“As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.”
—Ben Horowitz
Communication is key to any team. In business, it decides the success or failure of the teamwork, which directly influences the business outcomes. A team’s communication becomes easier when the team is smaller. But when the business expands the team, then the roller coaster begins. As rightly said by Ben Horowitz, the renowned American businessman, investor, and author, communication turns out to be a hurdle for teams when the business grows. Luckily, if addressed, the business can effortlessly dodge the challenges and failures. Otherwise, they shrink. What a secret in the business arsenal!
Small Businesses and Their Communication Challenges
Entrepreneurs expand their business from a one-man army to a small-scale business and that’s where the bottlenecks kick in within the team. Though the resources are limited, there are a lot of chances for them to voice out wrongly or not voice out when needed. This gap paves the way for misalignment in goals and actions. When the goal of the business is misunderstood, everything from productivity to results becomes unfavorable.
Besides this gap, there are other challenges, like a waste of time and effort repeating the communications or sharing the already shared information, using several communication tools and ending up confused, and a lack of transparency and accessibility of required information.
Can a Team Communication App Help These Small Businesses?
As the name clearly says, a team communication application is a digitally built software or a tool that helps teams with communication—precisely effective communication. Believe it or not, this one application can overcome all the above-seen hurdles or communication challenges of small businesses. Also, with this app, every team member can stay updated or well-informed of the business goals without any dilemma or misunderstanding and continue to improve their efficiency and productivity at work. Consequently, the business can plan, collaborate, coordinate, work, and succeed together as a team.
What are the Key Features of a Team Communication App That Small Businesses Can Make Use of?
- Real-time instant messaging
The app allows users to send instant messages like other messaging or communication apps. It can be in the form of messages, posts, updates, etc.
Use case: Project managers or team leads can swiftly respond to queries or requests raised by the subordinates. Accordingly, the team can start working on the resolution or plan of action.
- Group or team communications in one-tap
There is no need to forward messages like how the team leads forward emails. The users can broadcast information to groups with one click and every member of the group receives instant notification of the same.
Use case: Any latest updates or news can be shared on the group with less effort and time. This improves transparency and reduces the time taken to make decisions in small business teams.
- Easy sharing of varied data forms
Any form of data—files, documents, links, images, videos, gifs, etc.—can be attached to the posts or messages.
Use case: Team members can share presentations or data files with required members or users simply by tagging them. Also, the teams working on the floor can make better use of this application to send operational videos and the management can easily get access to what’s happening on the floor.
- A user-friendly tool at no cost
Even a free team communication app has all the necessary features that a small business team requires, like communication, coordination, and management.
Use case: Business teams need not allocate a budget to download, install, and use this communication application. Any number of users can download this and be a part of the respective teams or groups.
- Well-managed tasks or action items
Users can create tasks and assign them to specific group members or give them suitable roles.
Use case: Projects can be created and tracked based on the latest progress updates that the team members post on the group. Also, every project or task can be tracked easily, which is valuable to every small business.
- Improved features and integrations
The app allows the data integration of other entities, like calendars, emails, notes, etc., including the commonly used drives like OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, and Drop Box.
Use case: Teams can use this as a one-stop app as all the other tools can be easily integrated and one data exists everywhere without duplication or different versions.
- Safe, secured, and private
The app ensures the data shared on the group or the community is kept safe and secured.
Use case: Confidential data or information of the business can be kept in closed groups so that it stands private and secured. No one other than the team members can access the data shared on the group.
A Step-by-step Approach to Boosting Productivity in Small Business Through a Free Team Communication App
Small business teams can easily download and use a team management or communication app free of charge from the Play or App Store. Here is a simple 5-step approach to using them effectively for boosting productivity in small-scale businesses.
Step 1: Small businesses can create dedicated groups based on the goals or projects of the business.
Step 2: The team or project lead can become the owner of the group, add the respective team members to the respective groups, and assign roles to each of them.
Step 3: The group owner can schedule the calendars based on the plan of action and agreed deadlines (this has to be done as best practice after every discussion or business meeting).
Step 4: The group owner can send the meetings’ or events’ invites to the team members and the invitees can RSVP via the same free application. Also, the group owner can record the minutes, results, KPIs, etc. after every meeting or event via the application.
Step 5: The group owners and members can share the feedback via the application so that it serves as a historical repository of references for futuristic teams or projects.
Conclusion
Effective communication between and among the teams in a business is crucial for the effectiveness of the actions and outcomes. In simple words, it is directly proportional to the productivity and success of the business. When a communication app comes to the small business’s rescue, and that too at no added cost to the business, why not make use of it?
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