How Most Conference Calls Work

ANDREA TARRELL
Director of Marketing at HNI

This video is so true it hurts.

Technology is opening the door to lots of new opportunities for collaboration - but in most organizations, there's a long way to go.

The #1 place where communication goes to die is your typical meeting. The worst are those meetings that drag on with status updates, but where nothing really gets accomplished. Or the meeting where everyone leaves at the end with no clarity on who’s supposed to be doing what.

Email is another frequent culprit of communication fails. Our time is wasted interpreting ambiguous or poorly organized messages from co-workers. Mixtures of CCs and BCCs benignly intended to keep everyone “in the loop” make a mess out of who is supposed to respond to what and when.

So how do you begin to solve the communication problems of your organization? Hold a meeting about it? Send everyone an email?

We are seeing forward-thinking companies improve their internal dialogue by tapping into one of the ways employees are already communicating outside of the office: social media.

Business-oriented social platforms like Chatter or Yammer provide an alternative to the traditional tools of business communication and enhance internal transparency and accountability.

Have you explored using social media or collaboration tools to communicate with your employees? What have you tried to improve internal communication? Let us know in the comments!