If you own a business, it’s important that your employees always know how to communicate and use the technology that they will be using in the office. Moreover, you need to be sure that you develop some standard professional practices when it comes to office communication, and keep all your employees up-to-date. Here are five helpful tips for effective workplace communication.
- Always email your colleagues, rather than using sticky notes. One of the best ways to cause confusion in any workplace is to leave sticky notes on people’s desks. Those notes get lost, forgotten, and there’s no way of verifying when they were sent. If you really want someone to get the memo, it’s important that you send it via email, so that they can respond – no matter where they are – and you can provide proof of when it was sent.
- Always CC people who are in any way involved in the conversation. If you are working on a project with multiple people and they all need to be kept in the know, but they don’t all need to be addressed with each part of the conversation, it’s a good idea to put their addresses in the CC field. This way, you can keep everyone on the same thread, and they will know how things are developing, without having to go through the trouble of checking in on each and every person that’s working on the project.
- Always shrink large photos before emailing if possible. If you are sharing photos via email and they don’t need to be large, or of a particularly high resolution, then you should always be sure to shrink them before sending. Large images will slow down a browser’s ability to open a message, and they will fill up a lot of storage space. Most smartphones will prompt you to decide on the size of the photos you are sending, although this is something you need to learn how to do on your own if you’re on a computer.
- Always provide a clear subject for emails. Whenever you are emailing about anything, you want to be sure that you give that email a clear subject. This should include the exact words that someone would search if they were looking for your email several weeks later, and it should encapsulate the purpose of the email. In addition, it’s important that you keep replying and using that thread if you continue to email about that subject, rather than starting new email threads. This way everything is organized and easy to reference.
Make sure all of your communication devices are up-to-date. If you really want to improve business communication, then it’s important that you are using state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment in your workplace. You can find all kinds of equipment that is ideal for conferencing, communicating internationally, and more with Thuraya, for an office that is modern and fully functional.