Organizations who put effort towards increasing team communications can see a large number of benefits. Better team dynamics can lead to increased output, lower turnover rates, higher quality work and a myriad of other positive results. Quite often, these initiatives require minor time or financial commitments and can be easily adapted by many types of businesses. Being proactive about increasing team communications can give your company a big edge in the market, with overall higher performance than the competition.

Here are three areas where you can begin increasing team communications within your workplace:

Remote Meeting Solutions

Remote access meeting solutions aid in increasing team communications, through emphasizing face-to-face time and allowing contractors, managers on the go and executives traveling for work to all contribute to meetings. Simple solutions like Go to Meeting, Skype or HipChat give easy access to these capabilities, as can proprietary software. With most options carrying both desktop and mobile options, remote meetings can be made simply, while maintaining that important hands-on time that can be missed over the phone or via email.

Mobile Apps and Conversations

Mobile apps designed around productivity not only help to organize workflow; they assist in increasing team communications, through making teammate connections easy. Options like Slack or Flow include simple navigation and setup, with little maintenance or need for lengthy setup. Custom options could include more advanced methods of file sharing, display or messaging.

With recallable conversations that are typically more fluid than traditional email solutions, choosing or building a mobile system for communicating allows employees to share pertinent information on the fly, as well as the ability to collaborate more directly in real time. This can include group chat or lists, along with one-to-one conversations. Keep in mind that this shouldn’t dissuade from face-to-face time: it’s there to aid in collaboration, teambuilding and workflow, especially when away from your workstation.

Desktop Collaboration

Collaborative dashboards are commonly thought of for their file and project sharing capabilities but they are also the crux of increasing team communications in mid to large size organizations. Suites such as Teamwork and Basecamp incorporate collaboration and project management elements, along with calendars useful for marketing, release scheduling and a top-down view of what each team within your company is working on.

Increasing team communications with this method also helps with transparency, being that your employees and managers can view any projects or files you allow access to, making them feel more involved in the overall business process. These options should also help make work requests easy to access and remember, as timelines and alarms can be set within the system. No longer will work requests get lost or forgotten between meetings.

Evaluating potential digital upgrades or systems should be a team effort. Consulting with employees and management about potential software or applications draws on their experiences and expertise, along with making them feel more valued. This too supports your efforts in increasing team communications. Remember to incorporate your chosen solution into your corporate feedback loop, to collect useful opinions on team dynamics and the effectiveness of the system in question.

Interested in including team communications tools within your company? Contact one of our specialists, to see how we can help. For more updates on productive team dynamics and technology, stay up to date with Make IT Solutions on LinkedIn.