Communication

How to set up the company for better communication with teammates and clients.

Communication is everything. Missing important information can cost you lots of money, either directly or indirectly, sometimes without knowing it.

Operating a coliving space by yourself makes it easy for internal communication between you and guests, but once you increase the workforce to two or more, it makes things slightly more complicated, especially if those people are located in different time zones.

Communication with the outside world can be hard – people leave companies without notifying you of their replacement, emails get automatically pushed into the spam folder or perhaps your kid is deleting your messages for fun. What happens when people in your company take an unexpected sick day, lose focus or are on holiday. Perhaps they lose their phone or quit unexpectedly and you can’t access their work emails?

10 ways to minimise the chance of information getting lost.

1. Operate using descriptive email addresses, like bookings@company.com, sales@, marketing@, developers@ or have someone reading info@ every hour who then forwards these emails to the right person.
2. Use a ticketing-system that emails come in to, like Intercom or Zendesk, where admins can see response times and open tickets.
3. Don’t delete email addresses from colleagues that quit – instead, forward them to info@company.com.
4. Get used to delegating/forwarding emails instead of procrastinating the responses.
5. Unsubscribe to newsletters you don’t read anymore, as it fights for your attention from the important stuff.
6. Add a signature in your emails with other ways to contact you e.g. Phone (call/SMS), Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger and LinkedIn.
7. Don’t keep “completed” emails – archive or delete them immediately to get them out of your sight.
8. If you use Gmail, use Filter to put emails into different folders and also “yellow star” the important ones.
9. Snooze emails for later if they are deemed to be less important.
10. Use Zapier to send SMS messages when specific emails are coming into your Gmail.