The competition in business environments across the world is becoming fiercer by the hour, so every aspect of your operations matters more than ever. Before focusing on anything else, you should lay the foundations for strong business communication. And while there are plenty of tools available, the most essential among them are the following:
Social intranet software
Regardless of industry or size, every organization goes through a period where its internal communications are obviously failing. You should never take your internal communications for granted no matter how safe you think you are from these issues. Some symptoms you have to watch out for include:
- Excessive paperwork
- Documents going missing or getting buried in emails
- Isolated departments and employees
- Employees having difficulty staying up-to-date with company announcements and news
- Lack of a standardized orientation policy for new employees and interns
A social intranet software can address these symptoms. It serves as a central portal where everyone in your company can access all relevant information, documents, and communications no matter where they are. This software also lowers your IT maintenance costs and cultivates a flexible workforce, which increases your productivity by aligning everyone to meet the same goals.
Project management system
A major reason for employee inefficiency is uncertainty about what they should be doing. Projects become a confusing, timely process. Employees may not know the importance of their tasks, which ongoing projects to prioritize, and when the tasks are due. The expectations regarding someone’s report may also be unclear to team members. These issues further escalate when the management cannot directly monitor their progress.
A strong project management system with a thorough task management feature solves all these problems. From execution to completion, a task management software would help everyone at every level of the company to reach their goals as effectively and successfully as possible. Managers will be able to directly assign tasks and track the progress of their team members.
Collaboration tools
Collaboration tools help employees and project teams work together more efficiently. Without a platform solely meant for collaboration, it’s hard for team members to exchange ideas and keep tabs on group progress. Emails get lost, unread, and threads become too long.
Tools that allow private and group messaging, and file sharing are perfect to keep teams working together. They eliminate the need for emails, and are especially important if your employees are scattered across different locations.
Facebook Groups, Skype, Google Drive and Hangouts are free and accessible collaboration platforms. There are also more specialized tools, such as Slack and Cisco Spark.
Cloud computing service
Many companies invest in establishing and running their own data center, which has limited mobility anyway. And if you don’t create a backup, you will lose all your data when disaster strikes. None of these will be an issue with cloud computing.
Cloud computing provides your business more flexibility and mobility, without the cost of establishing and maintaining a data center, and stores your data more securely. It’s also easily scalable when your business experiences a growth spurt.
There is a wide range of cloud computing options that vary across providers. Some broadband providers, like Lingo, also provide Cloud applications and hosted PBX service along with a business broadband. If you are really interested in finding out more about lingo, you can find their website here.
These communication tools solve plenty of problems for businesses of any size. Don’t wait for communication breakdown before investing in them. Furnish your company with the essential tools to lay the foundation and hasten your success.
