Efficient Internal Communication

Enterprise communication issues arise from the size of the teams themselves, but also from complex responsibilities and regulations.

Discouraging number of emails

Internal communication is still mostly oral or by emails, even though it is a very inefficient way of communication. It is not uncommon for executives to have over 100 emails per day, as well as hundreds of unread messages. However, even 5 useless emails per day means waste time that could spend in better way. A single-day unread email might cause million-dollar loss.

To many emails is burdensome not only for executives, but also for experts. Even the experts are often overwhelmed by requests and long-time waiting for answers is not only costly but often dangerous.

“Workers from enterprise confirm that at least 50%, but often 90% of emails by executives, are “for information” – to keep the addressee informed, although the author does not expect direct response or action.”

Too much information

Large companies overwhelm their workers with a lot of information. Information often lacks a good structure and they are mostly not interconnected. Most of the news are communicated to workers in the time when author invented it, instead when the receiver needs it. Or even when receiver doesn’t need it at all.

Effective communication does not mean that information should not be published but that it is available when the recipient needs it.

Ineffective consultation

Perhaps the most common complaint relates to the ineffective consultation. It is a complex problem, ranging from the inexperience of meeting organizers, to improperly set processes (e.g. the obligation to discuss things in a meeting, even if the meeting does not bring benefits), to the lack of tools for "online" corporate communication.

Efficient meetings need not only experienced managers, but meetings automation. Last but not least, other communication channels that can replace much of the meeting and thus reduce the need to meet.

Complex regulations with too many changes

Enterprises tends to have many internal regulations and directives. Every week workers receive information about changes in regulations. Communication of regulations is costly (reading time × number of readers = several thousand dollars) and inefficient. Workers can never remember all changes, at best they got an idea about the change.

The solution is in dynamically managed tasks directly linked with Quality Management System and regulations. Regulations are linked with tasks and worked is informed about them in time when he needs it regardless when it was issued. Workers will observe regulations much more easy and could never say that they didn’t know about some new policy, standard or regulation.

“Regulations linked with task assignment save up to 4 hours a month to each regular worker.”

In particular, small business lacks tools and the culture. Both are depressed by small investments in internal organization as well as missing experience.

Missing tools

Small business often has nothing but emails. Intranet sites, shared directories, shared knowledge and many other tools that people in larger business use every day are beyond a small company scope.

Tools are often missing because there is no experience with the real boost of the efficiency, experience and necessary staff skills.

Missing experience

Experience is the basic step to verifying that something really helps us. When there is no way to verify that an investment pays off, it is difficult to justify internally.

However, experience if available free of charge. The major blocks are in knowledge of the potential for improvement.

A developing business grown out of its own processes

While few new workers in a larger business have no influence on its functioning, in a small business it brings major team increase. Such change requires significant internal changes. There is a need to change how to share information, mange internal communication and tasks. When a company culture does not grow accordingly to the team size, internal problems accumulate, affect productivity, personal satisfaction as well as the service quality. Sooner or later accumulated problems explode and breaks the team. It starts the team catharsis that is good to prune ill habits but can also sweep out the whole company.

Missing documented decisions

Whilst enterprises are overwhelmed by too many regulations that hinder and often makes smart and agile approach impossible, small companies and growing business suffer with exactly opposite problem.

Many small and medium-sized company often have no recorded important decisions, agreements and guidelines. Everything is handled orally, by phone, SMS or even WhatsApp messages (that should never got a place in the internal business communication).

The result of missing rules is:

• Non-efficiency and repeatable discussion of the same questions
• Disputes and discrepancies
• Non-consistent quality of work; confusions directly affect the quality of products and services
• Dissatisfaction of workers because they never have guarantee what will be evaluated as a good job
  Regulations, decisions and guidelines do not need sophisticated Quality Management System. However, there should be a location where to put them and make them available to everybody. And even better, link them with tasks that they relate to.

Also it might look strange, one of the most important communication tools is information sharing and mutual information about work. As a result, workers do not have to get and send each other records such as document templates, task descriptions, work reports. Sharing reduce "unproductive communication" when we are looking for something or sending information that are not directly necessary for receiver.

However, efficient internal communication requires cohort of integrated communication channels:

• Instant messages between workers – alerts, messages
• Shared object notes – discussion forums related with each record in issue
• Notes about the task processing shared by all in the task team. (Even for routines tasks like an order processing there should be possibility to store a note that might be useful later)
• Discussion forums
• Complete documentation of meetings and decisions.
• Intranet and bulletin boards to share information and new with wide audience

Automation within supported processes also contributes to effective communication, e.g.:

• Automatic task transfer: There is no need to send anything for a new or handed task, the worker gets the information automatically
• Voting: When something in a company, project or team needs to be decided, just open the vote and choose who is involved. All stakeholders are automatically informed about the vote, options and result
• Decisions and changes to directives: The directive or decision always includes an overview of the people involved. These people can be automatically informed in an appropriate way, without having to worry about the information, confirmation and documentation of the process
• Meetings: The system automates all communication relating to meetings from the invitation, agenda access, work on the meeting and minutes
• Web forms_: Initiatives, complaints, whistleblowing, questions about GDPR, job seekers – the company should have forms that allow direct communication via the web. The system via the web service receives a stimulus from the form and automatically creates the task and informs the workers.