How Centralized Communication Benefits Your Remote Team
Is your communication centralized right now? How many projects are you currently managing at any given time? We live in a world where, at any moment, we could be working on five things at once: team projects, matrixed projects, individual projects, and more. When you’re trying to keep all of the balls in the air, what’s a straightforward simple thing that can minimize stress and have a positive impact? Centralized communication.
Centralized communication systems connect all stakeholders to a central hub, which helps add more context when communicating about various projects and subjects in a remote collaboration environment. Great centralized communication systems also streamline the decision-making process across teams while assisting people in sharing ideas, gathering feedback, and turning discussions into actions.
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Centralized communication is also just as relevant to employee engagement as it is to productivity. At any given point, up to 70% of your workforce might be actively disengaged, and efficient communication is a proven fix. These improved communication systems help break down silos and eliminate barriers that might hamper growth. By providing space for useful and targeted discussions, you’re supporting your team in their quest for success.
Fragmented communication methods can lead to a lot of frustration — team members have to spend time traversing through different systems to find the update or document they need for one part of a project, only to restart that search to find a different piece of information.
Centralized communication systems benefit users by promoting transparent communication, organizing thoughts, and leaving room for flexibility on projects. Let’s dive into some of the benefits below:
Transparency
Transparent communication helps all team members perform better by giving them the resources they need to do their jobs well. Centralizing communication systems limit the back and forth of excessive questions by providing streamlined information sources that teams can reference when they need insight. One of the biggest roadblocks for any project is when one part of the team doesn’t know what the other is doing, which leads to excessive questions and less than informed decision making. By making sure that everyone is on the same page, you’re limiting opportunities for mistakes and helping teams make more intuitive decisions.
Productivity & Efficiency
Increased transparency leads directly to increased productivity and efficiency. When teams have insight into priorities, they are empowered to work harder and more effectively to meet those objectives. It minimizes the need for unnecessary meetings by synthesizing information and allowing space for a flow state.
Productivity and efficiency go hand in hand. A centralized communication system saves your team time by giving them all of the information they need at their fingertips. It decreases the need for distracting emails, IMs, and calls that pull them in an entirely different direction. Teams can streamline their attention and save time, thereby managing their schedule more efficiently while producing quality work. Centralized communication takes out the second guessing which necessitates finding someone or what the latest update is and instead makes room for streamlined workflows that move everything along successfully.
Organization
Another benefit of centralizing communication is better organization. We’ve all run into a situation where we needed a piece of information, but couldn’t remember if it was in our email, an intranet, or a random document somewhere. By providing a central space to store discussions and documents, like using a content management systems you’ll see that projects start to come together more smoothly. People can access essential pieces of information quickly and easily.
For instance, we at Nifty allow users to share relevant documentation or start an instant messaging thread directly on a task. If anyone needs to access that specific information in the future, they know exactly where to find it without wasting time looking through multiple sources. This directly translates into increased productivity and efficiency.
Customized Sharing
When your information has one central home, it becomes so much easier to define who you want to communicate with and what information to share. Audience segmentation allows you to share with the company, a team, an employee, or a client. It minimizes the use for different systems across audiences and allows you to have much more control over your messaging and information.
Customized sharing also means increased security. If project documents are stored and accessible from a secure server, like RedSwitches, there’s less of a chance of a confidential document being accessed by someone who shouldn’t be. Share updates and information only with those who need to know what is relevant to their work.
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A centralized communication system makes your team’s life easier, and therefore your life easier, by providing them with all of the information they need at their fingertips. This kind of system empowers your team and sets them up for success by sharing the ability to disseminate information in a clear and effective way. This becomes even more effective once your leadership team buys in, setting an example for everyone at the company to follow.
If you have multiple communication streams without an easy way to consolidate them, you run the risk of losing track of a project or missing an important deadline. Some updates end up being sent by email, others by instant messaging, and yet others through word of mouth. A centralized communication system consolidates communication systems to give you one source of truth for your projects.
When considering the cost of implementing this kind of system, you have to ask yourself the cost of not implementing it. Lost productivity, a lack of engagement, and disorganization have a real effect that can be fixed with effective centralized communication methods.
Nifty is a project management software that offers just that — a centralized location to communicate with every employee in your company while creating specialized teams to share documents and project updates. Teams can communicate directly on tasks or more extensive projects so that everyone is updated on what needs to be done to move forward.
Level up your team’s communication methods by getting started with Nifty today! 🚀