Have you ever calculated the amount of wasted resources that come with ineffective employees? Employee effectiveness is an important business performance indicator, that is very closely tied to workplace communication.
In this article, we reveal the first steps you can take to improve your workplace communication on all levels of the organization. Which in turn will boost the effectiveness of your employees, bring you closer to business success and reduce your expenses.Wasted Resources
Time is money - we all know it. So, time being wasted with information searching can become very pricey - and it all comes back to how effective your internal communication strategy is. A research conducted in the UK and USA by SearchYourCloud revealed that employees made up to 8 searches to find a particular piece of information they needed. Taken this fact, if an employee needs 10 different pieces of information related to their work during one workday, they might make approximately 80 searches to find what they need. If one search takes 3 minutes, the time for total searches will end up being 240 minutes, or 4 hours. That's half a workday! Sure, this is just the worst case scenario, but it can still happen.
Related: How Can Management Support Organizational Knowledge Sharing
McKinsey reported that looking for internal information that is necessary to get work done takes up to 20% of an employee’s workweek. That equals to one workday on a weekly basis. So, searching for information is a real productivity killer and a heavy cost for your company. To ease up this issue you need to allow, encourage and keep up a smooth flow of information across your whole organization. Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Understand the Importance and Benefits of Effective Information Exchange
It is crucial to have an open communication flow in your company, as well-informed employees lead to greater business performance, better product development and higher sales. To understand it in practice, take a look at the cases we rolled out below. They demonstrate the importance of effective communication and collaboration between business departments in any organization.
Case 1: Sales and Marketing
Even though these two units function separately, they ultimately need to work together in order to be the most efficient. When Sales has regular contact with Marketing, they can share key findings and information about the most approachable leads. Based on successful (or less successful) interactions with leads, Sales is able to determine which job functions, position types, industries and company sizes can be best targeted by Marketing.
On the other hand, Marketing can better tell Sales which geographical locations are the most responsive to online advertisements. Want to know how? Simply by being data driven and continuously monitoring the performance of their online advertising campaigns. This helps in evaluating market maturity in different locations, so Sales doesn’t reach out to regions where people are the least likely to buy your product.
Case 2: Customer Success, Marketing and Sales
Customer Success professionals are the key touchpoints between current customers and your business. They have regular follow ups with customers, which means they are the first ones to hear about both positive and negative cases. When it comes to success stories, Customer Success managers have the possibility to conduct in-depth interviews in some significant cases. When enough information is provided by a happy customer, the interview can be later turned into an excellent testimonial. The form of this material can vary between text documents, videos or even voice recordings.
Customer testimonials have a very high value for several other departments in your company. First of all, these materials can be a great Marketing resource. Testimonials usually appear at the consideration stage of a marketing funnel to drag leads closer to the conversion point. In addition, Sales can leverage testimonials as educational materials both for themselves and for their prospects. By getting familiar with and clearly presenting positive customer cases, they can appear more trustworthy to prospects. They can also refer to these testimonials as a valid source of information at any time.
Case 3: Product Developers and Customer Success
Product development is a vital part of any business. When a company follows a user-centered product development strategy, it does matter on what grounds the development is done. Now here's the thing: your Developers already have the best source of information in-house. They just need to talk to your Customer Success people! They know so much about customers, including problems to be solved, pain points to be targeted and requests to be fulfilled. When Developers really pay attention to these details, they are able to develop the best possible product that can highly satisfy your users. By doing this, the chance for increasing sales gets multiplied.
Read also: 5 Ways Internal Communication Makes a Digital Workplace More Productive
Step 2: Start an Effective and Structured Internal Communication Strategy
After getting familiar with the cases above, hopefully you see how crucial it is to let different departments talk to each other and have a good flow of information. Now, the next thing you can do is initiate an open workplace communication with the goal of eliminating silos. Aim for enabling everyone in the organization to get involved in internal communication. Encourage employees to share their daily work experiences that can be useful for other departments, too. Share market research, customer success stories, marketing ideas, company culture enhancements, product development plans or any other information they consider beneficial for multiple people.
In your internal communication strategy, you have already been using emails, cloud, instant messaging apps and perhaps other solutions, too. However, if you really want your employees to meet with business-relevant content, it’s time to implement an internal content hub. A tool like that will help your employees find information, company resources, business cases, market trends, employee surveys, or any materials related to your business and industry. It will save them time, money and will improve their effectiveness.
If you want to learn more about effective internal information flows, download our free guide below!
