Our interactions with any person is determined by the way we communicate. This is more important in the business world as wrong communication among your peer group or your superiors is the one that determines one’s career in any organisation.
Effective business communication is an integral part of every business process, improves or declines the efficiency and is most vital across the cross-sections of any organisation. Organisations with a well-defined communication process and practicing the same are reported to have over 71% better productivity
On analysing how would a 71% better productivity, impact company’s success?
The answer is simple – This leads to better customer service or better resolution to internal challenges or faster turn-around time on issues in front of the company and so on.
Let us understand why effective business communication is vital for organisation’s success and therefore employees’ successes. Did you know that 33% of companies have lost a customer due to business communication problem?
All organised and envisaged activity in a company rely on clear and crisp business communications. These communication could include anything from peer to another peer or a managerial communication to his/ her team or support team’s communication to their clients.
Types of Business Communications
Importantly, there are two types of Business Communications
Downward: Communications from a superior or manager or supervisor to a subordinate
Lateral: Cross-departmental communication between peers
Upward: Communications from a subordinate to a manager.
Sharing information including discussions during meetings : Often called Minutes-of-the-meeting, it is very vital to capture and clearly communicate all the important discussions of the meeting
Assigning or delegating work: An effective delegation or shared responsibility falls flat without an effective business communication channel or language and/or behaviour expressed
Decision-making discussions: The most important for any organisation which has to capture the critical aspects of decisions and also be communicated clearly
Why Business Communications are important?
Crisp and concise yet at the same time effective business communications can solve many problems. Some of the problems that an effective communication could solve are
Email Overload
"I receive 120-150 emails a day"
Unclear horizontal & vertical communications
My department head does not communicate what is needed
I work in a remote office. I haven't communicated with my manager in a while
Challenging communication needs for remote workforce
The customer said "this is the problem" but it is working
I fixed the issue but customer says that was never the issue
How to overcome these challenges?
As HR teams grapple and find ways to address these challenges, here are few easy steps to address these challenges to ensure that productivity loss due to lack of communication and especially business communications skills are addressed
Step-1: Evaluate your current state of business communications skills and set goals
Srishti’s Pre-Assessment solution can help in quickly ascertaining the present state and levels of business communications skills within an organisation. A comprehensive solution which can assess personnel on various capabilities of Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking through an Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled Machine Learning System to be able to provide a comprehensive report-card of the communications skills possessed by the organisation’s personnel.
This solution eases the burden on HR teams in terms of
- preparation – assessment preparation cycles can take long in the regular programmes and with this solution, the preparation cycle is reduced to not more than a few hours
- proctoring enabled – thereby rolled out remotely without the risk of being invigilating requirement
- comprehensive report card – helping identifying the specific weak and strength areas of employees relating to business communications
Step-2: Roll-out customised modules to meet the learning objectives of the organisation
Srishti’s Corporate Communications and Srishti’s Grammar Intermediate offers various modules that are pick-and-choose enabling customised course creation in minutes. This course can be deployed to targeted/ segmented set of learners within an organisation to enable the weak areas of business communications are addressed in a simple and profound way.
Courses that have been deployed in such a fashion provides the benefits of
- Easy accessibility for the participants through a simple web browser or through a mobile app
- Gamified learning experience for participants improving learning mind-set of the participants
- Micro-learning enabled so that participants can spend focused time for learning without intruding on their core responsibility
- Single-click monitoring of learning behaviour as well as progress of every participant with deep analytics
- Leaderboard and badges encouraging healthy learning amongst the learners
- Learners have access to content to review and refresh concepts and practice the same – content subscription available for 6 months
- (Optional) Experts’ facilitation – for the human touch and providing timely inputs to learners when in doubt or needing to seek clarifications
Step-3: Close-out with post-learning assessment
Rounding-off the learning project with Srishti’s Assessment solution to evaluate the improvement of business communications skills improvement amongst the learners.
As a result, any organisation can see motivated, happy and productive employee creating meaningful and high impact results for the benefit of the organisation
About the Author
Very well communicated