How to Communicate Effectively in a Hybrid Work Environment

“Today’s hybrid workplace is a whirlwind of communication. Quantity has increased, but quality is declining. The result is that businesses spend more time on a critical function and do it poorly” this quote was taken from a recent business communication study by Grammarly Business and The Harris Poll. Inefficient workplace communication results in a decrease in productivity.

How can you and your team communicate more effectively whether it’s in a virtual meeting or via a workplace platform to ensure business workflows are running smoothly?

The first step is to identify where the problem lies.

Three Ways to Identify Ineffective Workplace Communication

Misunderstandings in the office are not new. As more work interactions move online, how can we avoid these misunderstandings in the future, whether in the physical office or the digital one?

Hybrid work creates physical distance and this is often believed to put a strain on communication channels and cause misunderstandings due to disconnected employees. However, with the right technology, hybrid work can in fact bring your team closer together and strengthen both in-person or virtual connections.

This requires acknowledging the signs of unproductive workplace communication. Here are three indicators of ineffective workplace communication to watch out for:

1. When Tasks are Not Being Managed Properly

Lack of coordination can prevent managers from delegating tasks, leading to employees missing deadlines or delaying turnovers. This problem can affect your client relationships.

2. When Employees are Disengaged

Engaged employees worldwide show 21% greater profitability and 17% higher productivity. It’s easy to disengage when employees are overwhelmed. For example, chat and email notifications, or time-consuming and manual work, can easily become distractions.

3. When Meetings Have a Low Participation Rate

Meetings are commonplace in our work culture. However, getting participation during meetings isn’t always easy. For new team members, sharing their thoughts during in-person meetings can be intimidating. That said in-person meetings naturally have a higher engagement rate than online meetings.

How Can you Improve Workplace Communication?

Streamline and Automate the Way You Communicate Tasks

It is important to consolidate your workplace communication technologies to maximise ROI. By standardising the platform or solution, this ensures your workforce becomes more familiar and comfortable using it. Having an all-in-one workplace platform helps facilitate this and more.

All-in-one workplace platforms provide a customisable dashboard that gives you full visibility of your team’s workflow. They often come with built in collaboration features such as tagging and comments to encourage employees to collaborate more efficiently. Workplace dashboards can also help you organise tasks, track assignments, produce data-driven results and enhance employee productivity. One IT company found that an all-in-one workplace platform boosted productivity by 200%.

By creating a shared digital workspace with team members, the latest information can be exchanged seamlessly and everyone can monitor the project’s progress together. Save time and work more efficiently by automating notifications each time new documents are sent. The notifications can be sent to mobile devices so that hybrid and remote employees never miss new documents. This speeds up document and contract processing which benefits you, your team and your customers.

Improve Chat Communication

Today’s hybrid workplace setup requires a more agile work environment. However, multiple chat and messaging channels can cause distractions. According to a 2023 Microsoft study, 68% of people said they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday. Forbes reported that 46% of respondents said seeing messages ignored for long periods of time led to stress in the workplace.

While most employees prefer email to other digital communication options, it is no longer possible for employees to only use email in a digital workspace. However more can be done to outline and ensure different communication channels are used to promote more effective communication and information sharing. With unified communication solutions you can get the software and hardware you need to ensure communication in the digital workplace is effective and meets employee satisfaction standards.

Upgrading Hardware

Finally, it's crucial to upgrade hardware so that workers can easily communicate no matter where they are.

Remote conferencing with employees and clients can be tiring and painful when you’re trying too hard to hear or see what someone is showing you on low-quality video.

A Fully Integrated Solution to Collaborative Virtual Meetings

Here are four examples of hardware you can use to enhance the meeting experience for you and your team.

1. A 4K Video Display that will enable you to create a collaborative environment that is as immersive virtually as it is in person
2. High-performance conference cams that are specifically built for better, more efficient communication in virtual settings
3. High-quality, noise-cancelling headsets for smooth communication using plug-and-play conference call speakerphones
4. A digital workspace to transform your presentations from passive to impactful, using various multimedia content

Ensure Better Communication for Your Hybrid Work Environment.

Foster a productive, dynamic and collaborative working environment for all your employees – whether in the office, at home or on the go by enhancing your workplace communication technologies.

Reach out to learn more about how FUJIFILM Business Innovation can help digitally transform your organisation.