Modern Business Uses a Wide Range of Communication Tools

An earlier version of the workplace consisted of a physical office where people interacted in person and conducted business via email between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

After a few years, it is now common for employees to work across multiple sites, shifts, and devices. The workforce is no longer restricted to a single office setting.

The value of collaboration in the workplace has never been more evident than as these diverse workplaces emerge. A key component of ensuring business growth is creating collaborative, digitally connected work environments. Organizations need to implement digital workplace policies that enhance teamwork and communication while allowing workers to collaborate efficiently across all platforms and locations.

What Is A Digital Workplace?

Although the digital workplace is currently driving a wide range of initiatives across numerous industries, the idea is still in its infancy. The term “digital workplace” has many definitions, some of which are comprehensive while others concentrate on particular aspects of the idea.

You could think of the digital workplace as the workplace’s logical evolution. It includes all of the tools that employees use to carry out their duties. This can include intranets, portals, enterprise social media tools, email, instant messaging, HR applications, and core business applications. The majority of businesses, if not all, have a workplace.

Establishing a digital workplace that facilitates improved productivity for your employees should be your primary objective. Delivering work in a way that is usable, consistent, and fruitful requires a comprehensive set of environments, tools, and platforms. This places importance on the worker or individual’s encounter with their workplace and its surroundings.

You need to incorporate your company’s various means of internal and external communication into your larger plan for the digital workplace. By doing so, you can make sure the enterprise collaboration tools you implement actually improve the efficiency of your business’s operations.

Popular and Powerful Business Communication Tools You Can Start Using Today.

In response to these shifts, many of the most successful corporations and governments have adopted digital workplace strategies. The digital workplace has eliminated barriers to communication and is transforming the employee experience to one that supports efficiency, growth, and innovation by smartly combining technologies that many businesses already use.

However, the strategy for the digital workplace must be implemented, and it must be one that can bring about genuine transformation if it is to be successful.

Creative Social Intranet

An intranet is a secure network that employees of a company can use to communicate with one another and access internal company resources. Its primary functions include facilitating internal communication and digital collaboration, as well as providing quick and simple access to relevant resources. Content management systems (CMSs) are widely used in the development of today’s intranets because they allow for relatively simple maintenance by non-technical personnel.

The advent of BYOD and telecommuting has increased the need for an intranet solution to keep employees on the same page and increase productivity.

Intranets make it simple to disseminate company updates and create a knowledge base that employees can access from anywhere using any device. This makes it an excellent medium for encouraging team spirit among employees from various backgrounds.

Every member of your staff can have their own homepage news feed tailored specifically to them based on their team, department, and/or location. In addition, this can be connected to access controls to restrict who can view private or secret data.

Intranets take this a step further by enabling easier communication between dispersed teams of employees. Coworkers can share their latest developments with one another in a timely fashion. Colleagues can respond in real-time to content, and the news can be sent to specific groups based on geography or field of expertise.

You should consider adopting an intranet strategy if you:

• There seems to be a breakdown in communication between departments and employees, making it difficult for you and your staff to stay abreast of company announcements and news.
• Misplaced or lost documents and emails containing crucial information are a common problem.
• There’s far too much paperwork to be done.
• No uniform or well-defined policy exists for introducing new workers and interns to the company.
• The establishment of multidisciplinary groups for the purpose of resource allocation is a challenging task.
• Your staff lacks a sense of unity with management and headquarters.

Groups/Messaging

It is widely agreed that one of the most effective business communication tools for maintaining cohesive teams is the availability of private or group messaging and chat functions within a shared workspace. For managers and workers with hectic schedules, this method of communication is ideal. Keeping everyone on the same page and having general team discussions is much simpler with instant messaging.

This is useful when a group’s members are located in different parts of the world and/or observe different time zones. If necessary, files can be transferred and conversations retrieved.

Open discussions on any topic (typically set up and supervised) can bring together management and employees. In addition to improving accessibility (thanks to the built-in search feature), it can aid in the sharing of information and the unification of the workforce.

Though chat rooms and group messaging platforms share some visual similarities, their interfaces are often quite distinct.

In Slack, for instance, you can create separate “channels” for each of your projects, topics, or teams. Essentially, these feeds are online discussion forums. Everyone who enters a channel is presented with a continuous feed of all of the recent activity in that space, including @mentions, replies, files shared, polls, and more.

However, the UI of Microsoft Teams is unique. Channels, analogous to the ones in Slack, can be set up for every project, topic, or group. Instead, it has a more compartmentalized layout. Using tabbed interfaces for comments, files, and wikis.

Manage Projects

Any project your team works on will benefit from the use of a good project management tool that will aid in its organization, management, and execution.

The interdependence of various participants, activities, and due dates is a common source of stress for project managers.

The majority of PM software is designed to provide a graphical representation of the project’s status, making it much simpler for team members to monitor both their individual contributions and the overall trajectory of the project.

Here are a few things to keep an eye out for:

• Controlling the workflow by allocating work, setting reminders, and keeping tabs on completed tasks
• Personal task lists
• Tools like Kanban Boards, Gantt Charts, and other visual displays facilitate communication and planning.
• Calculator for keeping tabs on time or upcoming events
• Integrated tools for communication and teamwork
• Fits your company’s specific requirements
• Integrations

Software for Cases & Tracking

Whether you’re an employee or a customer, you can submit a case or support ticket to be tracked by an online help desk. In this way, it can be given to the appropriate staff member and addressed promptly.

A case management system is useful for organizing customer service requests and keeping tabs on open problems.

Maintain an accurate record of your team’s output, assign high priority to the questions that matter most, and amass useful customer comments for use in making future adjustments to your offerings and strengthening your rapport with existing clients.

Customer service departments often use an issue-tracking system to log, monitor, and ultimately resolve issues raised by customers and internal stakeholders alike.

Internal Company Newsletters & Blogs.

One more viable alternative is a private blog & company newsletters. Both your customers and rivals won’t have access to this information.

With the company blog, staff members can quickly and casually discuss topics of interest to the group. A few of the benefits of keeping a blog within your company are:

• The practice of making public and drawing attention to a worker’s expertise in a particular area of the company.
• Making a searchable database of previously published articles, previously acquired knowledge, and previously demonstrated expertise. Any content added to a private blog will remain there permanently unless the administrator removes it.
• It encourages people to speak freely and work together in the workplace. Some workers may feel more comfortable raising concerns in a virtual setting than in person.
• Collaboration across divisions is facilitated.

It ensures that all employees are aware of recent developments and news regarding the company.

Video Conferencing

The popularity of video conferencing apps has skyrocketed alongside the growth of remote and hybrid work arrangements because they allow businesses to keep running even when employees aren’t in the office.

They are crucial for maintaining contact with the formerly office-based workforce.

Audio as well as video conferences can be scheduled with as few as one person or as many as a few thousand for a corporate communication update using a conferencing app.

Video conferencing is more interesting than normal phone calls and makes it easier to identify who is talking in a group setting. Virtual meetings are a convenient replacement for in-person get-togethers with clients, partners, and suppliers because participants can easily share their screens and files with one another. Zoom Meetings, among other video conferencing apps, lets you swap in a custom virtual backdrop.

Conclusion

Although it may be difficult, it is possible to maintain open lines of communication among employees who are spread out across multiple locations and shift schedules.

Now is the time to begin investigating the various options in technology and making a choice about what will serve your organization best. Don’t feel like you have to pick just one method.

First, settle on a medium that can serve as the backbone of all your future interactions. For example, many businesses use an intranet platform for their internal communication requirements because it allows them to establish team workspaces, quickly locate staff information such as areas of expertise, send individualized news and information to various staff members, and configure security permissions to guarantee that only authorized individuals have access to sensitive company data.

Then, they add extra features to their platform by incorporating social media and video-sharing sites like Skype for Business, Facebook, YouTube, and so on. Because of this, businesses can provide their employees with a unified system for sharing and receiving information.