Communication is one of the most valuable leadership skills you can possess. With effective communication, you can motivate your employees, provide them with the tools they need to succeed, and help encourage them and keep up their energy even when things don’t seem to be going their way. Using the right communication platform–and using it to its fullest extent–can go a long way toward helping to enhance your overall leadership capability as well as providing you with a deeper connection to your whole team.
Improve employee motivation
Around 85% of employees are more motivated as a result of effective internal communication. Employees want to know what’s going on. They want to know that their projects and their efforts are making a difference. Most importantly, they want to know that they are making important contributions to the company as a whole–and that your management team recognizes them for those contributions.
With effective communication, you can go a long way toward keeping employees motivated.
Provide an effective strategy for employees to offer their feedback.
Many employees don’t speak up in the workplace, not because they don’t have effective ideas or even problems that they might be facing, but because they don’t know who to go to. Should they let their manager know that they’ve uncovered a problem with a client account? Of course. What about if they’ve identified a bigger problem: a compliance issue, for example? What if there’s an HR issue, including harassment or discrimination in the workplace?
An effective communication platform can provide employees with a clear look at exactly the steps they need to take when they encounter a potential problem or have something they need to report. Pronto, for example, can connect employees directly to their management team and allow them to receive immediate feedback and answers when needed–but it can also provide employees with access to the HR team, higher-level managers, and specific departments within your organization, including IT. When employees can clearly see how they can contact the people they need–and who they need to contact with specific issues–they’re often more likely to address those issues directly.
Keep projects moving.
Many challenges can slow down your projects–and send employee motivation plummeting along with them. Roadblocks, a lack of information, and even slow delivery on the part of other team members can all slow down the process and make it hard for your team to keep their motivation high.
With effective communication, however, you can go a long way toward keeping the ball rolling, even when there may be challenges along the way that make it hard to keep up motivation. You can:
- Provide regular updates through announcements or group chats that will let team members know what’s happening behind the scenes.
- Hold meetings and collaboration sessions that will allow team members to work together.
- Break out small groups for smaller sessions so that each member of the team can remain engaged.
The more involved team members are, the easier it is to keep up engagement and motivation even when things aren’t going according to plan.
Improve overall transparency
Only about 49% of the employees in an average company feel that they are well-informed about important decisions made by the company: what decisions have been made, who made them, and what factors contributed to those decisions. Without that transparency, employees might, over time, lose the support they feel for the company as a whole, or they might not know what steps they need to take to align with the organization as its values and plans shift.
Transparency, on the other hand, can help improve your employees’ connection to the company as a whole.
Send out announcements that share critical information.
Make sure that employees always stay informed with the latest changes across your company, whether that means providing them with more information about the latest updates to company policy or keeping them informed about your latest big projects. With Pronto’s Announcements feature, you can send out one-way announcements on critical changes or steps in the organization, with comments and replies turned off to prevent further commentary or turned on to allow conversations about any critical issues.
Answer employee questions privately.
Sometimes, employees may have questions about what the company is doing and why. You may want to answer them publicly, or you may prefer to keep those answers more private, between you and a specific employee or among a group of employees. Pronto makes it easy to do all of the above, whether you want to hold a virtual meeting to share that critical information or send out a message to a specific group of employees.
Send out personal, positive direct messages
Proving employee feedback is one of the critical pieces that can make for an excellent manager. Your private messages through Pronto are the ideal place to do that. You can send out motivating messages when you notice that specific employees are starting to struggle, during downtimes or difficult periods, or regularly.
Offer motivation and support.
Let your employees know that you’re thinking about them, that you care about them, and that you’re prepared to check in on them. Give them a boost when they need it most. Appear in their inboxes when they need that additional support, especially during a difficult project. The more support you provide to the members of your team, the better you can establish rapport and show your employees that you genuinely care about who they are and what they have to deal with, both on the job and off.
Provide regular feedback on employee performance.
As part of your general leadership tasks, you should provide regular feedback on your employees’ performance. Ideally, you don’t just want to give that feedback at the end of a project, when it may be more difficult for employees to make immediate changes–or when they may have continued to utilize the “wrong” method or strategy for the duration of the project. Instead, you should make sure that you’re providing regular feedback as each project goes on, allowing employees to adapt and adjust as needed.
Pronto makes it simple to provide that feedback. You can send private messages directly to your employees, which will create a virtual “paper trail” that they can use to keep up with what has been said, or host one-on-one virtual meetings that will allow you to go over what an employee has accomplished and how you expect them to change their performance in the future. During those sessions, you also have the opportunity to address employees’ goals and what steps they need to take to meet those goals with your organization.
Keep your finger on the overall pulse of the organization
As a leader or manager, you don’t have to be involved in every communication or conversation that takes place via Pronto–nor should you. In some cases, employees may want to communicate themselves: to share information via chat, to collaborate on bigger projects, or even to engage in off-topic conversation. Most of the time, you can let those conversations go on without you.
As a leader, however, you do have the ability to access the conversations and chats that are taking place within Pronto–which can help you stay aware of what your employees might be dealing with. Your overall access can also make it easier for employees to loop you in when needed.
Set notifications so that you can join the conversation when employees have a specific question or need.
With Pronto, you can set up your notifications so that you get a specific note if your name is mentioned during a conversation–most often because your employees want to pull you in. That simple feature makes it easy for you to answer employee questions, look over information on a specific project, or keep up with timely requests. As a result, you’re able to remain accessible to your employees while virtually tuning out conversations that you don’t need to participate in.
Review employee discussions periodically.
In addition to participating in discussions that involve you directly, or getting pulled in when your employees need you, you can review employee discussions periodically–especially if there’s something that you need to look out for. Is there a known harassment problem in the organization? Are you worried that employees might be having problems in specific areas, whether that’s addressing a specific client, dealing with a specific project, or handling a new change in the workplace? By reviewing employee discussions, you can keep track of what’s going on across the organization, which can help the entire leadership team respond more effectively.
Effective communication doesn’t happen overnight. As a leader, however, you must learn how to utilize those skills. Pronto helps make it easy. With our wide array of communication tools, you can more easily stay in touch with your employees, keep up with what they’re doing, and provide them with feedback that will help them grow. Is Pronto the ideal communication solution for your business? Contact us today for a demonstration.
