Team communication on virtual platforms is a major issue for companies today. Communication at work has always been a major challenge for all kinds of businesses. From small to large teams, the way they communicate deeply impacts the company’s results and ability to retain talents.

Since the past century, we watched a giant tech evolution. First, companies based communication on paper. Later, we evolved to laptops, smartphones, and cloud computing, with virtual services and information available to nearly everyone.

Even so, many companies still use paper notes and whiteboards for daily communication, while technology is widely available.

As time went by, companies realized that they needed more than just storing data and processing documents, so the software market also evolved to offer communication tools that could go beyond basic administration, but do smart management and help teams communicate and collaborate constantly.

On the other hand, there are so many communication resources, that some teams face the opposite difficulty from old times – excess of messages, confusing guidelines, and misunderstandings in multiple tools.

In conclusion, having tools is good, but it doesn’t assure communication efficiency if there is no communication alignment first.

How to Promote Communication Alignment for my Team

First, understand there is something as important as choosing the most appropriate tools. Instructing your team on how to use them.

Secondly, there must be a policy to organize this routine. Otherwise, there might be confusion with someone answering an email with a phone call or vice-versa. Thus, you could lose record of the resolutions later. Each company should decide their preferences, there is not an absolute formula of how it should work for you.

Here are some suggestions and you could consider applying:

• Define an official collaborative platform, a project management tool to exchange comments on the team’s tasks, approve jobs, write feedback and reviews in a dynamic way;
• Use instant messages as a second communication resource, for quick notes and questions;
• Use phone calls for emergencies;
• Appoint weekly video calls or meetings for general alignment on projects;
• Private calls for individual feedback.

How Project Management can help the team communication

Managing your activities with a project management tool turns your team communication more professional, objective, productive and results-oriented. The purpose is to show all collaborators that tasks feedback are about products and services, not personal, and all the team is engaged in the team’s goals. If a task was not satisfactory, the collaborator is told why and how to overcome it, in a practical way.

Transparecy is another clear value you can apply with your project management tool, since it makes clear you are treating all collaborators equally and fairly, assigning proper work for all of them.

But motivation is the best asset, since you can use your platform to engage your team towards the company’s goals.

GitScrum is an emerging project management tool that has many integrating features for team communication:

GitScrum Board:

It’s a must-have for teams who want to keep track of their weekly demands, assign tasks and collaborate exchanging comments on their task cards. It’s based on the classical Kanban boards, and can be dynamically managed by moving tasks forward from “to do”, “doing”, and “done”. You can label and name columns according to your preferences and needs.

GitScrum Sprints:

Sprints or milestones are time-boxed sets of tasks you associate with your company’s goals, usually scheduled for a week. They are important to communicate goals visually to the team, keep them monitoring their progress daily and offer mutual support or communicate with the manager when there’s any difficulty.

GitScrum Gantt Charts:

With Gantt Charts, your team leader can visualize multiple tasks on a screen, get project’s big picture and communicate with each collaborators about their tasks that are about to start or end. It’s an agenda view and helps you assure not missing any assignment.

GitScrum Documents:

Have you ever had any experience with team members missing documents in your company? Or taking too long to find a file? Missing backups? Probably yes. As a result, it causes trouble and conflicts. Avoid this, by saving your projects’ documents inside their own folder in your project management tool. Keep your files safe and organized, then you’ll preserve your data and team relationship.

GitScrum User Stories:

GitScrum User Stories are a resource to investigate customers’ and workers’ needs, with simple short forms. It might not appear to be related to team communication, but it is: it is a channel for collaborators to participate in the company’s innovation process, to be heard, and be able to discover and send valuable information forward.

GitScrum Mind Mapping:

Does your team like to do brainstorms? Do you need a tool to organize and map your ideas and charts?

Unlike old ways, can you picture a better way to demonstrate and teach ideas to your team? Well, we’ve got the technique and feature for that, and it’s called mind mapping.

GtScrum Time Tracking:

How many times a collaborator is asked about how long he/she would take to complete a task, and it’s hard to answer? Now it’ll be easier with the GitScrum Time Tracking feature. So, all team members will be able to help with budgeting and reports.

GitScrum Wiki:

Promote technical and intellectual growth, by encouraging your team to create and share internal content with GitScrum Wiki. They can share inspiring articles, reference texts, ideas, and any helpful content to contribute to your production.

GitScrum Subtask:

GitScrum Subtask helps teams sort and organize task requirements in a task hierarchy, helping them release more and approve parts of tasks faster. Moreover, it’s much faster to include a subtask on a platform, than having to explain that something is related to a previous task.

GitScrum Form2Task:

Create specific tasks quickly for your collaborators with GitScrum Form2Task, with the possibility to customize these forms with custom fields.

GitScrum Custom Fields:

Create task custom fields to personalize tasks to your team members, turning your communication much faster and specific. A marketing or design team could create fields like “target audience”, “format”.

GitScrum Rock Star Team:

You can take advantage of the world gamification trend to motivate your team, bringing some fun to your work environment. Create rewards and recognition for your top performer collaborators, gamifying daily tasks, and turn your team into super stars.

GitScrum Task Effort and Effort Templates

Keep transparency and engagement with your team, by holding tasks accountable and measuring efforts per tasks and doing effort estimates. Besides helping you to make strategic decisions, you can use effort templates to challenge workers with a “master” level task, for instance.

GitScrum White Label

This is the feature to make the project management entirely yours, with your brand, to improve the interface where your team communicates with your clients. With GitScrum White Label, you can replace the GitScrum logo with your own and use your own domain, set subdomains for your clients, which also builds brand confidence before your team.

GitScrum Interaction Features

With a smart project management tool like GitScrum, you can collaborate with your teammates and recall their attention on tasks with mentions (using @ and their names), attaching reference files and Youtube URL videos to tasks, making comments and promoting team discussions on the platform. You can label tasks with colors to identify high priorities and insert personalized code highlights.

Smart Integrations

As you might know, today’s efficient teams work mostly with integrations, so they can receive files and be responsive.

According to their example, you can integrate GitScrum with Slack, and import cards from other project management tools. Furthermore, you can start projects and link them to study groups and training on Discord. With Zapier, you do many integrations, like MS Office suite and many Google apps. Finally, integrate your Google Agenda to your GitScrum projects and get all important notifications.

In conclusion, team communication has evolved a lot with sophisticated virtual platforms, and human issues are still relevant concerns. An appropriate project management tool can help companies engage their teams to reach goals and maintain healthy professional relationships, if there is a commitment to use it and adapted policies.