Can Tech Really Help Solve The Biggest Communication Challenges?
What are the key ingredients of a successful business? Well, there’s optimized pricing, of course. That’s certainly vital. Charge too much and you lose sales, but charge too little and you don’t bring in enough revenue to keep going. And then there’s branding. A clever and subtle logo, a perfect adherence to the line between unprofessional and stuffy… it all helps.
The list keeps going, because keeping a business going is a very complicated endeavor – but one element that often gets overlooked despite its immense significance if communication. Being able to communicate effectively and efficiently isn’t just necessary for handling sales efforts: it’s also a core component of maintaining a productive team with high morale.
But how do you optimize the communication within your business? Since we’re in the digital age, the natural step is to wonder what tech can do, and that seems like a sensible move. Can it really make that big a difference, though, or does it instead mostly come down to personal responsibility? That’s what we’re going to consider in this piece.
It can ensure that everyone has the data they need
What are the problems that businesses face when it comes to communication? One that crops up time and time again is siloing. Multiple departments operate simultaneously without practically overlapping, each one steadily gathering data and producing work, and the fruits of one department’s labor can easily remain hidden from the others.
Through the implementation of robust cloud infrastructure, businesses can achieve vastly superior standards of data sharing, keeping access limited to those who need it but making it simple to share when it truly is justified. This is also vital for making overarching decisions, such as those about investment: it’s hard to know how to invest, and the more information that can be gleaned about how the facets of a company are performing, the better the conclusion can be.
It can enable complex digital collaborations
Another tricky part of company communication is dealing with the increasing prominence of remote and/or flexible working, as it’s making it far less common for the members of a team to be in the same room at the same time. This makes collaboration much tougher, and you might infer that this is a case of tech making communication harder, but – as is often the case – it’s both the cause of and the solution to the problem.
Yes, tech has made it possible for people to work remotely, but it’s also delivering ever-improving SaaS systems that allow people positioned on different sides of the globe to effectively work together on problems. This goes for everything from complex but intuitive design tools to messaging and project management tools, many of which are aimed squarely at small businesses (here are some examples).
It can’t make up for a lack of team spirit
If the titular question had been “Can tech alone solve the biggest communication challenges?” then the answer would necessarily have been no, because businesses are run by people – flawed, messy, ignorant people responsible for the ever-frustrating human error – and they’ll always find ways to waste the incredible tools and resources made available to them.
But it wasn’t: and the answer to the question of whether tech can help solve the biggest communication challenges is an obvious and unambiguous yes. Of course it can help, and not just in a small way. Through making vital data easier to access and empowering rich new forms of employee collaboration, it’s vastly improving communication infrastructure – and the onus is on all of us to make the most of it.
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