Overcoming 5 Business Communication Challenges
Katharine Dahl, presented a webinar on five critical business communication challenges. Here’s a quick overview of her main points and how corporate leaders can implement a more effective communication strategy for their organizations.
To start, Katharine lays out five critical business communication challenges facing organizations today:
Challenge #1: Rising Above the Noise of Everday Communication
Employees are bombarded by many different modes of communication throughout the work day, from phone calls and emails to internal instant messaging systems. Because of this, employees only have 3 minutes of consistent focus before an interruption.
An interactive poll during the webinar found that most attendees received office notifications through email, phone trees, or via collaboration networks. Katharine argues that while these channels can work well to capture employee’s attention, they lack redundancy and reliability. Mass notification systems that offer multi-channel communication with just a few clicks can ensure urgent communications rise above the the noise of everyday communication to reach employees.
Watch clip 1 of 5 to ensure your critical business communications reach all employees.
Challenge #2: Proactively Communicating With Employees
The majority of employees expect to receive urgent communications from their organization regarding emergencies. While it’s important for employees to receive notifications about potential life-threatening events, timely updates regarding office closures due to severe weather or system outages must also be communicated to ensure business continuity. More targeted communication can inform specific teams about shift changes or remind departments about updated HR policies and enrollment deadlines.
Katharine walks through different workplace communication best practices and solutions to communication problems in the workplace to properly notify your staff about a business disruption. These include proper data management techniques, how to define policies for frequency and level of communication, and ensuring you choose a critical communication platform that allows you to leverage pre-created messaging templates.
Watch clip 2 of 5 to learn about effecting communication best practices
Challenge #3: Connecting with Traveling Employees During Critical Events
Location-based alerting allows you to send specific and actionable alerts to employees located in affected areas domestically and internationally. Katharine cautions organizations from collecting freeform responses from employees during an emergency because those responses become difficult to aggregate and store.
Instead, she encourages organizations to seek out communication platforms that allow for more advanced data collection such as a polling feature, where responses can be categorized and aggregated, message delivery can be tracked, and action items and commands can be included. With this knowledge, organizations can send a follow-up alert with even more specific instructions to those who require additional communication.
Watch clip 3 of 5 to understand how location-based alerts can aggregate critical employee data
Challenge #4: Receiving Actionable Feedback from Employees
Katharine says it’s crucial that organizations provide a vehicle for employees to feel comfortable reporting information. Employees are on the front line and are the first to observe safety, security, and facility red flags. Allowing employees to submit confidential and discreet tips with effective solutions to communication problems in the workplace will alert your organization to an incident sooner rather than later, allowing for more effective mitigation and incident resolution.
Watch clip 4 of 5 to learn how to empower your employees to submit confidential tips
Challenge #5: Delivering Faster Resolution to Business Disruptions
By proactively communicating with employees, ensuring that traveling and lone workers are accounted for, and empowering your workers to submit confidential and discreet tips, your organization is positioned to provide a fast resolution to business disruptions.
One important piece of advice Katharine provides is having role-based access controls for sending out notifications. Department-level access can spread the responsibility of critical communication to different stakeholders across the organization to ensure multiple communication plans are available in case of a business disruption.
Watch clip 5 of 5 to ensure you know how to leverage real-time reporting for faster communication
