Business communications, which is the succinct way to say the sharing of information between people both internal and external to a company, is a key player in that company’s success. Here, we’ll analyze the different types of communication that a business could leverage, and the solutions that best enable them.

What Makes Business Communication So Important?

How well your business is able to communicate is a critical consideration to its success. If communications are lacking, it will be more challenging to accomplish your organizational goals, come to agreements, sell your services, meet effectively, etc. In fact, in some way, shape, or form, every aspect of your business will be negatively influenced by ineffective communications.

Considering that these kinds of communication capabilities (among many other benefits) can help to boost your operating income by 19.2 percent over a year, it just makes sense - and that’s before taking the 32.7 percent decrease in growth that low engagement has been tied to, into account.

There are a few different means and methods for you to boost your business communications, depending on the type of communication you are focused on.

Internal Communications

This kind of communication involves everything that remains in-house, like the lateral communication that takes place between your employees and their different departments, as well as upwards and downwards toward business members of different levels, like when you discuss matters with an employee or vice versa.

External Communications

This variety of communication covers any and all that involve someone who isn’t a part of the office, like your clients or your vendors.

Whomever is involved in a given business communication, it is going to pertain to one of four goals (if not touching on more than one of them).

1. Passing Along and Receiving Instructions - As one might imagine, many types of communication in business are focused on assigning responsibilities and tasks. Lacking communications here contributes to many other serious issues.
2. Sharing Information and Discussion - It is crucial that information reaches everyone that needs it in order for all assignments to be completed in a timely fashion - assuming they’re completed at all.
3. Improving Performance Through Feedback - Can you really expect your employees to improve their job performance if they’re never informed of what needs to be improved, or what they’re doing correctly? (Hint: you really can’t.)
4. Strategic Discussions - Without this communication taking place, a business is prone to becoming stagnant in its growth and improvement. In order to boost the quality and productivity of these discussions, reliable communication tools are required.

How a Business Can Communicate

There’s a variety of methods that can be leveraged to accomplish these goals, including:

Web-Based Communications

Web-based communications pertain to a wide variety of solutions, many of which should be quite familiar. Email, instant messaging, and others all allow communication to be established, without involving more people than necessary. As a result, disruptions are kept minimized and productivity can commence.

Telephone

This tried and true technology still has a very real place in the office, and with the introduction of methods like Voice over Internet Protocol, can now cost businesses significantly less.

Video Conferencing

Conferencing solutions are a great way to make any distances between your employees and the people they are trying to contact seem much smaller - and video conferencing only boosts this effect. Plus, it allows you to communicate using cues that the phone just can’t translate well.

This is far from a complete list of the tools that a business can use to simplify its operations. To learn more about them (and to see what would best suit your business), reach out to the professionals at (203) 261-2201.