What does your team use for communications?

Email is still very much the dominant form of electronic communication, with 269 billion emails sent/received every single day in 2017 and 2.9 billion daily email users predicted by the end of 2019 (source).

But, with all these email messages, our inboxes are noisy and crowded. What can you do to ensure that your team is communicating not just effectively but efficiently as well?

New collaboration tools are available that you should consider adding to your set of daily workflow. They solve the issue of the following three key things getting lost amongst the ever-growing inbox:
• team communication (chat, calls),
• collaboration (file sharing, integrations),
• and keeping up to date (notifications).

You may have heard of (or already be using) Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Hangouts, Chanty, Glip, or other similar solutions. Using such a tool will help you transfer all your important communications, from your overcrowded inbox and various other applications and services, all into one place.

At Direction Forward, we delineate different types of communications into different channels. For example, Slack is our main internal communications platform – direct messages between individuals, group chats, realtime notifications from our systems and clients’ systems. Whereas email is for external communications with clients and suppliers/providers.

It is true that using another tool could result in more work (as it’s another thing to monitor) or cause confusion as to how it fits into your workflows (at least initially). So do look at your needs before strongly adopting any such service. But, done right, it could be a massive benefit to all of your team’s daily working lives.