There’s a lot that goes into running a growing business. However, at the center of all your other activities is how your business communicates. If the members of your organization don’t communicate well, it slows down everything else and limits your growth potential. On the other hand, having efficient communication provides some great benefits.

For example, businesses with effective communication practices are more likely to have less employee turnover. In addition, you can improve productivity by up to 25 percent if your employees are well connected to one another. If you’re interested in getting these sorts of benefits for your business, below are 5 tips you can use to improve communications among your team.

Use Professional Writing Tools

A good place to start is by using professional writing tools. Professional writing tools are helpful whenever you’re creating documents that go out to your employees. They ensure that your writing is clear and grammatically correct. This makes it easier to convey the essential information and that your employees easily understand everything.

For example, you may have a large document that details all the specifications of your product. With some technical writing tools, you could produce a better document. This would save your team time, as they won’t have to spend as much clarifying things or re-reading the document. You could also use professional writing tools when creating documents such as an employee handbook. Essentially, if you have a lot of writing that goes out to your team, look to improve the quality of this writing with the help of some tools. A great tool to start with is Grammarly, which automatically checks for spelling and grammar errors in your documents.

Create a Communication Plan

A communication plan is a document that outlines where, when, and how everyone on a team should communicate. They are a good way to let everyone know what types of communications you expect from them so that there is no confusion. For example, you may outline that there is a weekly team meeting, over video conference, on Monday mornings.

This document also lists the contact information for everyone involved in a project and what they are responsible for. This can help to eliminate confusion when someone on the team has a question or needs some assistance. The next time you’re starting a new project, look to develop a communication plan before you start and see if it helps improve communication throughout the duration of the project.

Outsource Some HR Tasks

Another strategy you can try is outsourcing some of the responsibilities within your Human Resources department. Through HR outsourcing, you can take away some of the more repetitive tasks from your HR team, which would then allow them to focus more on other tasks.

For example, you can outsource benefits administration to another organization. With this task gone, your HR team could focus on providing communications training to your employees or developing a comprehensive employee handbook. Removing some tasks from your HR team cannot only improve communications but also save your business some money. Spend some time with your HR staff and see if there are any tasks that they would recommend outsourcing so that they can focus on improving communications.

Provide Communications Training

Your business might have less than ideal communications because your employees never learned how to properly communicate within a professional setting. Perhaps this is their first job out of college or their previous jobs didn’t place emphasis on good communications. Whatever the reason, this is a problem you can fix with some communications training.

Communication training is when you dedicate some time to teaching your employees the proper way to communicate within your organization. For example, you could provide instruction on how you write a professional email, have discussions in a meeting, or use your video conferencing software.

Even employees who have good communication skills can benefit from a refresher on doing things properly. If you think your employees could use a little instruction in how you want them to communicate with one another, set aside a few hours one day to provide some training – the benefits from this small time investment will likely last a long time.

Run Team Building Exercises

Finally, sometimes poor communication is the result of a team not feeling close with one another. Maybe everyone works in separate areas, or they are not used to working on a team. It’s hard to communicate with others, even professionally, if you feel like you don’t know who that person is. An easy way around this problem is through some team-building exercises. 

Gather everyone together and play some ice breaker games. Or send everyone out for lunch together one day. The goal is to find an activity for your team where they can relax a little bit and get to know one another. Once they feel more comfortable with one another, you’ll likely find that communication flows more easily and that productivity increases.

Strong Communication Takes Time

By implementing the tips above, you should see an improvement in your business’s communications. However, you may not notice a change overnight. Strong communication takes time, and you’ll need to be patient. The results are worth it, though, so make sure that you’re making good communication skills a priority for your business. If you keep working on improving communications every day, eventually, you’ll see the results you’re after.