Growing your team or looking for ways to improve communication amongst team members? Then you’ll want to tune into this week’s podcast episode. Time and time again we are learning the best ways to communicate with one another, about projects, with our clients, and this week are sharing why it’s crucial for your business. 

Listen now – Apple | Spotify | Youtube

Communication is a major aspect of any team event when it’s a small team, but even more so when your team grows! Here at Render we have added 4 new positions to our company this year and have really appreciated our ability to communicate through the process of onboarding each member.

So whether your business has a growing team like ours this year or if you’re still a party of one (nothing wrong with that!) knowing how to effectively communicate your needs or expectations is crucial to growth. Even as a party of one, hiring your first employee and sharing your expectations of their role is something you can never prepare too early for!

Your Team & Their Personalities

One of the first things we want to encourage you to do is try to understand how each person on your team prefers to communicate and operate. This will give you immense knowledge when it comes to conversations in the future. Plus meeting your team where they are at or how they prefer to be approached will help them build their trust with you as an employer and leader.

A step further is to know their personality type and how that can play into their communication style. At Render, knowing what our team’s personality traits are has been a game changer for everyone. There are plenty of personality assessments you can research and utilize. We have chosen to use the Enneagram to get to know each other better here, which has been so helpful.

Necessary lines of communication

Creating lines of communication for your team is essential. Think about daily communication needs, long-term, and when you’re not working during work hours how you can communicate tasks or information that arises.

Let’s talk daily first — There are many things that need to be communicated from details about events, to what’s happening at the office, to something new someone thinks of, things that your team brainstorms or generates ideas about

How can your team effectively communicate about daily tasks? Will it be via Slack, Asana, email, text, phone calls, etc.? Have you asked them their preference or what makes the most sense for your company? These are the questions you should be asking.

Something else you could ask when deciding where to streamline your communication is are there options that better support work-life boundaries? Our team uses Slack for the majority of our communication. It has an awesome unique feature to set working hours and not disturb hours. If something isn’t energy, but we want to communicate it after work hours before we forget it, we can slack it to our team members without fear of interrupting their evening because each of our team members has the “do not disturb” setting in place once the day’s work hours come to an end.

Long-term communication points — Ideas to better the business and problems your team may see and ways to improve. It is helpful to create a forum for your team to submit these without feeling like they have to wait for an opportunity, be in the proper meeting, or have a seat at a specific table.

Communication outside of work hours — unless it’s an emergency don’t do it. This means no texting about random work tasks, calling about unimportant client orders, sending Instagram messages for inspiration, or anything else that would bring your employee’s attention to work when they should be off and living well with their friends or family.

“To be clear is kind, to be unclear is unkind.” – Dare to Lead by Brene Brown

We err on the side of overcommunication to avoid miscommunication or under communication. We want to be clear with our expectations while supporting our team in accomplishing what they need to or by hearing them out when they have something to say.

We are here for you! Email us anytime at info@therender.co with specific questions or requests and we will happily get back to you!

Joyfully,

TJ White | Content Manager