Being one of the top 10 best paces to work in Australia the past 3 years running, as voted by BRW, we know a thing or two about optimising internal communication!

There are 3 great tools that we at E-Web Marketing use to make sure that we are all up to date on what’s happening in the company, and what tasks need to be done.

#1 Yammer

Yammer is an internal social media platform used to share ideas, company news, documents and general things that everybody should be in the loop of.

What’s great about Yammer is that not only is there a company wide group that allows you to share things across departments, instead of those annoying staff wide emails that clog up your inbox! But you can also create multiple groups for different projects, teams and even social gatherings. This means that the information appearing in your feed is only relevant to you, and you are not being distracted by information that isn’t important.

For us, the most important thing that Yammer facilitates is our cross-department communication. As we all come across so much new information on a daily basis, Yammer gives us a platform to share our findings, ideas and thoughts in a non-disruptive way and collaborate on things which normally we wouldn’t have time to do face to face with our daily schedules.

For us, Yammer rocks!

#2 Skype

I know Skype is not a new platform or concept for a lot of people, however I think Skype is under-valued a lot of the time.

As we have an international presence and offices in different countries, Skype not only gives us a platform to communicate externally with clients all over the world, but it also allows us to go about our day to day business internally without the international waters affecting things too much.

Skype is a chat, phone and video conferencing tool that is free to use (there is a paid version also), and gives you the opportunity to communicate with people across the country, and the world, at the click of a button.

For E-Web, Skype has allowed us to run our internal meetings as normal while also involving our international team. By using the video conferencing feature we can have our team up on the big screen and it is just like having them there in the room, in fact they are larger on screen than they would be in the room!

I know there are a lot of advanced conferencing platforms and software available in the market, some free and some paid for, however Skype for us has done the job perfectly and is free to use so it gets the thumbs up from us.

#3 Gmail Chat

Gmail isn’t just an email platform, it also now has a chat and video conferencing function.

For us, Gmail Chat facilitates those “quick questions” and “spare of the moment ideas” across our team. It might sound lazy, but as opposed to getting up and walking over to the other side of the office to ask someone a quick question, we just use Gmail Chat. The main reason we do this isn’t because we are all unfit and lazy, but because you never know what someone is in the middle of working on or what train of thought you are breaking by knocking on their door, or popping over to their desk to ask them your “quick question”.
Gmail Chat now gives us a quick, less distracting, way of getting those quick answers. This also replaces the need for one liner emails which once again clog up your inbox.

I will leave you all with this one question – What one change you can make today to your company’s internal communication that will improve the channels of communication and in turn improve your company’s productivity?