Episode Summary

Communication is what keeps your team moving, but too much of it (in the wrong places) can lead to missed messages, burnout, and bottlenecks!

In this week’s episode of Make Space for More, you’ll learn strategies for effective team communication without unnecessary chaos. Melissa Swink will teach you how to keep your team aligned and empowered while avoiding burnout and confusion. 

Tune in to learn about common communication problems and how to avoid them, the principles of effective communication, Melissa’s favorite tools for collaboration, and how to get your team on board with new, more effective communication strategies. You don’t want to miss this one! 

Key Highlights:

• Discover how implementing a structured communication cadence transforms chaotic team interactions into purposeful conversations that drive results.
• Learn why “over-communication” in multiple channels can actually harm productivity, and how to streamline your approach for maximum impact.
• Master the art of asynchronous communication to support your team's focus time while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
• Explore our tested toolkit of six essential collaboration platforms that have revolutionized how our virtual teams stay connected and aligned.
• Understand the three core principles of effective team communication that will empower your team to take ownership of their roles while staying connected.
• Get actionable strategies for auditing your current communication tools and processes to eliminate redundancy and enhance efficiency.
• Learn how to introduce new communication protocols in a way that generates enthusiasm and buy-in from your entire team.
• Discover the power of strategic check-ins that keep your team aligned without contributing to meeting fatigue or information overload.
• Master the balance between maintaining open lines of communication and protecting your team's focused work time.
• Walk away with a practical framework for creating a communication system that scales as your team grows, without losing the personal touch.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about team communication without chaos. We're going to talk about our favorite tools and tips. And our goal here today is to help business owners and leaders set up simple, streamlined team communications that keep everyone aligned and empowered.

without the constant need for check-ins and certainly without overwhelm. So really when I was thinking about today's episode and what I wanted to share, communication really is what keeps your team moving, right? Without communication, things tend to come to a screeching halt at one point or another, maybe not right away, but at one point things are going to come to a halt until we can all get on the same page or can be informed as to what the next step is or.

where we need to take this in terms of direction. But the problem is, is that too much communication in the wrong places leads to things like mixed messages, misunderstood messages, burnout, and other bottlenecks. So really what we wanna do is we want to streamline all of this, get everybody on the same page, make it easier for everyone to collaborate without it becoming a thing in and of itself.

Right, communication is important, but we also don't want it to be so incredibly time consuming and challenging that it takes away from ultimately being able to do our jobs well. So one of the things that I was thinking about when it comes to messy communication, I have a very simple example of this that happened in my own team within the last week. So one of the things that I would like to do is to start booking more guests.

again, for the podcast, because I think there's a lot of people out there who have grown incredible companies and organizations. And I'd love to hear from them and even myself learn from them, but also share those conversations with all of you to see what else we can learn and rather it be everything from my perspective. Right now, we've been doing a lot of solo shows where I'm doing a lot of teaching in terms of best practices for growing and scaling organizations, working with assistants.

designing your CEO calendar. And so I'm really feeling the need to pull back a little bit on some of the day-to-day technical things and also incorporate some storytelling and some story sharing really is what it is. So I asked my team, I came up with a list of people, here's who I would like to invite to be on the podcast. And I sent it to my assistant, our podcast manager, and I recorded a loom video. We're gonna talk about that.

in today's episode, what is loom? Don't worry, we'll get there. But I basically sent them a loom and said, here's what I need. And I left it to the two of them to execute on the task at hand. Well, the issue was, is that it wasn't abundantly clear which piece of this project each team member was doing. And it also wasn't spelled out how the two of them were going to communicate with one another so that

they were both on the same page. So we ran into some situations in the last week where the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. And it wasn't any one particular person's fault because there were just things missed and balls dropped in every direction, including mine. So this is something that can happen even in the most well-oiled machines of teams. Things can sometimes break down. And this was a very general example, but it is something that came up this week where it's like, wait,

I thought you were doing this. Do you want me to do this or so and so doing that? And then I had so and so do that and then so and so didn't let the other person that she was on it. And so we just kind of had this little mess, no big deal. Nothing was unfixable. No one was harmed in this communication breakdown. Certainly if you work in healthcare, communication breakdowns can be a matter of life and death. In my company, they're usually pretty minor, which is a good thing, but.

All of that being said, what we want to do, and we're going to talk about this in today's episode, we're going to talk about common communication problems. We're going to talk about the basics of team communication and how we can make it as effective as possible. I'm going to share more about our team's favorite communication tools and more importantly, how we use them. We're going to talk about creating a communication cadence. So what are the expectations set around communications within your team and company?

And then lastly, how to get your team on board with this communication structure that we want to improve upon and establish. So diving right into common communication problems, these are just the three that jump to my mind as being the most prevalent. Too many platforms. Maybe you've got so many methods of communication that there's conversations being had over here and over there. And so pretty soon it's

I didn't see an email about that. no, I put it in Slack or I sent it out in the group chat or we talked about it in the meeting. There's just so many different ways that we can communicate that if people aren't on the same page in terms of what needs to be used and when, what is being communicated and where. Having too many platforms, it can just get really, really messy where people are trying to monitor all these different communication channels all of the time.

Essentially, that's just really ineffective. The other communication problem that I see most often is when everybody is tuned in, okay, so they're engaged, they're reading their emails, they're listening to their voxer messages. Voxer's another one we're going to talk about. They're reading their Slack channel, they're going into ClickUp or Airtable or Notion or wherever this information lives. They're doing those things, but they're still unclear of the priorities.

What are their priorities and what are the priorities of the company? Because if everything is important, nothing is important, right? So if we have, here are all the things that need to be done and we have no clear direction on what is the most important thing or what is most time sensitive all the way down to, you know, we can work on this as we have time. If people aren't on the same page on that, it can create some pretty stressful situations.

Okay, and another common communication problem that I see not only on my team, but with clients and other teams that I've worked on is that you, the business owner, leader, executive director, manager, whatever your role is here, you have become the middleman for every message or decision. And maybe not every, maybe the word every is a little bit extreme, but you feel like you're in the middle of a lot of things where you're spending your time being air traffic controller in your company.

right, or air traffic controller on your team, or you're constantly being brought with, your team is constantly bringing issues for you to resolve or decisions that need to be made. And sometimes it's just too much where you don't need to be involved in every little decision, or maybe you don't necessarily have to be in the loop on every single communication that's happening within your organization. So those are the common problems that I see.

So just to reiterate, we want to establish some basic principles for effective team communication. So what exactly does that look like? We know what it doesn't look like. We know when there are breakdowns. We know when there are frustration or there's stress because people weren't clear on timelines and expectations. But what does effective communication look like? It should be very aligned. It should be confident. It should be clear.

It should be well understood by everyone. Everyone should be on the same page and we should be humming along, working together seamlessly in the perfect world. So let's break this down a little bit. Clarity. We want to have some clarity around what methods of communication are we using that also goes hand in hand with what platforms are we using to communicate. We wanna have consistency, right? So...

How often are we updating one another? How often are we meeting to discuss the particular project or the client account or just having some general one-to-ones? We're gonna talk about that in our create a communication cadence portion of the conversation today. Gravity is another one. I realized that sometimes I can especially hop on boxer and I haven't fully formed an idea in my head where I'm just kind of shooting from the hip. I'm like, hey guys, what do you think about this?

or their question came up from the team of, what is the best solution for this challenge that this client is having with this platform? And I think back to the way I use them, like, well, you could do this, you could do this. And I realized that pretty soon I've left them a lengthy voxer, which if they just fast forwarded to the end, that's probably where it would get more clear. So brevity is something that I think we all need to work on. We wanna be clear and concise, right? I also know,

that I've been in plenty of meetings with people, lovely people over the years, but we know that there's no way that they can have a 15 minute meeting, a 20 minute meeting, a 30 minute meeting. It's always going to go for an hour or more, right? And then by the end, we could probably distill down the entire conversation into probably three or four minutes of tactical, information that we need in order to continue moving forward on.

whatever we're working on together. So love those people. And sometimes when it comes to communication, brevity helps avoid people having to really distill down what was the overall point, what is this person looking for? And then the other thing that I was thinking about too with the basics of effective communication is I'm gonna use the term batched versus always on. So when we are...

always on. We are always available for emails that come in or text message that come through or phone calls or if you have a physical office where your team is working together in person, that little knock knock on the door, you got a minute. When we are always available and always on, it makes us less efficient and less effective in our jobs. And so when I think about it,

versus always having constant access, constant communication, maybe it's more batch. And more batch could be, we have heads down work time, rather than having our email open the entire time, or maybe we have our team chat up. Maybe what we do is we have periods of the day where we are focused and working, and then carved out windows of the day where we are going and checking all of the messages. That's one example. Another thing could be,

having a daily 15 minute standup with the team where everybody, know, good morning, they grab their coffee and everybody is very clear on what the top priorities are for the day. And then, you know, we're dispersed and we're doing our thing. Whatever that batch communication could look like for you and your organization, think about that because we don't want to create a situation where people are always being interrupted because that's not efficient and that's not always the greatest way to communicate.

Okay, so diving right on in and moving right along, our team's favorite communication tools. I wanna share those with you and a little bit more about how we use them. So number one is Asana. So Asana is a project management tool. Monday is another one, ClickUp is another one. There's lots of popular ones out there, but we use Asana. And that is where all of the tasks and projects for our clients

and our internal company are stored. So in that system, there's a list of all the running to-dos and it's very clear on who they're assigned to and when they are due by. And if it's a recurring task, it's, you know, this happens every Monday or this happens by the 15th of every month. So we have all those cadences in there. Everything lives in there so that it's clear on expectations of here's what everybody is working on and here's when the due dates are.

You heard me mention Voxer. So if you're not familiar with Voxer, it is a mobile, basically voice messaging app. It's like a walkie talkie. So my team members and I will hop on there when we have scenarios that we want to talk through that just would be way too long to explain in an email. You know what I'm talking about where you have a client situation and that sounds really intense, right? Sometimes maybe it's a scenario where

hey, the client is looking to do something like this. Does anybody have a tool that they could recommend? And they go into some of the details of the client needs this tool to be able to do X, Y, and Z. So if that team member were to sit down and write out a full email, that would be extremely long. It would take that person, I don't even know how much time, and then plus have everybody read it, absorb it, ponder it, think about it.

Whereas sometimes it's just so much easier to record a two or three minute voxer message or even less than that and say, hey, here's the scenario, what do you guys think? And it's just so much more convenient and efficient. So we have voxer. Now, I will also say this, that we have taken steps in our voxer system that we use to also help triage how urgent some of these messages are.

Like sometimes it is important, needs response, you know, soon, like, hey, we have something happening here, you know, who can help us out with this? Or we have a brainstorming one, like, hey, again, using this example for this client, we have a client who's looking for a CRM tool, they would like it to do X, Y, and Z. What does everyone have experience with? What have they liked? What have they not liked? That's more of a brainstorming kind of a thing. We also have a to-dos, like, hey guys,

We just had this come up. I think that we need to update our policy on this so that it is clear moving forward, things like that. We do have some triage in terms of those voxer messages. We also use voxer in groups as well. So voxer isn't necessarily from one person to the next. We have some group chats in there maybe related to specific clients, and we have everybody who works on that client account

in Voxer, especially during the onboarding phase when there's just a whole lot of moving parts and pieces where we've got everybody in there and they are able to communicate with one another. And that way, again, we're cutting down on lengthy emails, people writing, people reading and responding. It's just so much quicker to use a voice memo. Now there is a time and a place for email. So that's the third communication tool that I wanted to touch on. We still very much use email.

Email is great for more formal communication, maybe updates on company policies or exciting news and updates, like when we welcome a new team member. That is something that gets sent out via email to the entire team, so then they're able to respond and welcome and all of that. So there are certainly times and places for emails, 100%. We still use a lot of that. And then also just things that we want to keep track of in writing.

Just even for a simple fact of, let me give you an example. We are updating our process on this and we want this to go out to everyone on the team. So then that way when there's a question it's, yep, we updated this process on such and such date. We had that sent by email and we have that kind of date and timestamp, if you will. Now, another communication tool that we love, and I got a lot of great feedback on from potential clients as well.

is Loom, L-O-O-M, if you're not familiar. And that is simply a software that you can use to record basically like screen share videos. And so we'll use that for providing feedback, especially if it's visual. We'll use that for walking through maybe a new process or how to do something and to cross train other people. We use Loom all the time. Now I also use Loom and this is where potential clients love it.

to walk through the proposals and the scope of work that we put together for potential clients. So after we have a 30 minute consult with a client and really dive deeper into what is their, what do they do? We get an overview on their business. What does their team look like? And what are some of the things that they're looking for extra support on? Then what we'll do is we will put together a customized proposal based on their needs. And then we walk through that proposal.

on a Loom video. And so that way it answers a lot of questions that might come up. It also is helpful if there are multiple decision makers involved in the process, we're able to just kind of cover everything and have that video. Another communication tool, and this might not be something that you would think about necessarily, is calendars. Okay? So there are ways that we use calendars as communication tools as well. Now I'm going to actually give you a client example here because we are working with a client right now.

and he would like to have basically like a company calendar where all of their team meetings can be clearly indicated on there. And then they can also put on there, he has a small team, they can put on there when somebody is going to be unavailable and out of the office because they have a dentist appointment on Thursday afternoon, or they're going to be on vacation this week so that it's very clear and it's a visual way that everybody can be on the same page of who is available and when they are not available.

and when meetings are coming up. So that's another great tool to use to communicate in terms of availability as well. Now, one of the things that I wanted to mention here is that we train our team during onboarding on the various communication tools that we use. Here's what we use, here's what its intention is, here's what we use it for. Kind of here are some of the do's and the don'ts in terms of the way that we communicate using these systems. So there definitely is a way

to make sure that team members are on the same page. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. So all of that being said, we want to communicate on a cadence and we wanna create that schedule. So what are some of the things that we wanna make sure that we set a regular communication cadence or ritual, whatever word you want to use for it. We wanna talk about team check-ins. So team check-ins could be real time.

Maybe we have a daily 15 minute huddle, like I mentioned, and then we kind of talk through where are we at with this project, where are we at with that client, where are we at with that potential client, you know, what have you. Maybe we do just a 15 minute huddle every day. Or maybe that's not necessarily in real time. Maybe we do a written team check-in. Maybe every week it's here's a status update on this project, or here's the status of, you know, where we're at with this.

Maybe it's even simple as a video. Maybe it's you hopping on and recording a video of like, hi team, here's where this is at. Here's where our numbers are at for the month. If you're leading the sales team, we have this many consults or we have this many sales calls scheduled next week. Here's what we have in contract status. Maybe it's simply sending out a video once a week or every other week and updating your team that way. So we have team check-ins.

We also want to talk about monthly one-to-ones because I think that's really important as well. I know in our team, all of our senior VAs have regular one-to-ones with each of our team members. Say once a month, they connect for 30 minutes. What's going well? What's not going so well? What questions do you have? What are some things that you feel like we might be able to improve upon either as a company or with this particular client? Maybe there's a better way to serve them. We're checking in. We're also checking in with them.

on their overall capacity. How do you feel in terms of your workload? Is it pretty manageable or are you struggling to keep up? Do we need to bring in some extra help on some of these accounts? We're having those conversations regularly. And then my senior BAs are having calls with me again once a month where they're kind of recapping, here's what came up in one-to-ones this month. Here's what's going well. Here are some of the things that we're working through and improving upon. And we'll talk about just some of the things that...

we need to address as your management level in the company as well. So with these communication cadences, what we want to do is also clarify what needs your input and what your team can take ownership of. Because going back to the knock knock, you got a minute and having the team check in just entirely too often, maybe we want to clarify, I brought this up in a recent episode, maybe there are project milestones.

that we want to establish. once we get to this point, we need to meet as a group and review, get everybody's feedback and make sure that we're headed in the right direction. And then we're gonna do this next phase of the project, we're gonna reconvene so that we're not having to make all these different decisions throughout the entire course of the project, or you're not constantly giving direction or being asked questions.

Maybe what we do is we clearly establish roles on the team for this particular project, and then we reconvene together so that you're not, again, constantly always on and always getting those questions. We want to empower your team as much as possible and create those very specific checkpoints with when they can meet with you, when they can bring up questions, when they can bring up concerns, when they want to celebrate or they have a new exciting idea of how you can work more efficiently or serve your clients better.

We wanna establish rituals around these communications. And so lastly, once we have these established, how do we get the team on board? As I mentioned, this is something that we talk about during onboarding. So maybe the next step for you is to determine here are our communication tools and here's how we are going to use them as a company. And then it's a matter of communicating that expectation.

with your team and documenting those expectations. We want to start there. We want to make sure that everybody is informed and we want to make sure that we set expectations so everyone's on the same page as to how they need to be used and have that information available to not only refer back to, but also to educate new team members coming on board with your company. We also want to lead by example, right? It starts with us. If we break our own systems,

What do you think's gonna happen? Our team is going to break systems. I've had plenty of clients over the years that said, I love systems, I break them all the time. And they're joking, and I understand that because there are certainly, I feel like times where we have a process that is true 98 % of the time, and then there'll be some kind of wonky exception that needs to happen for some specific reason, and then I'll kind of go in and override it as I need to. But habitually,

You wanna be leading by example. You want to be following the steps that you've indicated that you want your team following. You want to use the tools in the way that you intend your team to use them. And then lastly, you also wanna reinforce as a team what's working and also redirect as needed. So maybe it's, we're going to try using Slack for our project communication. So we're gonna create a channel.

And we're gonna have all these different threads for, you can tell I don't use Slack very often, I'm probably not using this thing, the right lingo, but you get the idea. We're gonna create basically a conversation thread for each project, and we're gonna communicate there. And we're gonna try it, and then continue to refine and improve. And when you have those team meetings, those team one-to-ones, how is this working for you? What are some things that we need to clarify? What are some things that need to change? And then that way,

Everybody has input on what is working and what is not working and you can continue to grow and refine this as you go. And then certainly again, redirect as needed. So if you have that one person who is sending an email rather than posting in the Slack channel, you know, it's just a matter of responding, hey, so and so, do you mind dropping this in the Slack channel so that the entire team is up to date and we have everything in one place. It's okay to gently redirect as you need to, especially when people...

are learning and developing those new communication habits. So what is our next step here? We talked about overall, the goal is to set up simple, streamlined team communication that keeps everyone aligned and empowered to do their jobs to the very best of their ability without constant check-ins and without overwhelm and confusion. So where do we go from here? What I recommend that you do sometime in the next week.

is to audit your team's communication tools. What's working, what's not working, what do we need to implement, what's gotta go? Think about the methods in which your team is communicating with one another and go from there. Try something new or maybe use an existing tool in a new way or something that's popular lately, especially with everything going on in the economy is how do we maximize what we have?

Maybe it's not necessarily adding more or investing in a new tool, but it is, here's the tools we have. How can we fully leverage all the capabilities of that tool before we start looking at other things? So, highly recommend doing that team communication audit and making some adjustments so that your team is more empowered and communication is calmer, confident, and more clear, and most importantly, effective.

Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. I hope that you found it helpful. I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Enjoy your day.