Good communication is fundamental to a profitable business. The public tends to associate “communication” with marketing, public relations and a business’ other external interactions. However, business owners and employees know that internal communication is just as important if not more important. You will often hear internal communication referred to as the glue that holds an organization together—the weaker the bond, the faster business processes breakdown. If your team can’t communicate properly, they will waste a lot of time, which ultimately costs your business money.
Small business owners worry about the coordination of their teams. Their enterprises lack robust training programs and established systems like larger firms. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll understand the pressure of keeping your company productive with a small number of employees and big performance expectations. While you’re busy trying to keep things in the black, the lack of communication between yourself and your personnel stands out. The knee-jerk reaction to this problem is to check in more often with your employees, schedule more meetings, and frequently change team priorities based on work status. This “work about work” most likely costs your business a lot more than you can imagine.
According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, the typical worker spends 60% of their time on “work about work” and not doing skilled work. If your team spends more time talking about work than working, you’re not communicating effectively. Bad management is usually to blame. However, circumstances can also be part of the problem.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to effective team communication is remote work. Remote work is typically a way to reduce overheads, but now, it has become necessary for many business owners. The transition to remote work exposes the weaknesses in communication —inadequate reporting mechanisms, no system for task updates, limited means of remote collaboration.
The obvious solution here is to employ a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service with instant messaging. Many hosted VoIP services for businesses can help you solve any communication problems, but cost remains a pressing matter. Paying for a hosted VoIP service only adds to overhead costs. Fortunately, there is a free alternative that solves these problems.
Discord is a VoIP service, with capabilities for instant messaging, file sharing and more. Your enterprise can have a private server with different channels for text, voice and live video streaming. You can even add bots to the discord server to automate a wide range of tasks or effectively add features. For example, you can add a bot that periodically posts industry news from a site of your choosing. Discord’s versatility is remarkable even with the free version, which is more than enough for a small or micro-enterprise.
Unfortunately, Discord’s biggest strength is also its greatest weakness in a business context. Its sandbox nature makes the initial learning curve a bit steep for those unfamiliar with the service. Business-focused VoIP services tend to be more streamlined to meet specific business needs.
For some firms, the bare bones are good enough. Regardless, it all comes down to finding the most cost-effective solution.
Discord offers near-limitless possibilities without the prohibitively expensive cost. You can try your hand at learning how to use Discord to optimize your communication or have our team at Dominate Tech make it easy for you.
Stay tuned for more tips on our next blog post. Don’t hesitate to improve your small business’ communication! Book a consultation with Dominate Tech today!