If
you conduct an in-depth analysis of your company’s failures while performing a
close assessment of its successes, you will notice that many of them can be
traced to breakdowns in communication. Although not all of this is caused by a
failure of technology to establish the right connections in a timely manner,
late adoption of technologies that promote smooth communication within
organizations, or no adoption at all, can sometimes offer an explanation.
The 3 Dimensions of
Workplace Communication Technologies
Essentially,
there are three ways in which employees
communicate with one another in the workplace besides face-to-face
communication-- phone, email and
business messengers. Let us explore how these technologies have converged and
look at a few ways in which all three can be streamlined to support workplace
communication best practices:
Make a Phone Call
Phone
is the traditional medium of choice and has been used by businesses both large
and small for over a century in one manifestation or another. Phone
communication should be used as a last resort since it does not leave a
printable paper trail, is vulnerable to voicemail overuse by picky employees,
and is seldom effective if the communication channel happens to be
international in nature. While phone is good for routine communication, it is
not a good idea to use the phone if important instructions are to be issued or
key business intelligence is to be shared. If a key part of the communication
is not transmitted, results can be detrimental.
Send an Email
With
over 100 trillion email messages sent and received in 2014, email is indeed
here to stay. It is the preferred mode of enterprise communication for many
organizations owing to its flexibility and convenience. That said, email
messaging does not take place in real time and messages are almost never
processed instantly. Lately, email messages have developed a tendency to find
their way into spam and junk folders even if they are sent to a single individual without resort to bulk
mail. Occasionally, email messages mysteriously disappear into cyber space
which is why it is best to either request a receipt or ask for a written confirmation.
Install a Business Messenger
Officeinstant messengers or business messengers as they are also called, enable
members of an organization to communicate live and in real time using text
chat. This technology is a cut above the instant messaging or IM facilities
provided by the major search engines such as Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk.
Business messengers are dedicated, mostly subscription-based applications,
which create communication channels within the workplace under a 256 bit SSL
security blanket. Your co-workers can either communicate with a colleague or
with an entire team through the group chat feature. Business messengers capture
all the text communication for future use by generating chat transcripts. These
searchable transcripts can be retrieved by authorized personnel to review the
communication interchange, train other employees and create a paper trail as
evidence. Most business messengers do not require that you install cumbersome
applications on your servers. Since the Internet is the primary mode of
connectivity, communication takes place across cities, countries and continents
as long as there is some level of Internet connectivity. Workplace
communication, conducted with the help of business messengers, has gone beyond
the desktop in that your co-workers can now communicate directly using their
smartphones and mobile devices. To what extent this technology will eventually evolve
is difficult to ascertain given the rapid growth and adoption levels the technology
has been experiencing lately.
Which
of the three workplace communication technologies has your organization adopted
to promote effective interchange within the workplace? Do you have a personal
preference for one or the other? We welcome comments in the comment section
below and also encourage you to share this blog post among your colleagues so
that we can provide multiple perspectives on the topic.
