Have you ever noticed that, in attempting to enhance the available means of communication for your employees, you seem to inadvertently weave an increasingly complex web that your workers are left to untangle? The “paradox of choice”, it seems, can beset even the workplace.
As you add more and more apps and services to your firm’s communications palette, you could leave your staff wondering which of them they should choose on what occasion. As a result, the in-house communications network can become segmented and so ironically hinder effective exchanges.
The trick here is to make sure that this network doesn’t become so complicated in the first place – especially as it could have an adverse knock-on effect on how well your staff can deal with customers or clients.
Here are tips for keeping simplicity at the core of office communications.
Carefully weigh up what you can afford.
While you shouldn’t assume that you can rectify an internal communications block by simply throwing money at it, you do need resources to solve the problem, Fast Company warns. For this reason, it’s worth carefully assessing how much you can actually spend.
In looking at your existing systems, you might recognise both benefits and drawbacks of continuing to use them in unaltered form. Factors you ought to think about here include your employees’ engagement and morale as well as the quality of the product or service your staff are offering.
Evaluate your communications systems.
It’s easy to say “evaluate your communications systems”, but how exactly should you do it? A few worthwhile procedures include analysing how your firm’s productivity, sales and profits have recently fared, as well as surveying employees on their happiness and job fulfilment.
You should also take the latest staff retention rates into account as you monitor your current communications systems or, for that matter, the early results of one you have recently implemented. If those results are promising, consider expanding and refining the system.
Consider implementing a unified communications system.
Recent research highlighted by Business News Daily has drawn attention to the amount of “app overload” which many workers experience. According to the study, the average number of communication apps which workers regularly use is four.
Daily, switching between those apps wastes almost 70% of those workers as much as sixty minutes. With two-thirds of surveyed workers having revealed their preference for a single platform on which they can communicate in depth, the case for a unified communications system becomes clearer.
A unified communications (UC) system is capable of working across a range of channels and devices, within one corporation or business. A cloud-based phone service like Gamma’s Horizon service can form a solid base for a comprehensive UC system.
Master the first impression.
With a UC system, your workers can get straight to serving customers in a more low-fuss manner. Even when they can’t answer a call, an automated answering service – called an “auto attendant” by Entrepreneur – of high quality could promptly route callers to a suitable extension.
