Are you Just talking or actually communicating?
SOPs aren’t the only thing that helps keep a business well-lubricated. Here’s another consideration: how you and your team communicate.
Talking is getting a message or information across. Communication is taking it one step further where that information/message is successfully received—either as an FYI or for further action.
Business Laid Bare wants you to walk your talk because successful team communication = more lube to your business.
Your tip of the week
Create a standard operating procedure (SOP) about how you’d like to establish communication protocols in your business.
The most important part of this SOP? Standardization.
We’ve worked with countless clients who have made Team Communication an afterthought. We once had a CEO text message, Instagram DM, Facebook DM, and email her assistant. You can imagine how the assistant felt—anxious like no other. She always felt that the ball was going to drop, or had the biggest freakouts over where to find “that document [CEO] sent.” She’d waste hours trying to either find things or keep the conversation straight.
Imagine if everyone on the team knew the protocol of how to communicate without hesitation; it’s such a fundamental business practice to get right because information matters.
To the ceo or manager:
We urge you to set standards on how you’d like your communication protocols set in your business. What’s the most effective way for you to all communicate together (and with clients where applicable)? Draw some lines in the sand and make it work for you. Your team members (we’d like to think) have no intention of doing a bad job on purpose. When communication is hard, it’ll only ripple out and make other areas in your business difficult, too. It’s up to you to set them up for success. To get your ideas going, here’s a quick overview of how Business Laid Bare establishes communication protocols:
- Every Monday, we have a 60-minute team meeting that goes over our action items for the week; updates on projects; ideas to discuss; and things we need to brainstorm on as a whole.
- Instead of email, we communicate in our intentionally designed Slack workspace. We have various channels for different clients, topics, and projects that make communication organized and easy to take action on.
- We also use specific emojis in Slack, like , to denote that we’ve seen the message but cannot respond at this time.
- Because our Project Management is so robust and built out, any communication related to a specific task written out in our ClickUp should be left as a comment so that there is a paper trail. These comments additionally get sent over to Slack due to our integration.
- We also have ClickUp status updates pinged over to Slack in an organized manner so that it’s easy for anyone to see the progress of a task without asking. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing Slack messages of a task going from TO DO to DOING to DONE.
- When we send emails to clients (deliverables, interview requests, etc), they always come from a specific email address so that all team members working on client work have that handy. It’s also been noted in our ClickUp already. We want zero holes in our client experience and engagement.
To the team member:
If you feel like your team communication is driving you nuts more than it’s helping you, say something. We urge you to speak up and communicate why this area of your business operations needs refinement. Explain that doing good work requires an active and thoughtful conversation that should also be easy for you to access. You shouldn’t spend more time looking for the information to complete your task or project than the action doing of the task or project itself.
Since you’re in the business day-to-day, give feedback to your CEO. Explain to them what’s working; what’s not working; any suggestions you have based on what you experience in the business. This proactivity will immensely help because the CEO may not see everything you see since they are focused on other areas of the business.
Apps are just the tip of the Orgasmic Operations® Method. Needs, requirements, and strategy first!
When you’re ready, here’s how Business Laid Bare can help:
- Schedule a consult call—let’s chat about how we can work together to help create the systems and processes you and your team need to communicate and thrive in the business.
- Sign up for an Assessment—let Business Laid Bare deep dive into your internal operations so we can pinpoint exactly 1) what systems you need and 2) how to implement them so they grow with you.
