3 Tools Startups Must Use to Effectively Communicate with Staff

Shivam Trika — January 4, 2017

There’s hardly any doubt about your employees being the building blocks of your business, they sure are the pillars your business thrives on.

Most of the success or failure of your startup can be credited to the overall performance of all your employees.

Entrepreneurs or managers of a startup are often so busy with their own responsibilities that effectively communicating with their subordinates seems like a far cry sometimes. And communicating spectacularly with employees is the number one reason that leads to employee satisfaction.

So, communicating with them becomes all the more important for smooth functioning of your start-up. But communicating clearly and effectively is one of those things that sounds easy but can actually be very complex, especially in an office environment.

But you don’t need to fret upon effectively communicating with your staff anymore as there are tools present on the web that can make that work easy-peezy for you, forget sending emails.

So let’s have a look at these 3 useful tools that will help you better communicate with the staff in your organization –

1. Trello

Trello is a lightweight project management app that helps teams collaborate with each other and keep track of current projects. The service is highly visual and customizable.

You can create a number of boards with Trello. For example, a board for your designers, a board for your marketing staff, one more board for your developers and so on. Each board may have an unlimited number of columns and task cards.

Most businesses choose a standard model: Plan -> In Progress -> Done. However, you may add additional columns such as; For Approval, Keep for Future, Need Reply , etc.

Trello lets you add a detailed description for each column as well as labels and stickers to your task cards. The tool makes it easy to see what your team members are working on, which tasks are on hold and why.

There are three options you can use:

1. Free — for small startups.
   
2. Business class for $ 9.99 per user/month. It includes a wide range of options and can be integrated with Evernote, Github, Google Hangouts, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox and other services.
   
3. Enterprise for large companies who need to collaborate with numerous teams. The price is set individually on request. Here you’ll get 24/7 support, additional security options, and all Business class features.

2. Slack

While Trello helps you track current and future tasks, Slack is a communication tool that is killing emails. Instead of sending an email to your colleague and waiting for a reply, you can drop them a few lines on Slack.

It’s like messenger for your staff.

It’s an excellent private channel that lets you exchange messages, files, and links. The service is instantly searchable, thus no message will be lost. You can filter the search results by relevance, recent type, or file type to find exactly what you are looking for.

Slack integrates with a majority of popular services such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Dropbox, Twitter, MailChimp, Trello, Groove and many others. The service offers fully functional iOS and Android apps, so you can stay tuned wherever you are.

Currently Slack offers three packages:

1. Free — for those who want to give it a try during an unlimited period of time.
   
2. Standard — for $ 6.67 per user/month billed annually. Here you get additional options like group calls, extended file storage for each team member, unlimited apps and service integration, etc.
   
3. Plus — for $ 12.50 per user/month billed annually. This package includes all the features of the Standard one plus additional security options and 24/7 support with 4-hour response time.

3. Officevibe

Officevibe is a great tool that allows you to see how satisfied your co-workers are. It provides a continual feedback system to help increase productivity, reduce turnover and build a responsible and friendly team.

Use Officevibe to create short 5-minute surveys and send them to your staff. You can set the email to be sent automatically at the necessary frequency. The reports come in real-time, thus you can see what troubles your team and what they appreciate. This tool allows you to quickly find the weak points and fix them.

You can also use Officevibe to promote team building activities and increase your staff engagement in the process.

The service is available for $ 4 per person per month. Before buying it, you can start a 14-day free trial period.

Over To You

Whatever idea you want to implement in your startup, you should always keep in mind how you will communicate with your staff in the process.

It’s not a secret — the more effort you put into building a strong and friendly team, the higher your revenue will be at the end.

If your staff are not happy, it’ll affect their work in a not-so-good way and eventually your reputation.

I hope the tools above will help you create a great and productive team and communicate effectively with your customers. What tools do you use to communicate with your employees? I would love to hear them.

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