Communication is the key to everything. It’s more true than I would like to believe. When an ex co-founder and I started working on idea, the communication rapport between us was great. We jointly decided on everything, and it felt good. We launched our website, and things were fine for couple of months.
Then suddenly things didn’t seem to be going that well, and instead of communicating, my co-founder decided to not communicate instead. It left me with hours of frustration – I couldn’t understand whether it was because I was doing something wrong, or he had lost interest. Either way, I wanted to know as my career was dependent on this.
Without any proper communication we went on for an year and I felt that things weren’t going well. I decided to say ‘enough is enough’ and chose to move on. Fast forward 2 years and things are really great.
I work with a bunch of people who keep on updating and communicating on things that we need to know. I don’t have to bang my head against the wall to know what is going on. It saves me a lot of time guessing what could be the reason the way any emails/calls were not replied back.
When you have to keep guessing why something happened or why something didn’t happen as it were expected, your overall productivity also reduces.
Now I know exactly, what my colleagues are expected to do; they know what I am expected to do. We can follow up on each other, if something doesn’t happen on time and need not waste time and energy to follow up with what the other person is working on.
Communicating clearly and updating your peers is such an easy task – it doesn’t even take 1 minute to drop an email or update the CRM if you have any in place but it’s clearly one of the most misused tool.
Some of the tools used by us to keep a track on
1. Asana: This is one of the best tool to keep a track of bugs, enhancements, to-dos and so on.
2. Hipchat: In my previous company, we used Yammer to communicate with colleagues. For a while it worked great. Since Yammer replicated the one of the famous social networking features, everyone used it for a while. After some time the enthusiasm waned. Hipchat works great, as you can chat with your colleagues one to one and create department groups. The best part of Hipchat is that it documents, files and links. I can go back anytime and get my links back.
3. Email: Nothing can beat email even in this age. If you have a message to send, email works the best and a lot of time a reply is guaranteed. Tip: mention in the email if a reply is expected. A lot of emails go unanswered as the reader has no clue what s/he is expected to do.
Please reply how you communicate within your organization.
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