My guest this month, coach for the self-employed Emma Cossey, shares her favourite communication tools for improving communication between colleagues – if your diary is over-run with unproductive meetings, this is the post for you.
- “Meetings should be like salt – a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.”
Jason Fried, Founder & CEO at basecamp.com
Meetings can often be the go-to in organisations for communication, closely followed by email. But are these the most efficient way to communicate?
Here are three alternatives to improve communication in your organisation.
Slack
Slack is a team messaging tool, which you can use to share messages (text or audio), share documents, and collaborate on. You can create channels for different topics, so for example you might have one for website admin, one for social, one for finances etc. It intergrates with lots of other tools too, so you can sync it with Asana to alert them when a task is done, forward emails to pop up in Slack, save Facebook page posts to a channel and much more.
Zoom
I’m a firm believer that a lot of meetings, especially group meetings, are ineffective. And organising one when some of your team are remote can be challenging. Most communication can be done over Slack, but if you do need to jump on a meeting, Zoom is a great tool to use. It’s a video meeting tool (so, none of that calling in to a voice-only one where you have a lot of awkward silences when you’re not sure who is speaking next), which can be recorded.
Voxer
Voxer is perfect for the colleagues you have who are always on the run. It’s a ‘walkie talkie’ app for recording messages to send to each other. You can use text too, but it’s great if your colleagues wants to give you a quick bit of feedback or an update when they’re running between meetings.
Which tools do you love for communicating?
Emma Cossey is The Freelance Lifestyle Coach, a career and life coach specialising in helping freelancers and the self-employed achieve their goals. She’s also runs The Freelance Lifestyle, a blog, podcast, and Facebook community for lovely freelance types.