible results are being produced. One of the ways is to devise a one-one setting to discuss what is going on and the way forward.

4. Combine different communication methods

We often want to keep to one method of communicating with our employees and clients. Sometimes it’s not enough to be very good at communicating with a single method, combining other communication methods is way more effective.

You delegate tasks to your employees through emails which is quite a good practice but still not the best and might not be clear. A voice call and a video meeting would help respond to questions immediately and clarify what should be done on the tasks. Visual interactions are of great help as it helps your employees with what you are trying to portray.

5. Implements the feedback you receive

We might not be soliciting for information we receive, but an active listener solicits for information everywhere. Also, an active listener takes note of feedback received from consumers and use them to improve their product and services.

These are key comments to take note of while they are talking. More importantly, we wouldn’t want to leave that feedback hanging. Implement those feedbacks by analyzing the feedback you have heard and see what changes should be made in your business.

6. Be responsive

Issues and complaints might surely arise, and ignoring them would only develop issues. Showing concerns about the complaints and issues being placed out would make them feel you are disturbed and concerned about it.

Respond immediately or as soon as you can to the complaints and issues, stating it will be handled and look into them immediately. It makes your clients and employees happy.

7. Use a dedicated internal platform

There are technologies dedicated to making workplace productivity effective. You need to know which platform would meet the standard of my business. Various technologies have their special features while also helping to track conversations, files uploaded and shared resources that would be necessary to the business.

There are a plethora of tools that can help you achieve what you need. Slack and Facebook are great examples to be used as dedicated internal platforms.

8. Easy access to resources and documents

Recently hired some personnel to your growing business? Ideally, you should organize and make past resources, documents, and organization missions with statements easily accessible. This plays an important role in how employees interact with your business and helps keep the employees informed and updated.

9. Back up your emails

We often use emails to communicate either with our employees or clients. It is also pertinent to do a backup of your emails.

Even though we have read and collected the information we have received in the mail, it is recommended you do a backup on it. There is a high tendency that there would be a piece of information you would need so desperately.

10. Always fact-check your content

Before sending the final response on any services and products, you would want to do a recheck on it. Fact-checking your content helps make it authentic and helps stop unforeseen situations that may want to occur.

Communication is more than just gathering information. It greatly helps solve issues and get ideas that can boost your business. The tips are greatly helpful in helping you improve your communication as it aids in productivity and establishes a good relationship between your clients and employees.

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