Top 5 Ways to Communicate Better with Your Employees

Do you feel like the communication between you and your employees has been a little off lately?

Out of all the challenges business owners are faced with, sometimes, team communication can be the most difficult. This is probably partly because effective communication doesn’t just happen at the snap of a finger.

Effectively communicating with your employees requires effort, thoughtfulness and repetition in order for it to become natural.

So, if you’re not the best at communicating with your employees right now, don’t sweat it. You just need to start forming the right practices. Read on to learn the top 5 ways to better communicate with your employees.

1. Send Weekly Correspondence to All of Your Employees

Pick a day of the week, usually Mondays or Fridays are best, to send out a weekly email to all of your employees.

If you can, try to individualize each one as much as possible. If this isn’t feasible, at least tailor them by department. The email you send doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just a simple correspondence about your important updates and things you are thinking about for your business.

A weekly email that your employees can depend on will help establish trust and provide for a consistent line of communication.

Also, it’s super important that when an employee responds to your email with a question or inquiry, you do your best to reply within 24 hours.

2. Hold Meetings

No matter the size of your company, you should plan to hold regular meetings with your employees.

However, make sure these meetings don’t just involve you lecturing your employees. Instead, it should be an open dialogue between you and your employees.

The more room for dialogue you create, the more you’ll be able to learn about your business and grow as a leader.

3. Make Internal Information Accessible

Sometimes, it can feel like an almost impossible task to get all the moving parts of your business to flow together.

Therefore, it’s extremely important that you have some form of internal documentation that lets everyone know what page everyone else is on.

From company protocol to a client-facing document that is being prepared, your team will fare much better if they have some internal program they can all see so they know where everyone’s at.

4.  Plan External Events

Think about previous jobs you had. You probably had at least one or two coworkers that you didn’t truly know.

Creating events outside the workplace can give employees the opportunity to get to know you and each other on a more personal level.

This doesn’t need to be anything elaborate that you spend months planning either. A simple happy hour or holiday party is perfect to give employees the chance to kick back and get to know one another.

5. Build Up Comfort in Talking About the Negatives

Companies want to breed a culture of positivity. Unfortunately, this sometimes means companies only talk about the positives in emails and meetings, and leave out the negative stuff.

But, if you want your company to be great, you need to get comfortable discussing what isn’t working for your business as well.

Giving employees the opportunity to talk about the negatives also makes them feel valued and like they have a say in company culture.