We have all been in a situation where poor team communication lead us to working more or doing things twice. In fact, most of the teams’ problems do rise from miscommunication amongst the team members.
The importance of good communication follows us in our personal as well as our professional lives. Without good communication, we would be spending our lives in a never ending misunderstanding leading to constant annoyance with everyone around us. And let’s face it, no one wants to be wasting time at work, doing something twice, because of a communication error.
The issues of relaying information within a team usually appear simply because there is no effective way of sharing information or because the way to do it is not optimal and comfortable for the team. Therefore the most important thing to do is to fix the information channels the team uses. Most of the teams out there communicate within a mix of traditional channels: verbal, phone and e-mail. However, when using this mix, it is easy to lose information or to relay it in a misleading way. That is why more and more teams are looking for additional options and some actually end up using project management tools to improve the situation.
It may seem strange that project management tools, which are primarily created to help manage and overlook the project, are used to solve communication issues. But in fact, these tools are perfect as a company wide information channel, built to store and represent the information in the best way possible.
Tools like Eylean Board, allow for the team to have an overlook of all the projects and the related information in these ways:
- Showing an overlook of tasks and their progress as well as assignments to team members
- Allowing to share files and for multiple team members to work on them
- Representing the team members work load, making sure no one is overloaded
Shortly, these tools represent all the team related information in one place. And allows for team members to reach it at all times without having to ask colleagues for it. In these few simple ways, project management tools tackle the issues of the regular information channels, thus saving time and money for the team.
To solve communication issues in a team, one needs to look at how the team members are communicating and how these channels can be improved. In some cases, adapting another tool as an additional information channel, can prove to enhance the process and bring benefits to the whole team. It is important, however, to realize that it is not only the tool, but also the team that needs to change and adapt to the new process.
