By brightspyreOn

Recently, we’re facing challenges in our company on improving communication skills of our team members. The first solution that came to our mind was to create a guide for team members to follow for all the communication within and outside the organization. To us it seemed quite time-consuming and needed a lot of effort. In addition, you need time and resources to keep the guide updated all the times, and it also seems an effort re-inventing the wheels. Gitlab has created many guides that are available openly for any organization to use – especially for the companies in tech sector find these guides very useful. Here is a link to the guides created for gitlab on internal and external communication. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication

Secondly, we spend a lot of time on Coursera, udacity for learning anything and everything. We used to have udacity courses on Git https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-use-git-and-github–ud775 and introduction to web programming as fundamentals courses  before they start the engineering work in our organization.

Recently, we had a challenge that many of our team members in the organization were not communicating well and clearly within the company and with the customers. If you go to coursera and search for communication, you get dozens of courses in this category. The first difficulty is to choose the right course that suits your needs for improving team communication.  The solution to this problem is to try the course for few minutes; in our experience, we get to know within first sixty minutes about the quality of the course and relativity to our needs and we make a decision to continue or discontinue to go with the course in this time period.

If we continue with the course, then we ask the team members to make the course notes that can be used by other team members. Sometimes, other team members don’t go through the entire course and use the gists created by the other team members to understand most lessons taught in the course; especially for the courses where theory and tips are the main items to learn.

The course Write professional emails in English; available on coursera,  is taken by 6 of our team members. The notes taken by the team members are here

Here is the the thoughts of our team members after taking the course.

  1. I used to write emails without much thought process. However, after taking the course, I learned to align my thoughts before writing emails. Then I learned, how to write the proper email subject, how to greet, keep email to the point and concise, learned to take care of grammar and punctuation, and learned the importance of appreciating others. One important lesson was to avoid blaming others in the emails; that is very important trait in  the team development and many of the problems inside the company can be avoided by following this advise. These are very simple things, that we should learn in the university days but many of us enter the professional life without learning these simple tricks.
  2. One of the issues we’re facing was responding to the queries raised in the email partially. One team member started to respond to the emails properly and completely addressing all the points asked in the question. Again one very simple technique that addressed many of the problems within the team communication.

The best of all that all of these course contents were free and solved many of the intrinsic problems in our team communication.

By – BrightSpyre team.
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