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Communication is one of the most important aspects of business. How you communicate with your suppliers affects the deals and items you have coming in. How you communicate with your customers affects the money you can make and go a long way to building up brand loyalty and recommendations.
Perhaps most important of all though is internal communication throughout your business. If you want to achieve your full potential, then you need all your staff singing from the same hymn sheet and working towards a common goal. They all need to get the memo.
So how do you ensure that your employees are getting the memo? Here are four different ways you can go about it.
Make your message stick with visual communication
You might have an important message to convey to your staff about upselling a product or ensuring they are working within a certain legal framework. Important stuff, basically. How do you make that message stick? Many of us can read a letter or email and within two minutes the information it contained has completely gone out of our heads, presuming it had even gone in in the first place. With around 60 percent of people being visual learners, getting that message across in a video or graphic make it far more likely to stick than by using mountains and mountains of words.
Catch your employees when they visit everyday areas of the office
If your employees are busy dealing with clients when they are at their desks, chances are they then won’t be fully engaged in dealing with communications you wish to send them while they are stationed there. So why not place company memos around the office in places everyone visits? You could post details of the latest teambuilding exercise in the toilets, stick a memo about the businesses new drive to save energy on the Camping Refrigerator 12V that you’ve got set up in the kitchen to keep everybody’s lunch cool or put the great news about the latest awards you’ve won on the office door so everybody see’s it every morning when they come in.
Embrace technology so the messages never stop rolling
We’re surrounded by technology, which makes it the perfect source for getting across internal messages. From the simplest of ideas such as setting every screensaver on every computer in the office to detail a message about when annual leave needs to be booked by, to using HD televisions and projectors dotted around a room showing the key messages of the day, there are many ways in which you can adapt everyday technology to improve internal communication.
Use quizzes to create competition
If you’ve got a team whom competition seems to bring out the best of, then use it to your advantage. A weekly or monthly quiz complete with leader board will soon have them absorbing everything they need to know about the company in order to finish above their colleagues. It’s also a great way to build camaraderie as you can mix in questions about all the hilarious stuff that has happened in the office, such as which worker fell off his chair last week, as well as working in important messages such as what are the next month’s sales targets.