Monitor communication

The first step in monitoring and supporting team communication involves ensuring that all communication is consistent with the necessary requirements. These requirements come in the form of your organisational and legislative requirements which have been introduced in Section 1.5.

The process of ensuring that all your communication is consistent with both internal and external requirements is straightforward, and it involves three key phases. These are:

Planning for Communication

As with any undertaking, it is vital that you start your process right. Sufficient planning will enable you to be on the right path. As you brainstorm ideas for different communication initiatives, ensure that you give time and consideration to the different requirements you have in place.

In Section 1.5, it was reiterated that organisational requirements must be the foundation for your communication practices. The most effective way of making sure that your communication is aligned with these requirements is by actively planning your communication with these in mind from the very beginning. The same is true for your legislative requirements. From the onset, you must make it a point to adhere to the different guidelines provided by such and avoid any violations.

Plan Execution and Monitoring

It is not sufficient that your planning is done in alignment with your requirements. As you execute your different communication practices, keep them in check. This means actively monitoring them to ensure that they are properly being implemented. Sometimes, your planning may be sufficient and free of issues. However, in the process of your execution, you may find that some points are lost in translation.

As you monitor your communications, challenges that you may or may not have originally planned for may also arise. You must address these as they come. It is once again important to remember your requirements as you resolve these issues. Everything from your actual communication practices to your processes and techniques for addressing any issues must be done in accordance with both internal and external requirements.

An issues log is a good way to identify any issues or risks identified during the planning or execution of any communication. This can be used to capture both risks and actual issues, as well as identify potential solutions and track the status of any actions required to resolve them.

Issues can be escalated by anyone in the communication process, but should be done centrally and by someone who will take ownership of the processes around resolving the issues. This does not mean they need to address the issues, rather that they update the log and check in with the individuals assigned responsibility for their resolution on a regular basis to ensure issues are addressed.

The types of information typically captured in an issues log includes:

A basic example of an issues log is found below.

• Issue number:
  A unique tracking identifier.
• Issue/Description:
  A short description of the issue.
• Risk/Priority:
  A risk and/or priority indicator to identify how important the issue is.
• Raised by:
  The person who identified the issue or risk.
• Owner:
  The person responsible for resolving (or managing the people responsible for resolving) the issue.
• Actions:
  The steps that are required to resolve the issue.
• Status:
  The current status of the issue as updated by the Owner.
• Open date:
  The date the issue was raised.
• Closed date:
  The date the issue was addressed.

Evaluation

Finally, to make sure that your communication initiatives are consistent with your requirements, you must evaluate them. This is especially important when the communication activities you engage in involve projects and/or events that have a clear start and endpoint. You must go over everything that took place and determine if every aspect of your communication remained relevant and consistent with the necessary requirements.

During this step, you must also look into points for improvement and possible violations that have been made. Assess these and try to determine the reasons they occurred. Using this knowledge, develop ways to realign your communication and avoid further inconsistencies.

The next order of business in monitoring and supporting team communication involves providing performance feedback as well as additional support to others when required. This is especially necessary when you have employees who are underperforming or would themselves take the initiative to improve their performance.

Providing Feedback

Feedback is a reliable way of making employees aware of their performance. If you are able to give effective feedback, employees will not only be able to assess how well they were able to communicate and fulfil the tasks required of them but also recognise how they can further improve.

To make sure that the feedback you provide is effective, key techniques you can take note of include:

• Give feedback in a timely fashion

  Give feedback at the right time. As a general rule, feedback is meant to be given immediately after the task or activity you are evaluating has been completed. This will enable employees to clearly remember and understand the points you are referencing in your evaluation.

  In some cases, however, you may need to delay providing feedback. This would include situations when conflict and other challenges arise. During these times, it is best to give your feedback a day or two after the disagreement to ensure that everyone has had time to calm down and reflect on what has happened. By doing so, you ensure that the feedback you provide will be met with more openness.

• Provide detailed feedback

  Do not be afraid to give employees detailed comments regarding their performance. Highlight what went well and what can be improved, while ensuring that the feedback you provide is well-grounded and fair. It is also important to be proactive in your feedback. This means giving clear guidance and suggestions for the employee to improve their performance.

• Take time to develop feedback

  Do not make feedback for the sake of complying with requirements. Put sufficient effort into formulating your feedback and evaluating the performance of your employees. Though it is a tedious and time-consuming task, remember that the feedback you provide will enable employees to understand how well they have performed and how they can continuously improve. Take the task seriously and make time to develop your feedback.

• Treat feedback as a continual process

  Recognise the value of not only giving feedback but receiving it as well. Seek feedback on your feedback. Ask employees how they have understood the points you were trying to make and recognise how you can further improve the quality of the feedback you. Treat feedback as a continual process for both you as the provider and employees as the receivers. That way, the feedback you provide gets better as time passes just as their performance does.Providing Additional Support

Along with providing feedback, other ways through which you can provide additional support for others include:

• Training initiatives

  Perhaps the most fundamental way of providing support is through training initiatives. The kind of support training provides relies on formal and technical knowledge that would enable employees to improve their performance. There are different ways through which you can provide training to employees. Some of the most widely used methods include:

  • Formal instruction

    This method involves a lecture-style learning method where trainees would be situated in a classroom setting. They would receive training from an expert who plays the role of the teacher.

  • On-the-job training

    This method requires trainees to learn the skills and knowledge involved in a task by actually performing the task required of them. They will be guided by an expert and will have actual firsthand experience in performing said task.

  • Simulation

    This method is similar to on-the-job training. However, instead of actually performing the set tasks, employees will work on tasks similar to those they will actually encounter in the workplace.

  • Self-directed learning

    As the name suggests, this method relies on the trainee’s ability to learn the necessary skills and knowledge required by teaching themselves. Employees will be provided with the necessary materials (i.e. manuals, supplementary videos) and will be empowered to learn about these at their own pace.

• Coaching

  Coaching is another way through which you can provide support for employees. It involves a short-term development process that follows a structured and formal approach to helping an employee develop. Since coaching is mainly concerned with performance, it focuses on the required knowledge, tools, and opportunities that will enable employees to improve their communication.

  The timeframe for coaching is usually six months to a year, and coaches usually have a specific goal set for their coachees. In this case, the goal is to improve the communication of employees. The selection of a coach is made on the basis of their area of expertise, which is an area where their designated coachee needs support.

  One key technique you have to note in using coaching as a method of providing support for employees is establishing SMART goals. These must directly concern the performance of the employee and aim to improve such in a set timeframe. Using the SMART criteria to form goals is ideal as it will help you strike a balance between aiming high and being realistic. This will make it easier for you and your coaches to maintain a reasonable and consistent pace yourselves.

• Mentoring

  By definition, mentoring is a long-term process that follows a rather informal approaching in developing for an employee. It follows the format of generalised advice and guidance for career development, with a specific focus on the areas where an employee needs additional support. Mentoring usually involves a senior and experienced mentor and an inexperienced and promising mentee. The former provides support for the latter through the knowledge, advice, skills, and expertise the mentor imparts.

  Mentorship is beneficial not only for the mentor and the mentee but also for the company where the mentee will practise what they are being taught. At the minimum, relationships between the mentor and the mentee would last for a year. If the mentor and the mentee are well-matched, their relationship can last a lifetime. Through mentorship, employees can develop not only in terms of their communication but also holistically. This benefits their professional career, the teams where they work, and the organisation that they are a part of.

The process of monitoring and supporting team communication also involves seeking feedback and assistance from others so that you yourself can improve your own communication techniques.

Seeking Feedback and Assistance

As mentioned, feedback and assistance are invaluable in improving performance in communication engagements. This applies not only to employees but also to you. Given this, you must be open to seeking feedback and assistance from others as well.

Seeking Feedback

Seeking feedback means reaching out to relevant personnel who can help evaluate your communication techniques. There are different methods through which you can seek feedback. This may be done through informal means such as asking the relevant personnel about their opinions on the way you talk. It can also be done formally, through face-to-face meetings, calls, written evaluations, etc.

The most important thing to remember in seeking feedback is that you be fair and unbiased as you receive it. The goal of feedback is to help you assess your performance, and you should accept the views held and comments made by others so that you can improve your communication techniques.

Seeking Assistance

In line with the discussion in Section 5.2, you can seek assistance through training, coaching as well as mentoring. The different training methods may be helpful in improving your communication techniques, especially if the guidance you require is quite technical. On the other hand, coaching will help your performance-driven needs while mentoring will develop not only your communication techniques but your overall performance as an employee.

In seeking assistance, it is important to keep an open mind. The people who will be providing you assistance are experts in their respective areas of fields, and they know what they are doing. Do not be afraid of having the tables turned and being the one who requires guidance. Developing your communication techniques is an ongoing and continuous process that everyone should engage in.

Relevant Personnel and Sources

There are both relevant personnel and sources that can help you improve your communication techniques. The personnel you can reach out to include your colleagues, supervisors, and experts. Colleagues can give you reliable feedback on your communication techniques as they experience working with you firsthand. Supervisors can do this and also provide assistance as necessary. Experts who may be from within and outside the company are also key persons who can provide you with guidance in enhancing your communication techniques.

On the other hand, the sources you can use to assess your communication techniques may include both human and physical sources. The personnel above may be sources of key information that would enable you to develop your communication techniques. Along with them, however, you can work on your techniques by seeking relevant materials, guides, documents, etc. that can provide clear and easy to follow instructions on how you can improve your communication.

Collecting and reporting any essential information as well as unsolved concerns to the appropriate individuals is the final step in monitoring and facilitating team communication. Collating is the process of gathering all essential information - in this case, information about difficulties that arise during the communication process. These are matters worth reporting to relevant superiors who can help you address these.

Evaluating Communication Processes

Evaluating communication processes would involve looking into documents and seeking insights from others involved in the process. The first would involve reviewing the different records you have of the different communication processes you have in place. In checking these materials, you must seek issues and challenges experienced, patterns or trends that may have emerged, etc.

Along with this, you can also evaluate your processes by seeking feedback from employees. You can ask them regarding their experiences with the different processes you have in place informally or use formal methods for doing so.

Three ways through which you can formally collect feedback are:

• Administer surveys

  This is particularly useful for when you need to reach out to a lot of people. If your process involves many people and you would like to find out the feedback of as many people as you can, this is the ideal method. Surveys are, however, limited to closed questions. This is because seeking responses to open questions from a large number of people is inefficient. The responses you would receive from this method would be numerical, and you will need to analyse these results statistically. Surveys can be administered by giving out physical or digital/electronic forms to your target audience.

• Schedule interviews

  Interviews are an effective way to evaluate communication processes by means of seeking in-depth feedback from those involved in the process. Unlike surveys which are mostly restricted to closed questions, interviews allow you to have free-flowing discussions where employees can open up about their experiences extensively. However, you must carefully select who you will be interviewing as this task can be time-consuming. You cannot plan to interview everyone as this would be inefficient. Interviews can be both face-to-face or aided by technology (i.e. video or phone interviews).

• Hold focus group discussions

  A third method of obtaining feedback is through focus group discussions. This method is similar to interviews as it allows you to reach out to key persons and seek their in-depth insights on the processes that they are involved in. The main difference is that you'll have a group of people get together, and instead of just asking them questions and interviewing them, you'll encourage them to talk to one another about their ideas(i.e. engage in a group discussion).

Additionally, you may also find it useful to seek third-party help in evaluating your communication processes. This is especially important for the processes which may be more complex or too difficult for you to assess on your own (e.g. due to biases towards the process). Insights from a third-party may provide fair and unbiased assessments of your communication process, allowing you to establish key information with more ease.

Identifying Areas for Improvement, Important Information, and Unresolved Issues

As you evaluate your communication processes, you are not merely looking back at everything and making a summary of what has been accomplished. There are key findings which you are paying close attention to and seeking out. These are your areas for improvement, important information, and unresolved issues. Though the three are closely related, there are fundamental differences among them.

Areas for Improvement

Areas for improvement refer to the parts of your processes that you can further develop to promote more effective communication. These include parts where you have already performed satisfactorily but can still improve further as well as parts where you simply did not meet your goals. Areas for improvement usually concern the performance of employees. The employees themselves may need to improve their performance to develop the process or the systems and mechanisms they work with need to be improved so that the employees can perform more effectively.

Important Information

Important information refers to findings that are vital to your process. These include data that would affect your processes positively, negatively, or in a neutral manner. You may have found causal relationships or possible correlations among different factors involved in your processes, for instance. This information needs to be properly noted and documented so that you can further investigate it and find out if it can be used to your advantage to improve your processes.

Unresolved Issues

Finally, unresolved issues refer to the different challenges you have faced along the way that you were not able to resolve. The truth is, not every issue you encounter can easily be addressed. However, this does not mean that you just let them go once your processes or activities have concluded. You must acknowledge them and attempt to understand them. This is done to determine if anything can still be done to try and resolve them and/or prevent or lessen their occurrence in the future.

To effectively identify areas for improvement, you must simply be keen on your evaluation of your communication processes. Pay close attention to findings that may be of interest. Take time in your evaluations and carefully assess all the information you have. Moreover, it may once again be useful to seek third-party help. Personnel who have areas of expertise that may be relevant to your endeavour may help make your process more efficient, and there may be particular processes that are more difficult to assess than others. Do not be scared to seek help, as necessary.

Collating and Reporting Information to Relevant Supervisors

Scenario:

Following the implementation of any communication strategy, Jacinta completed a full review and final report to determine how successful the communication was.

This helps her to understand whether the initial message was received, but also helps her to understand what did and did not work for future communications.

This process involves collecting feedback on the communication and compliance against any process that was being communicated. If a program is not fully adopted, Jacinta needs to understand why and what else needs to be done to ensure it is.

The lessons learnt in this communication can then be applied to future communication strategies to ensure success.

The final output of your evaluation process is a formal document that summarises all of your findings. This document would highlight key findings and insights that would help others make a meaningful assessment of the communication processes you have in place.

To create this document, you must effectively collate key findings from various materials. These include records and reports on your processes, feedback from employees, and insights from third-party consultants or experts. Moreover, you must also incorporate proof and documentation of your processes through photos, actual sample materials used in the process, and other forms of evidence that would substantiate your findings. It is important that your collated findings highlight key points that need to be given attention. Finally, you may also provide recommendations for improvement in your report.

Once you have collated your findings, you can then report these to the relevant supervisors. These would include your direct officers as well as other superiors who have the power to make decisions or take the necessary action to improve your communication processes. The act of reporting your findings is, in itself, a communication practice. It is, therefore, crucial that you effectively present your information and keep in mind the different strategies, techniques, and tips outlined in this manual.

• You must ensure that your communication practices are aligned with legislative and organisational requirements.
• To effectively provide support for others, you must be ready to provide them with feedback on their performance and also additional support.
• Likewise, you must be open to seeking feedback and assistance from others to improve your own communication techniques.
• The support and assistance you can give as well as receive may come in the form of training initiatives, mentoring, and/or coaching.
• You must sufficiently evaluate your communication processes to determine how well these were executed and how they can be further improved.
• Your findings must be collated and then reported to relevant supervisors so that the necessary actions may be done to develop your communication processes.

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