Poor communication is proving costly, report reveals.

A recent report has revealed that poor communication between business leaders and employees is causing the biggest headache for small and medium sized businesses.

The Driving Growth in Small Businesses report, commissioned by Microsoft and YouGov, discovered that more than a third of SMB staff in the UK feel that there is a lack of effective internal communication and that 45% of staff are making business decisions without all the information they need.

The report also discovered that staff in SMBs feel that 42% of work communication is social based and 20% would describe it as unproductive, and when asked what daily communication methods face to face came out on top. The report has recommended that business leaders look to find a good balance between meaningful collaboration and communication through the right channels, as the study showed that many employees feel overloaded by email and feel there is a missed opportunity to share information better.

Business communication tools are becoming an increasingly important player in the day to day working lives of employees with many being low-cost or free. Microsoft Teams, which was launched back in 2018, has become on the of most popular tools available to businesses as it’s available in many Office 365 business licences and has over 20 million daily users worldwide.

Matt Smith, CTO at BCN Group, commented on the report;

“Improving the communication and collaboration between staff is now becoming business critical. We live in the age where news and information is at our finger tips, and employees want the same from their business leaders. Better communication can result in improved productivity and collaboration, as well as retaining staff and recruiting the new wave of young employees who are the future tech pioneers. Microsoft Teams can play a major part in this evolution.

We’re seeing, on almost a daily basis, businesses coming to us asking how they can better adopt and utilise Microsoft Teams. In some cases, many companies have already started to dabble with Teams but, due to the lack of training and understanding, the experiment ends and adoption fails.

Personally, I see Microsoft Teams as one of the biggest and most exciting tools on the marketplace. It can make the engagement and communication amongst colleagues easier than ever. With the ability to voice and video call colleagues anywhere in the country or world, private and group communication, sharing and working on documents together, and integrate 3^rd party applications.”

BCN Group host monthly workshop sessions in which we guide businesses through all the major features within Microsoft Teams, as well as exploring some of the less well known and new ones too. If you’re interested in attending, you can visit our events page or email marketing@bcn.co.uk for more information.