How Does a Communication Policy Actually Improve Communication

Ask any successful leader, and they will tell you that communication is the key to a successful team. Whether communicating with co-workers, a boss, or different departments within your company, being able to communicate is crucial for sharing the information and ideas that help organizations make better decisions. However, communication doesn’t happen on its own – that’s why many of the best organizations have a communication policy in place to ensure that their employees are communicating effectively and appropriately. 

A communication policy goes beyond just setting expectations for better emails—it’s about creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable communicating with their colleagues at every level. If you want your team to grow, develop, and be as successful as possible, you need them to develop solid communication pathways between their colleagues and leadership. If you don’t have a communication policy at work or you do, but everyone isn’t following it, you could miss out on opportunities because of breakdowns in communication. 

What An Effective Communication Policy Can Accomplish

The importance of effective communication is often forgotten until it is too late, and the detrimental effects of miscommunications have been felt. Communication policies are an invaluable tool that helps ensure consistency in communication across teams, departments, worksites, and even with customers. Here are some ways that having a successful communication policy can benefit you. 

It Sets a Standard for Communication

The primary goal behind establishing a communication policy is setting a standard for how your employees should communicate with colleagues and customers. If you don’t have clear expectations around how they should be communicating with each other and their managers, then it will be easy for miscommunication to take root without anyone noticing until a simple misunderstanding is allowed to balloon into a larger problem. 

A well-defined communication policy will help your employees avoid confusion about how they communicate, how information should be shared, and who it should be shared with. By establishing these standards, you’re making sure that everyone on your team knows how they should communicate with one another so they are better equipped to handle any situation that comes up. 

It Helps Create Spaces for Communication

As a leader, it’s important to remember that communication policies are not just about setting rules. They’re also about creating spaces where employees can communicate safely and freely. To do this, you need to create an environment where they feel comfortable talking and asking questions. This can be done through many different methods, including:

• Encouraging open dialogue in the office by setting aside time for team meetings or other conversations.
• Creating opportunities for individuals to ask questions and share ideas privately, such as during one-on-one meetings with managers or executives.
• Creating designated areas, such as a suggestion box, where employees can give feedback about how they’re feeling at work and what they’d like to see changed to improve morale.

Having spaces where employees feel comfortable communicating goes beyond just helping ensure your business runs smoothly. They also give employees the opportunity to suggest ways to improve the product or service their organization provides, or the delivery and distribution of that service. It also provides them an outlet to raise concerns about their work environment. For example, if a company has a clear policy on how to report incidents of misbehavior such as harassment, it will be easier for an employee who feels harassed to report the problem without fear of retaliation.

It Helps Develop Channels for Feedback

The ability to give and receive feedback is a vital component of any team’s success. It helps people learn how to do their job more effectively, develop skills and abilities, and provide value to the company. However, feedback can be hard to come by if you don’t know where to look for it or aren’t sure how best to provide yours.

Crafting a good communication policy ensures that managers know how to handle feedback when given to them and how best to give feedback without being intimidating or demeaning. This ensures that everyone feels heard, respected, and valued by the company as a whole—and not just by individual teams or managers themselves! 

It Standardizes Your Communication Tools

Think about all the different ways people communicate with each other: 

• Email 
• Text Messaging
• Phone Calls 
• Video Conferencing
• Face-to-face

The list is endless. While such a wealth of options can be helpful, if everyone is using different methods to communicate, important correspondence can get missed, resulting in lost productivity and frustrated employees. This is especially true for remote workers who rely on tools to communicate with their colleagues. By providing specific communication platforms for employees to use, you can ensure that nothing slips through the cracks or gets overlooked. 

It Makes Information More Accessible

As your company grows and more employees become involved in the day-to-day workings of the business, you will also find yourself with a lot of different ways to share information—from email to websites, blogs, or even newsletters. Having different platforms to find information can be extremely helpful, but only if the information can be easily found. It’s essential that employees have access to that information without having to dig through a complicated system or flip through pages in a book to find it. Without easy access to information, employees are forced to waste time and resources trying to find out what they need. 

Ensuring employees have access to existing information isn’t all a communication policy helps with. Keeping employees up to date can take a lot of time. No one wants to spend every minute trying to figure out when something has been updated, what has been updated, or where it was updated. A communication policy will clarify how and when new or updated info should be disseminated. 

Get the Most from Your Communication Policy with ComplianceBridge

We all have run into situations where poor communication has made our lives more difficult. But having clear and formal communication guidelines can help prevent that by providing your employees with the tools and knowledge they need to handle any situation. However, crafting effective policies isn’t always simple. Whether this is your first time writing a communication policy or you’re simply updating one that’s already been implemented, ComplianceBridge can help. 

ComplianceBridge is the simplest, most comprehensive solution for crafting, distributing, and managing your policies. Our software helps you with every step of creating and managing your company’s policy documents making it easy to keep everyone on the same page. ComplianceBridge streamlines the process with automatic workflows, helps you manage the policy lifecycle with proactive alerts and keeps you organized with version management features. The best part is all of your policies are stored in one centralized library, accessible 24/7 365 days a year to anyone who needs them. Want to learn more? Request a demo of ComplianceBridge today!