Can you picture yourself working in a team where everyone works alone in a quiet corner, with little to no communication or human interaction? That would be awful and depressing, right? Actually, it would be impossible to make critical decisions up the chain of command, maintain collaboration, or keep workers engaged in such an environment. That’s what makes communication critical to the success of any project.
If you’re a project manager, you must encourage teamwork. This means fostering clear, open, and effective communication across the board. Here’s how that will boost project management for you:
Getting all team members on the same page
Poor communication creates a disjointed team. Disjointed teams are pervaded with miscommunication, chaos, role confusion, mistrust, and inefficiency, resulting in project delays or failure. Effective communication cures all these problems by providing all team members with a clear view of the overall scope of the project. Everyone understands the overall goals, targets, individual responsibilities, and individual performance expectations.
When multiple departments work on the same project, clear and timely communication ensures that each department understands what its portion of the project is. Each department member understands their role within the department and in the bigger picture. This enhances intra-departmental and interdepartmental coordination.
Improving communication also eliminates instances of miscommunication. Miscommunication leads to costly errors, low-quality work, duplication of roles, lost time, and budget overruns, which bog your project down. When you improve communication, say by bringing communication onto a single platform, you effectively eliminate miscommunication. Everyone is able to follow the progress across all parts of the project in real-time. Also, in case of errors, decision-makers can easily spot them and make the necessary amends in good time.
Developing healthy relationships with stakeholders
Project stakeholders are the individuals and special interest groups involved in or affected by your project. There are 3 tiers of stakeholders. The experts, support staff, suppliers, contractors, and external consultants working on the project make up the first tier. The sponsors, investors, and clients form the second tier. Government regulators and community organizations, including those who could be opposed to the project, make up the third tier.
The 3 tiers sometimes have conflicting interests and expectations. Eco-conscious community groups, for example, may raise environmental concerns about some of the materials you need for the project. Cultivating a healthy relationship with them leads to a mutually agreeable compromise, preventing unwanted lawsuits and execution delays. The clients, on the other hand, may demand stricter timelines against the expert advice of your employees, or against your team’s capacity. Developing a healthy relationship with clients prevents unwanted frustrations, back and forth, or mistrust.
Expert tip: Open and timely communication is the key to building healthy relationships with and among stakeholders. It helps you straighten up issues that may arise at the beginning or during the project.
In the formative stages, stakeholders need to comprehend the need for the project as well as its functioning, upsides, and potential downsides. Workers should understand the scope, milestones, and goals of each step of the execution process. You should also help investors and clients form realistic expectations in terms of funding, potential budget fluctuations, and expected return on investment (ROI).
During the execution process, open communication helps keep all stakeholders in the loop. This means they can get important updates, ask questions, and express their views & concerns in real time.
In a nutshell, open communication should create mutually agreeable language, tone, and terms of engagement across the board.
Effective conflict management
Poor communication is a recipe for displeasure, disagreements, and conflicts. To minimize conflicts, you need to ensure that all your instructions and guidelines are sensible, relevant, and easy to understand for all interested parties. You need to remove complicated terminologies, derogatory statements, and offensive words from your communique. You and your departmental managers also need to be accessible to the subordinates so that they can come to you in case of confusion, displeasure, or disagreements.
There’s more. Your speeches, seminars, emails, and even non-verbal communications should be respectful, polite, courteous, persuasive, convincing, reassuring, and motivational to all members. That sets the standards for all personal and professional interactions within the team. You should ensure that no team member feels neglected, ignored, or left out in your communications to prevent unhealthy competition and suspicion.
Improving communication as a project manager also means improving your listening skills, which comes in handy in conflict resolution. A good listener is patient enough to allow people to speak their minds and air out their frustrations without interjecting just for the sake of it. An active listener knows the right questions to ask in order to understand the issues at hand better. Good listeners don’t make assumptions, jump to conclusions, or overreact on petty issues. They are not rude, harsh, or emotional. They are transparent throughout the conflict resolution process and fair when passing judgment. These are skills that every project manager needs for effective conflict management.
Change management
Humans don't respond well to abrupt change. But then, change is inevitable, especially with long-term projects. Budget cuts, new technologies, environmental challenges, supply chain disruptions, restructuring, etc. are some of the issues that necessitate abrupt changes in project execution. Your project could be doomed to fail if you fail to communicate these changes clearly and regularly. You need to provide a convincing argument for change, reassure team members of their welfare, and outline clearly the steps to be taken throughout the change process. If you decide to let some people go, you need to communicate that decision with dignity and empathy. That’s how you’ll keep everyone positive about the change and mitigate resistance, confusion, and fallouts.
Efficient knowledge management
Successful projects are driven by data and accumulated expert knowledge. As a project manager, you need to capture information about the progress of your project and isolate important data. Together with your team, you need to analyze, share, and put into practice all the insights you get from the analysis.
Important data, in this case, could be individual performance vis-à-vis set key performance indicators, resource mobilization & utilization statistics, or employee remuneration data. The data could also be industry insights and analytics that could help you create a competitive edge for your end product. A good communication strategy helps you to seamlessly share data, insights, and knowledge with your team. By extension, it helps your team realign its priorities and streamline its operations for speedier and better-quality execution.
Real-time and transparent modes of communication among team members also enhance collaboration. They build a culture of continuous learning, active listening, empathy, dialogue, experimentation, and sharing of ideas. This is good not only for improving the quality of your project but also for driving professional growth, engagement, happiness, and job satisfaction in your team.
Tips on How Businesses Can Improve Communication
Hire well
If you’re starting the project from scratch, be sure to hire people who are flexible, good communicators, organized, and who collaborate well with others. Ensure that your team has the right blend of personalities and skill sets in order to minimize conflicts and enhance efficiency.
Train them well
After hiring right, train them well in effective communication, conflict resolution, effective time management, teamwork, and other soft skills. You also need to train them to leverage project management software for added efficiency.
Address cultural and language barriers
Cultural differences increase the risk of confusion in the team. Avoid using jokes and sarcasm that might be offensive to some members based on their race, religion, sexuality, etc. Language barriers, on the other hand, lead to miscommunications, misunderstandings, and, eventually, costly errors. You should consider translating and localizing key information and instructions to ensure that non-natives aren’t left behind.
Establish SMART goals
Ensure that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic, and have clearly defined timelines (SMART). When done, split each goal into smaller actionable targets. This allows you to split your message into small, easy-to-consume, comprehensible, and actionable bites.
Create a project communication plan
This is a blueprint of how and when different communiques will be shared with stakeholders during the course of the project. A solid stakeholders’ communication plan should define:
- The objectives and communication needs of all stakeholders.
- The vision, mission, and values of all stakeholders.
- The metrics for successful communication.
- The target audience.
- The communication hierarchy.
- The relevant information for each audience.
- Specific communication methods for specific scenarios. E.g., when will in-person meetings be necessary? When will emails, instant messages, or press releases suffice?
- Communication frequency for each audience.
Share project dashboards with clients and employees
This is important for real-time updates and feedback on the project's progress. Encourage all interested parties to share insights, questions, and concerns freely on the dashboard.
Leverage digital communication technologies
Invest in as many digital tools as you can as a way of enabling your team to operate at the top level with minimal supervision. These digital tools include collaboration, document sharing, project management, and communication platforms for remote working. Digital tools have many benefits. Sharing messages on a shared communication platform, for example, enhances transparency, minimizes miscommunication, and builds mutual trust.
Encourage dialogues
You can do this by holding regular brainstorming sessions whereby team members sit around a table and share their passions, dreams, and expertise pertaining to a selected topic.Make sure to use a board minutes template or meeting template to consolidate any ideas discussed for future reference.Such circular in-person meetings also create a friendly, relaxed environment where members can air their concerns, ask questions, form friendships, and gradually develop mutual understanding.
Final word
Open, regular, and clear communication is critical for the success of any project manager. Communication is the tool you use to keep all interested parties informed, motivated, and excited about your project. Without this tool, you’ll struggle to meet project goals and deadlines, which eventually leads to failure. That’s why you should start working on your communication skills and strategy ASAP!