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Strategies to Strengthen Communication Within Your Company

This article is more than 9 years old.

Healthy internal communication is central to the success of any company, whether the organization is a small startup or an established large enterprise. Like many aspects of successful business management, stellar company communication can take months or years to cultivate. Whether your business currently has three staff members or 300, strengthening your internal communication at every level can lead to greater operational efficiency, increased sales, and a more satisfying company culture.

Here are six strategies that I have found especially useful to boost the effectiveness of internal communications:

Video simulcasts

For CEOs whose companies are large, with offices in multiple states or countries, or whose businesses are remote, it can be difficult to personally share information with every member of your team. When sharing this information is also critical to the success of the business, one possible solution is to hold a video conference. With a simulcast, each team member can hear and see you speak about upcoming initiatives or your company’s future trajectory in real time, no matter where he or she might be working.

Group events

Like video simulcasts, group events can unite geographically distant or large businesses. Your operations department may not interact with your marketing team every day, but chances are the two will eventually overlap on a project. Understanding who is responsible for what, or simply recognizing a name, can greatly facilitate company communications. Group events lead to shared experiences, whether formal or informal, and these can help individuals relate to each other more easily. Varsity Tutors, for instance, hosts an annual summit that helps our entire team forge strong working relationships.

Recurring meetings

Consider scheduling recurring meetings with your senior management, and encourage your managers to do the same with their teams. Whether weekly or monthly, check-ins enable you to accurately track deadlines and pass on reminders and suggestions. More powerful still, when a problem arises, you can address it in a timely manner, and your entire team will be present to trouble-shoot.

Team lunches

Team lunches offer many of the same benefits to increase openness on a smaller, more frequent scale, compared to group events. Depending on each team’s objectives, lunches can be working or social. These social opportunities to break bread together can build respect and trust—crucial to effective communication—while working lunches can simplify those tasks that are easier to complete when staff members sit beside one another and share ideas in real-time instead of asynchronously over e-mails.

Internal newsletters

You may find it ideal to communicate with your team both verbally and in writing. Internal newsletters can be easily archived, and individuals can refer back to their content (calendars, monthly updates, etc.) whenever they need to do so. Electronic or physical newsletters are also the perfect medium to acknowledge the successes of individual staff members, to welcome new team members, and to maintain contact with your company. Even a brief note may help your team members feel like they have a tangible connection to you.

Open-door policies

CEOs spend a significant portion of their time recruiting brilliant team members, many of whom have fantastic ideas and a less certain sense of how to share them. Consider instituting an open-door policy, and then explicitly advertise that openness to your staff. You might find that an act as simple as sharing your Skype username translates to clearer lines of communication within your business.

Successful company-wide communication often involves a combination of the above strategies, and a mixture of forms—email, in-person conversation, video conferencing, and others. Successful communication relies on every team member within an organization, and its presence, no matter how new and small or large and established your company is, can positively set your business apart from others.

Chuck Cohn is the CEO and founder of Varsity Tutors, a technology platform for private academic tutoring and test prep designed to help students at all levels of education achieve academic excellence.