Small Business Phone Systems: Improving Communication In Your Business

For small businesses today communications skills are essential to making sure your team if working effectively. When team communication is working well, it creates a strong cohesive team in your office. This translates directly to your customers too. Effective internal communication also helps your employees be more productive in business and keep processes working like clockwork.

 

Bad Communication Skills

Everyone has worked in an office at one time where bad communication is prevalent in the office. Bad communication leads to employee frustrations and poor employee morale. Bad communication also has devastating effects on your customers too. Bad communication leads to missed deadlines, tasks not being done well, and missed goals in sales, etc.. This directly costs your company time and money.

Establishing Communication

Whether you are using your communication skills for peer-to-peer or manager to employee, good communication skills are essential to a well-run business. Here are some tips to get started with good communication.

 

Good communication between managers and employees are not elaborate and complicated. Good communications skills are based on these fundamentals:

 

1. Interpreting body language
   Glen Wilson writes: “Where body language conflicts with the words that are being said, the body language will usually be the more truthful in the sense of revealing true feelings.”
2. Listening Carefully
   Today with the fast pace of social media and everyone wanting to a superstar, the art of listening seems to have taken a back seat. Being quick to listen and slow to speak goes a very long ways. Listening for voice infections, verbal pauses and eye contact have been replaced with a generation of thumbs-ups icons and impersonal communication. Listening is a skill that enables you to catch details that other will miss and may be the difference between a long customer relationship or not getting the sale.
3. Clear Communication
   Do you listen attentively? As a leader part of your job is to listen to your employees and peers carefully. It is also important to use clear and concise communication that is easily understood by those same people. Don’t use words that most people won’t understand. Many writers today use a scale called the “Flesch-Kincaid” readability scale. This scale applies to how you speak too! Talk to people with clear and concise words that are easily understood. Most Americans have an education level of 9 grade to 12 grade. Using words beyond that may confuse your employees and/or customers.

Put It In Writing

Verbal communication is paramount in understanding who is speaking and what they are trying to convey. People tend to prefer face-to-face communication as a rule of thumb. It 's nice to have an open door policy to allow your employees or peers to talk to you about business. Even with that in place, writing things down to share with your staff will help to clarify things said in a meeting. Writing it down and sharing with your team will further enforce clear communication throughout your organization.