The three steps necessary to improve team communications are:
- To reduce/bridge distance
- To document relevant outcomes (or to stay away from paper as I say in my own workshops)
- To establish rituals
#1 Way to Improve Team Communication: Reduce & Bridge Distance
To encourage open communication people need to be able to actually communicate with each other. For those working directly together this isn’t normally an issue but for those not directly working together reducing the distance is essential. This is hardly a new idea, since the 1970s managers have been trying to bridge the gap between themselves and the workforce through a number of techniques. The ones I personally remember are open-door policies, in which managers would literally leave their office doors open to encourage more communication, and the so-called “Management By Walking Around” technique made popular by the 1982 book, In Search of Excellence.
More recently we’ve seen the development of open office floors and another technique, “Management By Sitting Around” where managers are leaving their private offices to sit and work among their staff. All these different techniques have their advantages and problems, so I think it suffices to say here that what works and doesn’t will be completely situation dependent. Through experimentation an organization should decipher what works best for their own situation, the point is that something needs to be done to get people talking to each other.
#2 Way to Improve Team Communication: Stay Away From Paper
Paper here doesn’t refer to actual paper, rather it’s any form of written messages. Since the introduction of the PC in the workplace in the 1980s, we’ve come to rely more and more on written communication. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, as a ‘paper’ trail allows us to keep track of messages and look up things we forgot. However, too often people can be found emailing or texting while sitting next to each other.
This is wrong because most of us don’t actually read those messages, we just scan and forget. A better way would be to first talk to each other and then follow up with a written message. If talking means leaving your office/desk to go and find someone even better, you’ll get some much needed exercise as well. If this is physically not doable, a phone or video call would be better than an email or text message. The spoken word simply has a more direct effect than a written message, especially in an age where we receive far more messages then we can effectively process.
#3 Way to Improve Team Communication: Establish Rituals
Probably the most important step to take for “talking more” is the establishment of rituals. The reason for this is that rituals provide a sense of connection and thus help improve communication.
When I was working as an airline Operations Officer in Spain in 2001, we had a simple but effective ritual. Every morning, the officer on duty gave a quick briefing about what was going on with the fleet and what issues might be expected throughout the day. All staff were required to attend these briefings, even though the content did not have any real relevance for most of them. The point of their attendance was show that they were important in the process of keeping the fleet afloat despite the fact they were administrative support staff and their work didn’t have much to do with the airplanes. The positive outcome of these briefings was that our admin staff felt involved and as a result engaged with the pilots, technicians and other specialists about what was going on in their world. Casual conversations in which both parties felt comfortable using the jargon of the aviation business. Some other examples of rituals would be the daily stand-up meetings and retrospectives of Scrum teams, weekly video conference meetings for remote teams or even Friday afternoon drinks for office staff after a week of hard work.
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