How to Choose The Perfect Medium of Business Communication
Publié le 28 November 2022
Grow your business and improve team performance by knowing how to choose the perfect medium of business communication for your workforce.
Whether you’re selecting a business phone solution or a project management tool, it’s important to understand how communication enhances your team’s performance.
As we’ll see, you’ll need different tools and mediums for different workforces and contexts. It’s why some teams need a weekly strategy meeting that takes up most of an afternoon, and why some establish limits like “no meeting days”, where people have to use asynchronous tools like email and chat.
If you have the wrong medium of business communication, you could hold back your team’s progress. Developers might need long periods of focus, while the marketing team might be inspired by in-person collaboration. With 86% of workers citing bad communication as a cause of business failure, the future success of your business may depend on this choice.
With that in mind, let’s look over some of the communication methods you have available, and how to choose the perfect medium of business communication for your workforce.
What is a medium of business communication, and why is it important?
By “medium of business communication”, we mean any method of delivering a message to your workforce. That could mean phone calls, text messages, emails, videos, Webinars (using the best webinar software), or even in-person meetings.
It’s important to keep information flowing through a business, and effective communication is a big part of that. If this isn’t working as intended, staff could miss important information and teams could be stuck in their own “silo” where they don’t know what’s going on in other teams. But picking the right method of business communication can raise productivity by as much as 25% and help your teams make better decisions.
Communication channels for your workforce may be formal, casual, synchronous or asynchronous. A slide deck delivered during an all-hands meeting is a formal communication channel and provides employees with a clear understanding of the objectives of the business.
On the other hand, informal communication channels might be Slack channels about specific business-related topics. Finally, unofficial channels of communication might be any platform that team members use after hours to talk about anything, like a WhatsApp group between a few team members.
It’s important to make sure your message reaches your intended audience and that they fully understand its meaning and relevance, which is why you must use the right medium of communication. The audience is far more likely to listen to, see, or read what you’re saying and understand it when you use the right channel.
For example, engaging in face-to-face communication with someone can help guarantee that they understand you and have the chance to ask questions for clarification. Whether it’s in-person or over a video call, it’s the best channel for that conversation. On the other hand, sending an email is the right tool for the job if you’re just enquiring about another company’s services and don’t need an urgent reply, or you know they’ll need some time to get back to you about costs.
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Mediums of communication
Face-to-face contact is one of the most popular forms of communication at work, even in hybrid companies. It’s the most “high bandwidth” of these mediums, using both verbal and nonverbal cues. This method of communication has the advantage of being immediate. And while there’s no tooling to optimize the experience, there are no technical difficulties in the way: everyone can take part in a conversation. Speaking with someone in person rather than over a virtual channel like a video conference can make it easier to recognize and understand their nonverbal signs, and is the best option for sensitive discussions.
Virtual and remote communication
“Virtual” or “remote communication” covers several channels, all enhanced by the latest software. If you know how to port a phone number to a virtual device enabled by VoIP, you can always phone someone up without thinking about if they’re in the office today or working from home.
Meetings can be joined from anywhere in the world, from one-on-one catch-ups to all-hands gatherings with hundreds of people in one “room”. And it’s not just office work that’s being transformed. Doctors can use video conferencing to view patients and provide remote therapy, bringing this channel to the fore in several industries like healthcare. Sometimes you just need a face-to-face presence, like when you need to hold big strategic talks or communicate important decisions to your remote team. Find the right business phone solution can help make for seamless communication.
Despite the popularity of the video call, the old-fashioned phone call isn’t going away. A phone call is often ideal for a very quick chat because nobody has to worry about their background or getting their audio setup right. A voicemail can be left if the person you phoned is unavailable, and in a VoIP phone comparison you can set smart routing options so that calls always get to someone in the know.
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Written communication
Writing is still an essential medium of business communication, despite all the other tools available. One reason for that is that it’s more asynchronous than voice, and a complex email or memo can be broken down and responded to in bitesize chunks.
The other reason is documentation. Important memos can be a useful way to preserve knowledge and onboard new employees. For example, Amazon uses six-page memos in meetings rather than powerpoints, and new employees are encouraged to read the archive to get a sense of how they want people to think about problems.
When you need an informal opinion or rapid collaboration on a project, writing a message in a chat app like Slack is the way to go. The mixture of public, private, and semi-private chatrooms in these apps is also good for sharing knowledge. If the marketing and sales managers can discuss an issue in the public channel, both marketing and sales teams can learn to think through problems the way they do and ask the right questions in their own work. Preserving and “transmitting” company culture like this was much easier in-person, but written communication gives you one great way to do it remotely.
Despite all the tools available, email is still the most popular medium for written communication. Email’s strength over chat is that your messages are archived, so the team can easily refer back to information years after the fact. The only issue is that because employees receive so many emails each day, it might be too easy for them to overlook important information.
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How to choose the right channel
There are a few factors to consider when choosing the best medium of business communication for your situation.
Formality
More formal communication may be used in some situations than others. An email demonstrates extra effort and thought that other forms of communication might not demand, which is why you might use email for company-wide memos rather than video conferences.
Purpose
Consider the goal of your message. For instance, to reach a big audience and provide the audience members the chance to ask questions right away, you can decide to conduct a live presentation to instruct a group of new employees. If you want to solicit more careful feedback, you might send a company-wide email or a short survey where people have to put effort into writing their answers.
Accessibility
Based on the channel you’ve chosen, take into account how easily your audience can access the message. While some audiences might find it easier to communicate remotely, others might prefer face-to-face interaction and the soft skills involved.
If you need to get a lot of complex information across with good comprehension, you should send an email so people can re-read if they have to. Your message will be more likely to be understood if you take your audience’s accessibility demands into account.
The type of information
Certain media are more effective at expressing particular types of information. For instance, using visual aids can help you communicate with your audience while you’re sharing facts and statistics.
If you’re discussing data trends, you might pick a medium that allows you to include pictures because they help your audience understand data. Having a written record like email might help you store knowledge that you might need to refer to later. If you want to save a record of a conversation, you could want to use email or have someone take minutes of an in-person meeting.
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Your team’s needs
Your team’s needs and preferences should play a big role in the communication channels you choose. Who are they, and which platforms do they use? Do they favor text messaging, phone conversations, or other types of communication? Do their jobs require long periods of deep focus, or is it good for them to always be aware of what’s going on in other teams? That’ll make the difference between updating people with a weekly email “newsletter“, or a stream of daily check-ins with a Slack bot.
Choosing the right medium of business communication
The right medium of business communication for you will depend on the team and the company culture, but it also varies by context. Employee engagement surveys and analytics can help you see what works, but the best first step is often to just ask people about how they work best and what they need to know. This might vary by individual, but over time you’ll find ways to improve communication for everyone, increasing output by up to 30%. How to Choose The Perfect Medium of Business Communication For Your Workforce
