Streamlined and effective team communication is a necessary aspect to boost productivity in the workplace. This is particularly necessary in distributed workforces, where employees no longer see each other in the office every day (or ever!).
Studies have shown that robust communication between your team can increase your organization’s productivity by 25%. This means that enhancing team communication directly improves the results you get from employees.
If your business has been struggling with ineffective communications, we’ve researched 5 communication solutions that can help your team collaborate across video, chat, emails, documents, and more.
Spike: Communicate Seamlessly Across Video, Chat, Docs, Emails, and More
The reason that Spike team communication app is first on the list is because of all the aforementioned communication mediums, Spike offers them all. Unlike most communications platforms (e.g. Teams, Slack, Zoom, Skype, and more…) Spike offers all the necessary functionalities into a unified single platform. So, among a range of robust features, Spike gives you access to email, calendar, group chat, video chat, collaborative docs, tasks and to dos. You can also add existing business emails to Spike. So in case you’re already using Gmail or Microsoft for your office, you won’t need to deal with any migration issues or lost data. Speaking of data, Spike is highly secure, with all messaging data encrypted using the AES-256 encryption. The app is free, and includes apps for Desktop, iOS, and Android. Spike also comes with some pretty cool features – like its unsend email feature that works across iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and more. There’s also a delay after sending an email, so you’re able to prevent any “oops” moments before you accidentally send an email meant for HR to the employee you’re writing about.
1. Google Drive: Collaborative Docs – But Only if You’re Already on Workspace
When it comes to tools for collaborating cross teams, it’s almost certain that you’ve used Google Drive or its suite of apps. Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides revolutionized how we worked together on documents, files, and presentations. And they remain fantastic parts of the Google Workspace features – in fact amongst its best parts. The trouble is, the rest of the Google Workspace hasn’t caught up. For example, Google Chat and Google Meets are less than intuitive to use. It’s telling that despite using Drive and Gmail, businesses opt for messaging through Slack, Video meetings through Zoom, or an integrated experience like with Skype. And it’s even worse if your business is already using Microsoft.
2. Align: Communicate Strategy Across the Organization
Communicating with your employees and between teams shouldn’t be just about day to day tasks, projects, and updates. It’s also critical to ensure that at an organizational level, all employees are aligned on the big picture strategic goals of the company, its mission and vision, growth goals, and most critical priorities. Align is a strategic growth management software that provides tools to enable companies to visualize, communicate, and track business priorities and strategic goals across the organization. Align’s methodology is centered around communications through proven management principles: quick minute daily check-ins, consistent employee feedback, and transparent, visual performance tracking for top priorities. Align is a user-friendly, intuitive way to ensure all employees have access to the comapnies’ top priorities, department objectives, team goals, and their individual responsibilities. An especially useful feature is the eNPS feedback, which facilitates robust employee feedback communication by automatically collecting and measuring employee satisfaction.
3. Monday.com: Visually Communicate Milestones, Metrics, and Workflows
Other than communicating with team members or teams across chat, video, and emails to facilitate written or verbal communication, it’s also important to communicate with your team about tasks, timelines, technical issues – and in an organized manner. Monday.com is an ideal tool for this purpose, with an interface that allows for ideal communication in two key ways. Firstly, its user interface, which resembles a spreadsheet, makes it easy to communicate and keep track of projects in a simple and easy to follow manner to make sure that nothing gets missed. Secondly, Monday.com offers a variety of visual mediums to communicate workflows, project analytics, metrics and milestones with your team. Communication isn’t just about written and verbal conversation – it has a highly visual aspect. And that’s where Monday.com truly excels. The app includes a range of visualization options such as Gantt charts and Kanban boards, and for multiple project techniques such as sprints, Agile, and Waterfall planning. Adding to the visual element, Monday.com features a wide range of well designed project templates, offering effective frameworks through which your message can be better organized, conceptualized, and communicated.
4. Miro: Communicate Highly Complex Concepts It’s Hard to Explain Otherwise
Miro is another great tool to communicate visually, and to foster communication between teammates. Miro is like an endless virtual dashboard, which is ideal to map out and visually communicate highly complex concepts that are difficult to explain in text or in a conversation. For example tasks with intricate dependencies, or complex automation workflows and their particular triggers, or user journey and segmentation at each stage of a marketing campaign, or an internal HR protocol with a different set of steps to be taken or forms to be filled depending on what the occurrence is. You and the team can either build these from scratch and improvise, or customize a whole wide world of pre-existing templates. Miro is also a great tool to have the whole team participate by creating mind maps or brainstorming ideas. Team members can communicate in text, visuals, imagery, or even emoji. Miro also offers some particularly interesting tools that make it excellent for real time collaborations like anonymous voting, live reactions, and icebreakers.