This guide will walk you through the all hands meeting meaning, how to run it effectively, and what best practices to use. Moreover, you’ll learn how to utilize an AI meeting assistant to make virtual gatherings productive and engaging and unite employees.

Key Takeaways:

• Also called town halls, all hands meetings are company-wide online or offline gatherings that include employees and managers from all levels.

• A town hall aims to bring company members together to share updates, discuss information and company culture, align goals, celebrate wins, and address concerns or questions all at once.

• An AI meeting assistant designed to eliminate noise, record remote meetings, and automatically transcribe and take notes can make meetings productive, enhance communication and collaboration within companies, and foster a sense of unity.

What Is an All Hands Meeting?

The name is derived from the phrase “all hands on deck,” a signal calling all ship crew members on deck. Specifically, all hands meetings can be online or in-person and occur monthly, quarterly, or annually, which we’ll discuss below.

Importantly, they’re more vital for remote, distributed, or hybrid teams, as they interact face-to-face less often. What’s more, opinions expressed during these strategic symposiums can be game-changers and move things forward.

How do all hands meetings differ from typical team meetings? The first ones more effectively keep the entire company on the same page and are great for companywide announcements. The second ones are more valuable for specific project updates.

What Is the Purpose of an All Hands Meeting?

All hands meetings aim to get everyone on the same page regarding company goals, initiatives, vision, and strategies. After all, departments, teams, and employees can miss the big picture by getting wrapped up in their specific tasks.

But that’s only part of the story. All hands meetings aim to:

• Build unity around business goals and strategies by sharing experiences and discussing roadblocks.

• Reinforces company culture, which can be abstract and hard to grasp. Namely, sharing company values and discussing the behavior of leaders who embody them cultivate a value-driven environment.

• Enable leaders to gather different opinions and ideas to arrive at the best possible conclusion. For example, business advisor Glenn Llopis said, “Your voice can challenge the company’s status quo and cultivate innovation.”

• Allow employees to surface rarely-seen large-scale questions about the company’s operations.

• Enjoy a healthy debate based on different opinions to learn new viewpoints, possibilities, and experiences.

• Enable managers to discover talent and look at employees with a new perspective based on the opinions expressed during meetings.

• Create a positive and supportive company culture by discussing progress,  recognizing achievements, and celebrating milestones.

• Build transparency and honesty by sharing performance updates, challenges, and plans. 

• Let leaders assess the company’s health and make informed decisions through shared feedback and Q&As.  

• Bring together remote employees, ensuring trust and effective communication without frustration. 

• Help quickly spread critical information and adapt strategies in times of crisis or major change. Thus, leaders can proactively address concerns, outline action plans, and manage the situation.

How Often Should a Company Have All Hands Meetings?

Companies usually host monthly, biweekly, or weekly all hands meetings. Precisely, quarterly meetings are typical for companies that aren’t fast-paced. Once decided, the meeting organizer should schedule them as recurring meetings on participants’ calendars.

Smaller companies can host these gatherings weekly to maintain close communication. And larger companies usually hold all hands monthly, as bringing hundreds or thousands of people together at once is challenging.

The good news is that modern conferencing tools help connect large groups more easily. For instance, an AI meeting assistant developed with productivity in mind removes background noise, automates transcriptions during remote meetings, and records them flawlessly.

As a result, hosting an all hands meeting online has become effortless and effective, enabling companies to organize them frequently.

Overall, the frequency depends on whether the company faces rapid changes, prioritizes transparency, and launches projects frequently. For example, companies must share their yearly plans at the start of the year.

Moreover, companies adjust the frequency based on employees’ feedback regarding the effectiveness and impact of these gatherings. So, it’s always good to experiment weekly and monthly to come up with the best solution.

How to Run an All Hands Meeting Effectively?

Leaders are often worried about running meetings effectively so employees can speak up and share ideas without confusion or frustration.

So, how can you, as a leader, invite participation and expect proactive responses? Moreover, what if opposing opinions lead to conflict, leaving no space for consensus?

For example, I remember a company hosting dry, data-heavy, and disengaging all hands meetings. And when leaders shifted those gatherings to a more interactive format, focusing on storytelling rather than statistics, they witnessed a 30% increase in employee engagement scores.

They created segments like “Behind the Scenes,” in which different teams shared insights into their daily work. As a result, the company became more transparent and exciting to all employees.

Now, let’s dig deeper to learn to hold all hands meetings effectively.

Prepare for Your Meeting

Step 1: Create Your Meeting Agenda

Consider an agenda like this one that includes:

• Welcome & icebreaker (5-7 mins)
• Company updates (15 mins)
• Departmental highlights (20 mins)
• Special topics (20 mins)
• Guest speaker or special presentation (10 mins)
• Q&A session (15 mins)
• Recognition & awards (10 minutes)
• Closing & feedback (5 mins).

Step 2: Change the Meeting Venues

For instance, choose a large conference room, auditorium, or fun off-site space. However, ensure it comfortably accommodates the entire staff and supports technology for presentations and remote participation.

Step 3: Invite All Relevant Attendees

The all hands meeting attendees include:

• The executive team
• Chief financial officer (CFO)
• Chief operating officer (COO) and other C-suite executives
• Department heads and managers
• All employees
• Remote workers.

Step 4: Survey the Employees

Send out a survey a week before the meeting to gather questions and topics of interest. Because this helps gather input on topics employees are interested in discussing.

Step 5: Go Through a Dry Run

Run a technical rehearsal to avoid hiccups, especially when using new technology or formats.

During the All Hands Meeting

Step 1: Start Strong

Kick off with a compelling story or a valuable company milestone or celebrate accomplishments since the last gathering. This also applies to nonbusiness achievements, such as marriage and milestones. Also, consider starting with a meeting icebreaker.

Step 2: Keep the Meeting Moving 

• Include informative updates
• Incorporate live polls or real-time feedback
• Give everyone a chance to ask questions 
• Ask employees to submit questions or discussion topics in advance
• Listen to diverse groups of presenters with varying ideas
• Let each department discuss its news and achievements or project updates
• Plan five-to-ten-minute small group discussions

Step 3: Communicate Clearly

• Communicate your message through compelling visuals, such as slides and videos, to make your speech memorable.

• Ensure an all hands meeting environment of mutual respect so participants can engage in dialogue without conflicts. Interestingly, American educator Stephen Covey wrote that members should be encouraged to understand one another first and then expect others to understand them.

• Invite an expert or a coach to get a fresh perspective and enhance engagement.

Step 4: Ensure Post-Meeting Follow-up

• Distribute a recap with a video recording, main takeaways, and action items.
• Solicit feedback for continuous feedback: What worked? What didn’t? 
• Facilitate post-meeting follow-up using an AI meeting assistant designed to automate transcription and note-taking.

Krisp Connects People & Boosts Productivity of All Hands Meeting

“The future of human sociality lies in understanding and consequently shaping online interaction,” said psychologists Lieberman & Schroeder.

And AI meeting assistant Krisp is committed to making your online all hands meeting productive, effective, dynamic, and effortless, enhancing virtual communication and helping people connect better.

Let me show you how:

• Krisp’s AI Meeting Transcriptions help people unite and foster team identification: This automated, multilingual transcription feature transcribes calls and meetings in real time and with 96% accuracy.

Thus, it enables participants to discuss core issues and share ideas instead of focusing on transcribing or creating an all hands meeting template. Additionally, it helps manage the overwhelming amount of meeting data, which is especially critical for larger companies.

• Krisp’s AI Meeting Notes & Summaries keep members in sync: This feature generates meeting notes, summaries, and action items by reflecting key meeting elements.

With the essential meeting information at hand, team members become more organized, enthusiastic, and driven to accomplish their goals.

• Krisp’s Meeting Recording creates transparency and accessibility: This feature automatically captures all hands meetings with high-quality audio. Importantly, it’s compatible with any virtual conferencing app or platform, including Zoom and Google Meet.

Thus, this feature transforms your meeting into a memorable source of information that you constantly revisit to review. Additionally, it turns your meetings into more accessible, open, and actionable resources to boost productivity and collaboration.

• Krisp’s AI Noise Cancellation eliminates distractions from online meetings: This feature removes background noises, voices, and echoes in real time.

Specifically, Krisp’s advanced Voice AI technology ensures best-in-class audio clarity to let you engage in meetings more productively and effectively. So you can focus on what matters most during online gatherings.

All Hands Meeting Best Practices

All hands meeting best practices offer working standards or guidelines for good outcomes. Let’s get started.

1. Timing is Everything: Decide your meeting frequency and create a schedule that respects everyone’s time. And we’ve already discussed the frequency above. What about the best time of day? Well, mid-morning or late afternoon typically sees peak engagement.

2. Avoid Mundane Meetings: According to a Harvard Business Review study of over the past 50+ years, meetings are taking longer hours and becoming more frequent. Did you know employees shy away from long and boring meetings? So, maintain a strict agenda, allocate specific times for each segment, and prepare concise presentations.

3. Keep It Interactive: People want to avoid sitting through a monologue. How can you turn an all hands meeting into a two-way conversation? Use live polls, Q&A sessions, and even interactive quizzes to keep the energy up. And avoid overshadowing introverts.

4. Streamline Your Agenda: An all hands meeting without a clear agenda is like a ship without a rudder going off course. Moreover, prioritize updates that affect the entire company. Additionally, include finance, HR, major project milestones, and strategic pivots.

5. Celebrate Achievements: Here’s something you’ll want to remember: recognition fuels motivation. So, take time to shine a spotlight on team and individual accomplishments. Maybe your sales team has surpassed its quarterly targets. And what about the development team’s release of a new feature ahead of schedule?

6. Address the Elephants in the Room: Transparency builds trust, prevents misinformation, and keeps everyone on the same page. So, are there rumors about funding or layoffs? Address them head-on.

Final Word

The goal of an all hands meeting is to keep every team member informed, engaged, and aligned with the company’s goals, mission, and culture. When properly executed, these meetings foster a united and motivated workforce.

The guide above discusses how to make all hands meetings flexible, effective, and innovative to inspire and unite the entire team. And AI meeting assistants like Krisp can significantly enhance meeting productivity, engagement, and effectiveness.

Frequently Asked Questions

The post All Hands Meeting: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Krisp.

I get it. While hybrid work has a lot of the same needs as remote work, it has an added layer of complexity due to having a workforce that is both remote and on-site.

Below, I’ve rounded up the best tools for hybrid teams to collaborate effectively.

1. Bonusly for building a culture of appreciation

Pricing: Plans start at $3 per user/month (billed monthly). There is a free trial available.

Preserving culture is a prominent concern for leaders as they shift into a hybrid work model. It’s difficult enough to maintain culture when people don’t see each other in person (like with remote work), but it’s an even bigger challenge when a workforce is split into different groups: in-person and remote (like with hybrid work). You want to avoid creating factions and division among your teams. 

One way to build cohesiveness and appreciation, and enrich your company culture, is through employee recognition software. With Bonusly, you get a scalable, measurable way of recognizing and rewarding your employees. Each employee receives an “allowance” of points each month to give out to team members as a thank-you. Every time praise is shared, it can be tied to your company values via hashtags. Employees can then redeem these points for gift cards, charitable donations, and more. You also get a dashboard filled with data to gain insights on recognition given and received and points earned.

2. Envoy for hot desk booking and on-site safety protocols

Pricing: Paid plans for Envoy’s Visitors + Protect option start at $119 per location/month (billed monthly). Their Basic plan is free with limited features.

I’ve written before about how the hybrid work model, though full of benefits, is also a logistical nightmare. For instance, if you have a flex option (where employees can come in whenever they want and grab a desk to work on-site), how will you ensure enough desks to accommodate an unpredictable ebb and flow? And once you invite employees back to the office, how will you ensure Covid precautions are in place?

Envoy aims to solve the logistical intricacies of a hybrid workplace and provide a streamlined way to implement pandemic protocol. With Envoy, employers can create an employee health check with Covid-19 screening questions that must be completed before entry is allowed. If needed, it also allows employers to verify vaccine information and conduct contact tracing. And Envoy provides desk analytics and enables employees to book desks to help your company optimize layouts and ensure sufficient workspace.

3. Krisp for distraction-free meetings

Pricing: Get started with Krisp totally for free on the Personal plan and get a set number of noise cancellation minutes. Upgrade to Pro version for more features and unlimited noise removal. Learn more about the pricing plans.

Whether working from home or from the office, noise constantly interrupts meetings. If it’s not your dog barking at the UPS delivery person, it’s your chatty coworker dishing up the latest gossip to your cubicle mate. 

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Krisp fixes all that. It’s like pressing the “mute” button on your environment so you can focus on deep work. This AI-powered noise-cancellation app is easy to install and works seamlessly in the background. When you open up Zoom, Teams, Meet, or really any communication app, Krisp identifies which sounds are not meant to be there and blocks them out—leaving your voice and your attendees’ voices crisp and clear.

Krisp is a must-have tool for hybrid teams to cut out distractions and dive into deep work.

4. Noisli for customized productivity playlists

Pricing: Noisli’s free plan gives you 1.5 hours a day of streaming. For unlimited streaming and access to more sounds, the Pro plan for individuals is $12 per month (billed monthly).

Speaking of noise, what’s the best way to drown it out when you’re not in a meeting? While there are plenty of noise-generating apps out there to mask sounds, Noisli is my favorite (and I’ve tested a lot). 

Instead of music (which I find more distracting than background noise), Noisli provides a plethora of soothing sounds, from raindrops to railroad tracks to coffee shop chatter. Mix and match them, and even adjust their intensity, to create your own productivity playlist. My personal favorite? Chirping birds, a babbling brook, and rustling leaves (heavy on the chirping and light on the water).

5. Doodle for picking the best meeting time across time zones

Pricing: Doodle is free to use, but to get premium features such as no ads, Zoom integration, and deadlines and reminders, you’ll need a paid plan. Paid plans start at $6.95 per user/month (billed annually).

Having a hybrid team often means you’re working with folks across multiple time zones—making scheduling meetings a challenge. Doodle helps with that by allowing people to vote on a list of available times so you can pick the most fair one.

Launched in Switzerland in 2007, Doodle has come a long way since when I used it in college to schedule potlucks and social events. Now, it has more robust features for the busy professional, such as “if need be” to indicate that it’s not an ideal meeting time. It also has a Premium subscription level that removes ads and sends automatic reminders to nudge invitees to vote.

It’s easy to get started with Doodle; you don’t even need to create an account. Simply create a Doodle and select all the possible times for the meeting. You can then copy the personalized link and share it or send invitations via email. Once all the votes are in, you can choose the time slot that most people can make it to.

6. Calendly for scheduling

Pricing: Calendly’s Basic plan is free for one active event type. For unlimited active event types and more features, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. Paid plans start at $10 per seat/month (billed monthly).

For one-on-one meetings, nix the back-and-forth, and send a Calendly link to allow the other person to book an available slot on your calendar. I’ve yet to find a simpler way to have clients book time to meet. Calendly also integrates with Google Calendar, Zoom, Webex, and Slack, just to name a few.

7. Whereby for quick browser-based meetings

Pricing: Whereby’s free plan grants you unlimited one-on-one meetings and group meetings up to 45 minutes each. To get unlimited group meetings and more features, upgrade to a paid plan. Paid plans start at $6.99 per license/month (billed monthly).

And once you’ve settled on the best time to meet, you need a place to host your virtual meetings. Let me suggest Whereby. Unlike better-known players like Zoom and WebEx, Whereby is entirely browser-based. You don’t have to install anything, there’s no desktop or mobile app available, and attendees don’t need to log in.

To start a meeting on Whereby, all you need is your unique meeting room link, which you share with whomever you want to invite—up to 100 participants total. When an attendee clicks your meeting room link, they’ll be asked for their name and access to their camera and microphone before entering the meeting. That’s it.

Whereby also has virtual backgrounds, breakout rooms, and integrations with Miro, Trello, and Google Drive.

And as far as security goes, you can “lock” your room so that anyone trying to enter must “knock” first to gain entry.

I think Whereby is a much lighter, faster way to get video meetings started. But, of course, there’s a lot to be said for having a high rate of adoption. Because Zoom is nearly ubiquitous, I could see why you might resort to using it for meetings, and it works great, too!

8. Miro for virtual whiteboard collaboration

Pricing: Miro has a free plan for unlimited team members and three editable boards. To access unlimited editable boards and more features, upgrade to a paid plan. Paid plans start at $10 per member/month (billed monthly).

Whether you’re a scrum master or middle school teacher, whiteboarding is useful for many roles. That’s why Miro, a virtual whiteboarding app, is one of the most helpful tools for hybrid teams.

For those of us who miss those messy, magical brainstorming sessions with sticky notes galore—Miro does its best to replicate that for you. With templates, integrations (like Jira and Confluence), voting, video chat, and reactions, Miro mirrors what it’s like to be collaborating with your team on a whiteboard.

9. Loom for asynchronous video communication

Pricing: Loom has a free plan that lets you record up to 25 videos per person (five minutes per video). To access unlimited videos and recording length, upgrade to the Business plan, which starts at $8 per creator/month (billed annually).

For when you need to explain something complex and visual but don’t want to schedule a meeting for it, there’s Loom. Loom lets you record your screen and voice so you can explain something on your computer and then send the link to someone. Even better, the person watching it can speed up the recording. So not only did you just avoid having to wrangle people into a meeting, but you’re also saving them time. Win-win.

10. PandaDoc for e-signing and sending documents (for free)

Pricing: PandaDoc’s free plan gives you unlimited e-signatures and document uploads. To get templates, 24/7 support, and more features, upgrade to a paid plan. Paid plans start at $29 per user/month (billed monthly).

From new employee onboarding documents to client contracts, digital signing just got easier with PandaDoc. Simply upload documents and email them to collect signatures. Within the dashboard, you’ll be able to see when the document has been viewed. You’ll also get an email when all parties have signed, along with a link to the completed document.

The best part? PandaDoc is completely free for unlimited document uploads and e-signatures. You’ll be hard-pressed to find another e-sign software that offers that much value.

11. Asana for project management

Pricing: Asana’s Basic plan is free and includes unlimited tasks, projects, and messages. To access Timeline view, unlimited dashboards, and more features, upgrade to a paid plan. Paid plans start at $13.49 per user/month (billed monthly).

Of course, every team needs a project management tool to keep track of tasks and optimize workflows. Asana is a popular choice. It lets you make sense of your work in whatever view makes sense for you: boards, list, timeline, or calendar.

When your team is remote and distributed, you lose the ability to easily assess who is working on what task. Asana provides that necessary transparency. With its Workload feature, for instance, you can see how much work each team member has so you don’t overwhelm them. You can also set up automations to further optimize your business.

Asana boasts more than 200 integrations, including Miro, Toggl, Google Drive, Loom, Twist, and Slack.

12. Google Drive for sharing files and collaborating on documents

Pricing: Google Drive accounts come with 15 GB of storage for free. You can purchase extra storage if needed.

I wouldn’t be able to do my work without Google Drive. With its file sharing and word processing, it’s the go-to place to collaborate on documents. Whether you need to write an article, crunch some numbers in a spreadsheet, or put together a slideshow presentation, Google Drive has you covered.

13. Twist for async communication

Pricing: Twist has a free plan that gives you access to one month of comments/messages and allows up to 500 members. To get full access to your history of comments/messages, unlimited members, and more features, upgrade to Unlimited, which costs $6 per user/month (billed monthly).

Twist dubs itself as an asynchronous messaging app (check out the benefits of async communication), meaning you can send chat messages to your entire team without putting pressure on them to respond immediately. The idea was born out of its parent company Doist’s own frustration with using Slack.

“We felt like we were constantly fighting against the product,” explains Chase Warrington, Doist’s Head of Remote. “Ultimately, we decided we needed our own async-first tool that would help us communicate as a remote team spread across 35 countries and over 10 time zones. We built Twist, quit Slack cold-turkey, and never looked back.”

So while you certainly could use Slack asynchronously, it doesn’t exactly encourage it. With things like typing indicators, statuses, and standalone (unthreaded) messages, Slack adds a sense of urgency—but Twist has none of those features.

The main difference between Slack and Twist is that, with Twist, every message (except for DMs) is part of a thread. With Slack, a message can belong to a thread or be completely standalone. When you give teams the option to send standalone messages, if you’re away from Slack too long, you have to go back through tons of messages and try to understand the context. But with Twist, since every message belongs to a thread, there is always context because it is tied to a topic.

14. Grammarly to optimize written communication

Pricing: Grammarly’s free plan will do a spelling, grammar, and punctuation check. But to get more advanced corrections, you’ll need a paid plan. Paid plans start at $12 per month.

Let’s face it, in a remote or hybrid team, written communication becomes the default. Therefore, being able to communicate effectively through text is crucial. Grammarly is useful not just for its best-known feature (an editor) but for its add-on, which analyzes your word choice and gives you an idea of the tone of voice that comes across. I find this useful in emails, as sometimes when I’m in a hurry, I don’t come across as friendly as I’d like to.

15. Toggl Track for time tracking

Pricing: Toggl Track’s free plan gives you unlimited time tracking, projects, clients, and tags. To access billable rates, time rounding, and more features, you’ll need a paid plan. Paid plans start at $10 per user/month (billed monthly).

Even if your organization doesn’t require timesheets, tracking your time helps you optimize your work. Having an idea of where your time goes and which projects are taking you the longest can help you better manage your time. 

For that, Toggl Track has remained my favorite time tracker for years. It has a desktop, mobile, and browser-based app, as well as a Chrome extension that lets you track time no matter what website you have open. 

You can break time tracking down into teams, clients, and projects. Toggl Track’s “Reports” tab gives you easy-to-read insights into where your time goes each day, week, month, and year.

Which of These Tools for Hybrid Teams Will You Try?

As much of the workforce transitions to a hybrid work model, we will inevitably run into snags. But having the right infrastructure in place and equipping your teams with the right tools will give you the greatest chance for success in a post-pandemic world.

The post 15 Best Tools for Hybrid Teams to Crush It in 2022 appeared first on Krisp.

However, there are new downsides to be aware of as well. Specifically, privacy risks. When your workforce starts splitting its time between the office and their own homes, it introduces cybersecurity concerns that are important to start addressing immediately. 

If you’re not sure what this means and how to get started, don’t worry. In this blog post, we’ll explore what privacy in the world of hybrid work looks like and share tips to help you start protecting your organization. 

Why hybrid work creates more privacy risks 

What exactly is it about the nature of the hybrid work model that introduces new privacy risks, compared to a fully in-office setup? 

The short answer is that your organization no longer has full control over the working environment.

In the office, your IT team works hard to ensure all your networks are protected and your computers have the right software installed. Even just by nature of working in a secured building, you’re mitigating your cybersecurity risk. 

However, when people have the option to work from home, your company no longer has control over the workspace. Your employee may have family members, guests, and contractors coming in and out of their house all day. Or they may choose to work at a coffee shop, where strangers can easily see what’s on their laptops or where their device may be left unattended for short periods of time.

All of these factors lead to increased privacy risks. 

What are the top 4 security challenges of hybrid work? 

Let’s get more specific and explore the top five privacy challenges your hybrid workforce may be facing right now: 

1. Your employees aren’t aware of cybersecurity concerns

Most people aren’t aware of the privacy risks associated with working outside the office. This is a security challenge in itself. Why? If your employees aren’t aware of the potential dangers, they won’t behave in a way that keeps themselves protected. 

Let’s say, for instance, your employee is at a co-working space and needs to use the restroom. Someone who isn’t aware of the potential security risks may leave their laptop open and leave it unattended for several minutes. This may give a bad actor time to steal the computer or peek at sensitive information on the screen.

On the other hand, if your employee is aware of the security issues, they may choose to pack up their laptop and bring it with them to the restroom. This difference in mindset can make all the difference when it comes to privacy. 

2. Public spaces lack visual privacy

According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, an average of 40% of organizations’ hybrid and remote workers spend time in coffee shops and shared workspaces.

The problem with these public workspaces is that they lack visual privacy. In other words, it’s easy for people to see what your employees are working on—including sensitive company information, passwords, and more. This can then lead to potential breaches in security. 

3. Transporting devices creates risk

Another risk is the transportation of company phones and laptops. When your employees have to physically move their devices from one location to another, it increases the chance of these items getting lost or stolen. This, of course, has many negative implications from a privacy perspective.

4. Secure networks aren’t guaranteed

Another challenge you’re likely facing is the fact that you can’t control the networks your employees use.

This means that if they’re working on an unsecured WiFi network, for example, they may be vulnerable to attacks that allow the bad actor to gain access to sensitive information—including passwords, key identifiers (like social security numbers), and company data. 

How to address privacy risks created by hybrid work

Thankfully, there are steps your organization can take to mitigate the privacy risks introduced by hybrid work. Here are a few ways you can get started: 

1. Invest in educating your employees

The first step is to make your workforce aware of privacy issues. As we mentioned before, most people aren’t aware of the risks that come with working outside of the office. By simply raising visibility about the potential risks, your employees can adjust their behaviors accordingly. 

How exactly do you educate your employees about this topic? There are a variety of tactics you can turn to, such as:

• A mandatory in-person or virtual security training session.
• A question and answer session with the IT team. 
• Printed and digital materials that share guidelines on how employees can protect themselves from cyber attacks in public settings. 
• Email or Slack reminders that contain helpful tips on how to maintain privacy outside of the office.

2. Craft comprehensive (but realistic) policies

Education is a great start. But we encourage companies to take things one step further by crafting an actual policy around privacy.

The benefit of crafting a company policy is that it creates clear guidelines and expectations for your employees. This makes it much more likely that people will actually follow what you propose. Your policy should cover: 

• The company’s expectations for employees when doing work outside of the office.
• The technologies, software, or tools that everyone is expected to use or have downloaded on their devices. 
• Guidelines on how to take precautions in public workspaces.
• What to do if someone experiences a breach, attack, or leak. 
• Who to turn to with privacy-related questions, concerns, or incidences.

However, remember to keep your policies reasonable. It’s not realistic, for example, to ask employees to always keep their laptops with them while they’re at home. Or to demand that employees never work out of a coffee shop or co-working space. 

While these rules would certainly mitigate the risk of a cyberattack, they’re unrealistic and won’t be followed by the majority of your workforce. 

3. Provide all laptops with privacy filters

Even though you can’t control the environment your employees work in, you can still offer some forms of protection.

If you’re concerned about visual security, for instance, provide everyone with a privacy filter for their laptops. These filters blacken out the angled view of onlookers, while providing an undisturbed viewing experience for the person using the device.

Similarly, you can make sure that all company-provided laptops have the proper software pre-installed on them so you don’t have to put that burden on employees. 

These small investments can give you more peace of mind about potential security issues. 

4. Introduce the right technologies

According to the same Ponemon study, IT managers believe these five technologies are the most effective for protecting privacy and security in a remote or hybrid work environment: 

• Incident response platforms. This is software that guides, assists and automates incident response. So if there’s a security incident, this technology will help your IT team collect all the necessary information, identify trends, and find a solution to the problem. 
• Anti-virus/anti-malware software. This type of program helps prevent, detect, and protect IT systems and individual computers from malicious software, which is also referred to as malware. 
• Big data analytics for cybersecurity. This technology helps your IT team collect, visualize, and analyze data to predict and prepare for potential cyber attacks. 
• Identity management and authentication. This is a common tool  that’s used to authenticate the identity of a person so they can have access to your company’s applications, systems, and networks.
• Intrusion detection and prevention systems. This software monitors the events occurring in your network for signs of possible incidents, violations, or imminent threats to your security policies—and stops the detected incidents when they occur.

Tip: In addition to your tool stack, try Krisp noise cancelling app. It acts as an online meeting insurance, protecting you and your team from distracting background noise.

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Having these various technologies in place can help your company keep your network access secure, detect possible threats, and handle security incidents more smoothly. 

Mitigate your cybersecurity risk by introducing these changes today

You don’t have to sacrifice the benefits of hybrid work out of fear of cybersecurity issues. By taking a few steps in the right direction, you can significantly minimize the chances of any breaches, leaks, or attacks.

If you’re curious to learn more about other tools that can support your transition to hybrid work, check out our article about the must-have tools for hybrid teams. 

The post Privacy in the World of Hybrid Work. What Does it Mean? appeared first on Krisp.

These are all common challenges a newly built hybrid team will face at some point.

In particular, fairness in collaboration is important to maintain the trust between your remote and in-office employees as well as to maintain a smooth project documentation and handover process.

To get you up to speed with the best practices that improve collaboration in hybrid workplaces, I’m going over 6 strategies that show immediate results. Each one of these is focused on helping managers solve a different collaboration issue.

1. Keep distractions away

Distractions are inevitable.

That’s the plain truth we can’t avoid.

There’s always one more chore that needs immediate attention or a quick errand someone has to run during work hours.

So ultimately what matters is:

1. Building employer-employee trust and allowing your team to stay flexible as long as they can deliver work on time.
2. Preventing distractions on one employee’s side from interrupting the work of others.

The most common [and also the most prone to disturbances] event when remote and in-office team members get to interact are meetings.

And these are surprisingly easy to manage.

A tool like Krisp helps managers tackle three common meeting challenges:

• It removes surrounding noises and cancels background voices from other people speaking in the room based on individual voice pitches.
• It shows you how long a person’s been talking during a meeting so you can monitor engagement levels and get quiet employees to speak up.
• It lets you track the time you spend in meetings so you can better distribute talking points in the future and avoid lengthy meetings.

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2. Get your team on board with the new tech you’re picked

Nobody like to have a manager come in and bring more hybrid work tools to the board with no prior training. 

So if you’re planning on having your team use new tools, first make sure they truly need it. Choosing an app should be a collaborative effort. Talk to your team members to see what they don’t like about the current solution, what needs they have, and if a new tool will turn into a burden. 

After making a joint decision, prepare your training sequence. 

In other words, plan how you’re going to introduce the new platform and decide who will handle training and potential questions employees will have. An intro demo meeting is a good place to start. Take this further by holding dedicated demos for each team. Take a project management tool for instance. Your marketers will use it differently from your devs or design team.

Extra tip: Run feedback surveys on a quarterly basis to get a feel of how happy your teams are with the new tech stack addition. You don’t want to change tools every year so make sure that the solutions you pick from the beginning are versatile. Going back to our project management app example. You don’t need a tool to contain all the features possible as long as that platform’s easy to integrate with the other apps in your data ecosystem.

3. Help your employees connect [even when they’re not part of the same team]

This issue is relatively effortless to handle as long as you commit to making healthy employee interactions a part of your culture. 

Some inexpensive ideas for building a collaborative culture in the hybrid workplace:

• Embrace facilitating random connections between members of the same team or not
• Support new team members by assigning dedicated mentors
• Create an environment that fosters feedback and transparency
• Set up dedicated monthly or weekly times for employees to dedicate part of their schedule to building something with team members they don’t usually work with
• Allow your employees to share activities and take time for the usual office chit-chat remotely too
• Schedule cross-functional one-on-one calls or make these quarterly trips to the office for some solid bonding

If you’re running out of ideas, just ask your team!

Most problems that collaboration in a hybrid workplace could bring up can be solved by just giving your employees a voice. This is the most powerful method for making them feel valued and also ensuring that the changes you make are worthwhile. Managers retain the right to adjust the final strategies and tools based on general best practices.

4. Prioritize knowledge sharing

“Going back to the office also means I no longer need to track everything in an app, right?”

A common belief that many will stick to even when they don’t actively think of it.

Once employees are back in the office, they’re highly likely to forget about writing down all documentation. So their remote counterparts will no longer have all the resources and updates on a task’s progress.

That’s where you come in to state the obvious: “We need to make sure everything that happens on a project is documented.”

For hybrid teams, effective knowledge sharing is a costless process that has dozens of benefits, such as:

• Preventing delayed or missed deadlines due to poor communication
• Keeping all resources and project history in one place
• Making it easier for new team members to adapt to a project and continue where work was left off
• Highlighting potential details, data points, or strategies you’d miss in the absence of a shared knowledge hub
• Speeding up productivity as individuals are no longer aimlessly asking and waiting around for the insights they need

So how do you get started with improving knowledge sharing?

Encourage knowledge sharing in multiple formats. Sure, keeping everything tidy in Notion is one guaranteed way of not letting anything pass through the cracks. But it’s not fun. So employees aren’t motivated to eagerly participate in knowledge sharing. 

Dig into the common personality types on your team and turn those traits and channels they’d enjoy using. From classic file directories to dedicated Slack channels, recorded calls, and Loom video folders. Reserve time for regular retrospective meetings with 5-10 extra minutes for people to share and contribute knowledge.

Idea in practice: Organize workshops on a weekly or monthly basis by calling up experts to teach your team skills ranging from design for everyone to leadership or getting started with managing projects.

5. Set clear KPIs and OKRs

Goal setting is more important than ever with hybrid workplace collaboration because it’s that one core thing that aligns all employees.

But first, a quick distinction between Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] and Objectives and Key Results [OKRs]:

• KPIs – Measurable data points/numbers that highlight if a strategy is effective or stalling. Example: Reaching $6,000 in sales in each of the next two quarters.
• OKRs – A framework that involves setting goals and key results for each business objective. Example: Attract new clients by increasing PPC advertising spend to $2,000/month.

Evaluating progress on these OKRs shouldn’t be merely a secondary priority. That’s why you need to pair them with KPIs that allow you to see if you’re meeting the company’s performance goals.

As general guidance, focus strictly on the objectives you’re able to attain. Unreasonable or too many targets will only cause more chaos in a hybrid team. Facilitate new creative challenges by setting realistic due dates for fun experiments and following up with them regularly.

6. Work on spreading the trust

Remember my very first point on building employer-employee trust even when distractions are bound to happen?

This whole issue of trust deserves its own strategy in your agenda.

After the pandemic, employees have received more power and leverage when it

comes to creating change within their organization. In fact, they’re now the ones setting expectations and raising the bar. The same Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report has also found out that 6 in 10 employees are now choosing employers based on their values and beliefs.

So if you’re wondering where you can get started with trust building:

It’s through employer branding.

Simply put, how you present your company and team culture to the public. Aside from that, how you handle your recruitment and interviewing process allows you to showcase your company’s values and measure for culture fit.

This is your first chance to establish trust. Even before day one at work.

Employees that trust their employer also tend to be more motivated to take action when change is needed. This idea gives you the chance to test out your current trust levels. Are your employees taking issues to a management team they trust or are they publicly complaining because there’s just no one in the company to listen to them?

Let that sink in a bit.

Prioritize fixing trust issues within your current team. Once you’re able to hold transparent conversations with your employees and meet their expectations, a healthy team culture is much easier to find and promote. Plus, you’re setting yourself up for amazing talent retention stats.

Making sense of collaboration in hybrid workplace

I often talk about how important it is for employees to be happy at work. This is the principle that should guide your hybrid work communication plan as well: How do I make sure every individual on my team is happy?

Most often, keeping employees content in a hybrid team is a matter of:

• Staying true to your values and promises
• Providing not only the right resources for them to collaborate, but also the opportunities for connections to happen [even if virtual ones are the only option]
• Treating every employee fairly and facing them with the same conditions, regardless of whether they work from home or the office
• Being honest about the company’s performance and future changes or new expectations
• Letting every person voice their opinion [anonymously, when otherwise difficult]
• Facilitating career growth opportunities by prioritizing the individual, not the company
• Clearly outlining all hybrid collaboration best practices so employees don’t have to face unprepared management orders

Back to you now!

What are your plans to improve collaboration in your hybrid workplace over the next 3 months? What about the objectives you want to hit by the end of the year? Skim through this list again to organize your priorities.

The post 6 best practices to strengthen collaboration in a hybrid workplace appeared first on Krisp.

Has your company kept up with the pace of innovation? And what are the costs of failing to do so? Below, we’ll go over how Covid and a hybrid workforce have affected digital transformation around the world and how you can give your organization a competitive edge.

7 Ways the Pandemic Changed Digital Transformation

1. The pandemic proved that remote work was always possible.

Before a virus started its global spread, many employers saw remote work as unnecessary, or even detrimental, to the performance and impact of their employees. Remote work was not the norm pre-pandemic. But now, working remotely at least part of the time is commonplace. A 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 57% of U.S. adults working remotely rarely or never worked from home before Covid.

The pandemic proved that employers’ excuse that remote work was “unproductive” was simply that—an excuse. In many cases, working from home during the pandemic led to an increase in productivity. Great Place to Work conducted a two-year study of more than 800,000 employees.  They then measured employee productivity from March 2020 to August 2020 and compared it to the same period in 2019. They concluded that across those months, productivity either remained the same or increased.

Even jobs previously thought incompatible with remote work found a way. Therapists, nurses, and physicians alike took advantage of telehealth sessions, allowing them to diagnose and even treat without ever stepping foot in the same room as the patient. 

As grueling and unwanted as the pandemic was, it forced a shift to remote-friendly work environments that employees had long pined for.

2. The pandemic expedited much-needed digital transformation across industries.

Organizations across industries and the world were forced to question what they previously thought was possible with technology. And in many cases, these innovations left everyone wondering, “Why didn’t we do this before?”

In health care, for example, it is now common practice to provide an online portal for patients to fill out paperwork before arriving at their appointment, saving time and paper and preventing unnecessary exposure to pathogens.

And at the DMV, car registration renewals—once infamous for long lines and atrocious wait times—are now as simple as entering your license plate number into a self-service kiosk, which then prints your renewal sticker for you.

The added convenience and safety of the tech advancements spurred by the pandemic have revealed that these things were always possible—businesses just needed a catalyst to make them happen.

3. The pandemic necessitated a shift to a workplace culture that’s more conducive to digital transformation.

When governments swiftly implemented lockdowns to slow the spread of Covid, organizations were left scrambling to transition their workforces and technologies to a work-from-home model. Workplaces that had previously been more formal and rigid faced an ultimatum of sorts: Adapt to the “new normal” of employees attending work via Zoom in a crowded house with their kids playing in the background, or stick to their old ways and risk unhappy workers and a business model that would fail in this new world order.

As such, employers were forced to develop a culture that created a psychologically safe place to try something new without fear of failure. Interestingly enough, this is exactly the kind of culture where digital transformation succeeds.

An October 2020 McKinsey report found that organizations that performed well during the pandemic used cutting-edge technologies. Further, “a related imperative for success is having a culture that encourages experimentation and acting early.” 

What’s more, the transition to the hybrid work model, too, is driving culture change that’s conducive to digital transformation. As management consultant Geoffrey Moore tells technology journalist Peter Burrows, “Embracing the hybrid model is forcing companies to adopt a collaboration culture.” When you’ve got employees split between remote and in-person and spread across the world, establishing the digital tools to collaborate effectively becomes crucial.

Where experimentation and collaboration thrive, so too can digital transformation. Why? Because you no longer have a workforce that is largely resistant to the technological changes that will have to happen. They’ll be onboard and will embrace it, making the transformation flow smoothly.

4. Consumers are now more familiar with tech—and expect the best.

We’re now living in a world where much of the population spent most of 2020 and much of 2021 in isolation, doing many things only virtually. That means that people of all ages are more familiar with tech than ever before—from ordering groceries online to attending a doctor’s appointment via video chat. Those new behaviors are likely here to stay.

In fact, according to the EY US Consumer Index 8 report from November 2021, 54% of consumers say “new behaviors adopted during the pandemic feel normal now” and 45% “don’t want to go back to living exactly like before the pandemic.” 

“What this points to is that consumers are more adaptable than we think,” Kathy Gramling writes in the EY report. “They can adjust quickly to short-term impacts, but those impacts can also leave a lasting impression, turning what may not have mattered before into a top priority that companies are required to now address.”

One of the biggest pain points the EY report highlights is supply chain issues: Consumers are sick of not being able to buy things on time because a company doesn’t have them in stock. One of EY’s recommendations is that companies employ digital technology that gives real-time insights into inventory.

With these changing consumer expectations, companies must be quick to adopt technology that can improve the customer experience. In a 2021 research paper entitled “Impact of Digitalization on Customers’ Well-Being in the Pandemic Period,” the authors write, “In the pandemic context, retailers need to respond quickly and innovatively to new customer needs with the help of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and IoT.”

For customer service call centers, for example, the fix could be something as simple as implementing an AI-powered noise-cancelling app so agents can better hear callers and vice versa. 

5. More than ever before, employees want technology that makes work easier.

The fast rate of new tech adoption means that workers are well-versed in digital tools, but instead of the latest shiny object—they want only the best (the tools that make work easier). A 2022 Microsoft special report found that 46% of frontline workers say that employing technology that makes their job easier would reduce their stress. And 63% feel excited about the job opportunities tech brings.

Further, about half of Gen Z and Millennials say they “envision doing some of their work in the metaverse in the next two years,” according to the Microsoft Work Trend Index 2022.

And employers would do well to heed these new employee expectations. Seventy-one percent of business leaders believe that employees will look for jobs elsewhere if their current employer doesn’t provide them with the technology they need to do their jobs, according to the 2022 Freshworks State of Workplace Technology.

So what new tech tools can make employees’ lives easier? More than ever before, workers are reaping the benefits of artificial intelligence to enhance their jobs, including technology like noise-cancelling apps to improve virtual meeting quality and productivity.

Leading AI researchers developed Krisp, an app that uses the power of deep neural networks to pinpoint and remove distracting background noise on both ends of a call in real-time. Equipping teams with this cutting-edge technology means that whether their work is in a call center, an office, or their living room, they can have more productive and stress-free meetings. 

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6. This faster pace of digital transformation comes at a time when society is at its highest level of tech fatigue and consumer distrust.

Digital innovation during the pandemic presented a double-edged sword: At the time digital transformation is increasing, so too is the level of tech fatigue and consumer distrust.

Deloitte reports that one-third of consumers feel overwhelmed by tech during the pandemic. Microsoft data shows a “252% increase in weekly time spent in meetings for the average Teams user since February 2020″ and a 32% “increase in chats sent per person since March 2020.” And if that weren’t enough, the 2022 Freshworks State of Workplace Technology reports that 91% of employees are frustrated with inadequate workplace tech.

Google’s announcement that it’s doing away with third-party cookies in Chrome follows on the heels of consumers being less willing to share data—presenting a huge challenge to companies that rely on third-party data to target customers. In the 2022 GroupM annual consumer attitudes survey, 77% of participants “strongly or somewhat agree with the statement ‘I worry about how companies use my personal data online.’” That’s up from the previous year’s survey.

7. It also comes at a time when employees are at their highest level of burnout.

To complicate matters further, employees are experiencing burnout at a higher rate than before. The American Psychological Association reports “heightened rates of burnout in 2021.” Its 2021 Work and Well-being Survey found that 79% of employees felt work stress in the month before being surveyed.

A 2022 Deloitte survey of 5,000 women in 10 countries found a burnout epidemic in working women, the same demographic in which, a year earlier, 80% said their workloads had gone up since the start of the pandemic.

Clearly, the workforce is heading down a path of chronic stress, and it’s up to employers to use their digital transformation efforts to ease that stress—not make it worse. This will require listening to employee feedback and acting on it by implementing a real digital strategy that aims to serve employees, not just the company.

Covid Kickstarted a New Era of Digital Transformation: Will Companies Keep Momentum Going?

There’s no doubt about it—Covid necessitated a drastic change in the way employers do business. An overarching theme is that what many believed would be short-term fixes for the pandemic have had long-lasting effects. 

Consumers and workers alike have realized the convenience and improvement technology provides, but they’re also frustrated and fatigued by outdated tech. It’s up to organizations to retain what is good about these changes and continue to drive digital transformation forward.

The post 7 Ways Covid and Hybrid Work Changed Digital Transformation appeared first on Krisp.

Below, we’ll review the top digital transformation trends this year. But first, let’s establish a definition. 

What Is Digital Transformation?

In his book, Why Digital Transformations Fail, Tony Saldanha defines digital transformation as “The migration of enterprises and societies from the Third to the Fourth Industrial Revolution era. For companies, this means having digital technology become the backbone of new products and services, new ways of operation, and new business models.”

Like computers and the internet drastically changed society starting in the 1980s (Third Industrial Revolution), this Fourth Industrial Revolution, Saldanha says, will be “the melding of the physical, digital, and biological worlds today,” such as how brick-and-mortar stores now have online shopping too.

Digital transformation is about leveraging technology to perform better as a business. The main benefits of digital transformation include enhanced efficiency, increased agility, improved customer experiences, and new opportunities for growth and innovation. It’s not about the latest shiny object or doing enough to survive—digital transformation is crucial to helping companies thrive.

So what’s in store for 2022? Let’s dive in.

The 6 Digital Transformation Trends to Watch in 2022

1. Employers will become more intentional about technologies that connect remote and in-person experiences.

From 2020 to 2021, digital transformation efforts focused on the transition to working from home, but in 2022, it’s all about optimizing hybrid work—striking the right balance between working remotely and collaborating in-person.

How can tech help? Take the Meeting Owl, for example. It’s a smart device that sits in an office conference room and projects 360-degree audio and video to remote meeting attendees. In an effort to mimic in-person collaboration, the Meeting Owl creates an immersive experience, zooming in on whomever is speaking at the moment. And its AI-driven Owl Intelligence System ensures the device gets smarter over time.

Digital transformation in 2022 will continue to focus on blending in-person experiences with remote work benefits.

2. The Great Resignation, coupled with customer fatigue and increased expectations, will force a shift to employee- and customer-centric experiences.

After the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, employees started leaving companies in droves, termed The Great Resignation. In this candidate-driven market, employees have more options and are more selective than ever.

On the flip side, customers have higher expectations than ever, too. According to a 2021 Forrester report, 42% of customer service decision-makers think that customers expect faster customer service. 

So how can you keep employees and customers happy? Companies that wish to thrive in this new era will need to leverage technology to deliver a better employee and customer experience—a tall order, admittedly.

But as with most things, the right technology can help. Employee experience software provides the data and resources to track and improve company culture and employee sentiment. And customer experience software can consistently measure and track CSAT and NPS scores, provide AI insights, and conduct surveys to ensure you’re meeting (or exceeding) customer expectations.

In 2022, more than ever before, companies will be forced to think less of their bottom line and more of the people they serve. Interestingly enough, though, by focusing on the latter, the former will improve, too.

3. Becoming more agile and flexible will be top of mind for businesses preparing for the next crisis.

The constant and often abrupt change forced by the pandemic made one thing clear: Companies that want to thrive must be able to adapt quickly. In 2022, after two years of reacting to sudden changes, organizations will finally have the breathing room to step back, evaluate their processes and technology, and find ways to become more agile, so the next crisis doesn’t catch them off guard.

According to Adobe’s 2022 Digital Trends report:

“While 92% of senior executives agree that ‘our ability to be agile will determine our success as a marketing organization,’ only 31% of practitioners rate their organization’s agility in responding to opportunities and disruptions that may arise 8 or higher out of 10.”

The Adobe report recommends focusing on training and development by looking at existing stacks and lessening the burden on employees by using automation capabilities, as well as investing in learning and development programs to improve workers’ digital skills. 

Additionally, the following technology will make agility and flexibility possible:

• Cloud computing: By breaking free from on-premise servers, companies are able to be more flexible and save money. 
• Documentation: Documenting processes makes it possible to adapt quickly and modify processes as situations change. Without documentation, teams are left scrambling to figure things out last-minute. Knowledge management software will be a key focus for many businesses in 2022.
• Workflow management: Software, such as Airtable, Hive, and ClickUp, create an online space where your documentation can live. It also enables your organization to have a centralized repository where any employee anywhere can easily check on projects, helping your team run smoothly.

4. Employees will demand more AI-powered tools.

At this point, AI itself is nothing new in the grand scheme of the relatively fast technological cycle. But new applications of AI are still on the upswing. Gartner predicts that in 2022, AI software revenue will reach $62.5 billion—up 21.3% from 2021. In 2022, Gartner says companies will focus more on AI maturity and invest more in finding ways to use AI for knowledge management and to enhance the new digital workplace. 

On using AI to enhance knowledge management

Knowledge management is one way you can ensure a single source of truth exists in your workplace, streamlining information and ensuring everyone knows where to find documentation. AI-enabled knowledge management software, like Lucy.ai, makes it easier to aggregate information into a single repository–using Natural Language Processing to understand the context of an employee’s search and therefore helping them find the most relevant information fast.

On using AI to enhance the digital workplace

Your team wants more AI. According to February 2021 data from SnapLogic, 81% of employees say AI boosts their work performance, and 68% want their company to implement more AI-based tools.

Krisp uses deep neural networks (a subfield of artificial intelligence) to learn the difference between your voice and unwanted background noise. The result? Every virtual meeting you attend will have crystal clear audio—improving call quality, productivity, and the employee experience. 

5. Marketing organizations will take advantage of this last chance to prepare for a cookieless future.

Google announced that it will begin phasing out third-party cookies—which track online behavior—in Chrome beginning in mid-2023, making 2022 the final year for marketers and advertisers everywhere to figure out how to stay afloat. With third-party cookies, companies are able to serve more relevant ads; it’s why you look at a pair of shoes on one website and then keep seeing ads for those same shoes everywhere else you visit on the web.

But with consumers becoming increasingly concerned about privacy, third-party cookies are getting the boot. So organizations that rely on advertising will need to find new ways to intelligently serve ads, while still protecting user privacy.

HubSpot reported data from GetApp, which found that 41% of marketers think their biggest challenge in a post-cookie world will be “their inability to track the right data.” And 23% intend to shift their budget to email marketing software to get around Google’s changes. Email marketing provides a way for users to opt in to certain interests, allowing marketers to segment based on user-provided (versus third-party) data.

What will replace third-party cookies? One possibility is Google’s Privacy Sandbox, which is still in development. According to Google, “The Privacy Sandbox initiative aims to create technologies that both protect people’s privacy online and give companies and developers tools to build thriving digital businesses.” It remains to be seen how these technologies work and whether they’ll provide advertisers with the same level of revenue.

6. Companies will invest in upskilling their workforce on cloud computing.

As entire workforces went remote, cloud adoption hastened early in the pandemic. McKinsey found that 65% of organizations increased their cloud budgets because of the Covid crisis. But now, companies are investing in helping employees gain new skills and creating expert technologists to fully take advantage of the cloud. 

According to Pluralsight’s 2022 Tech Forecast, cloud maturity (not adoption) will be the focus this year. Pluralsight, which provides expert-led technology courses, reports an increase in viewership on cloud-related courses, indicating that many businesses are upskilling their employees to better understand this complex field. In fact, 2021’s most popular course from A Cloud Guru (a company Pluralsight owns) was Intro to Cloud Computing. 

Cloud maturity will mean investing in skills assessments and courses to help your company’s IT team and technologists optimize your cloud infrastructure.

Where Will Digital Transformation Trends Take You in 2022?

Use these digital transformation trends as a guide–and not a hard-and-fast rule. Remember, trends often come and go, but they speak to the overall needs that businesses are trying to fill as we come out of the pandemic. 

Skim through this list once more and see which tools you can test with a free trial. Many software companies offer free subscriptions or trials, so you can see if it works well for your company before committing. 

An easy place to start? The Krisp noise-cancellation app grants you 60 minutes of noise-free meeting bliss every week—at no cost to you. Try Krisp here.

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The post 6 Digital Transformation Trends Taking Over in 2022 appeared first on Krisp.

Knowing the digital transformation challenges that you may face on your journey can help you prepare for obstacles and create a plan to overcome them. Equipped with this kind of knowledge, you’ll increase the chances of your company’s success. So if you’re curious about why digital transformation fails, read on.

7 Digital Transformation Challenges Every Company Needs to Be Prepared for

Neglecting to reskill or upskill employees

Once an organization has implemented a major technological change, the challenge becomes maintaining and optimizing it. This requires reskilling or upskilling your employees. Take cloud computing, for example. For the 2021 Open Source Jobs Report, cloud and container technologies came out on top as the hottest skillset of the year, with 46% of hiring managers and developers selecting it. It surpassed Linux development and administration for the first time since the Jobs Report began. 

Why the sudden spike in cloud technology skills? Because there’s been a recent surge in cloud adoption, companies now need technologists who can optimize that infrastructure. Cloud Academy surveyed 100 technology leaders between April and May 2021, and 95% said they plan to invest more in the cloud this year compared to the last, and 81% will be investing more in developing tech skills. Upskilling existing employees is the most commonly chosen resource, with 75% of IT leaders saying it will be key to achieving their tech goals this year.

Teaching employees new skills is an investment, but the payoff can be worth it. According to the 2020 Future of Jobs report, 66% of employers expect an ROI on upskilling and reskilling within one year. It’s also worth looking into free online education. Amazon, for example, offers free online courses, pledging to train 29 million people on cloud computing by 2025.

Comparatively, upskilling or reskilling is less expensive than hiring. But that’s not to say that new hires don’t have an important role to play in a company’s digital transformation, as we’ll see in the next section.

Failing to hire top talent

In a McKinsey survey, about 80% of tech leaders reported “finding the right talent is the greatest challenge they face in their transformations.” And 51% of IT leaders from the Cloud Academy survey said they’ll need to hire new talent to achieve their tech goals.

In the age of The Great Resignation, hiring top talent becomes even more of a challenge than before. Candidates now have more options than ever and are in high demand, which means they have the luxury of being selective. Companies would do well to rethink their employer branding and create a strategy for attracting and hiring top technologists that will help lead them to a successful digital transformation.

Data security concerns

With new technology comes new data security concerns, especially when plans are rushed. One mistake some companies make is that they adopt a new tech tool first and then worry about cybersecurity later—often after a breach has happened. 

CyberGRX and Ponemon surveyed 883 IT security professionals and C-suite executives and found that 82% believe their organizations had at least one data breach because of digital transformation.  

What’s driving the vulnerabilities? 

• Haste. The IT professionals surveyed by Ponemon think it’s the rush to produce apps and the increased use of Shadow IT.
• Cloud migration. Meanwhile, the C-Suite executives in the Ponemon survey think it’s the increased cloud migration that’s led to data breaches. It’s no coincidence that as cloud adoption increases, so too do data security concerns. Cloud computing has long been criticized for its higher cybersecurity risks compared to on-premise options.
• Remote work. Working from home (or anywhere except for the office) has many advantages, but it also draws more security risks. For one, company-issued equipment taken off-premises can be more vulnerable. Also, it’s tougher to ensure a secure internet connection at each employee’s home (or coffee shop, coworking space, etc.). There tends to be less oversight overall, lending itself to more potential vulnerabilities. 

Here’s a bonus tip: For employees working remotely, have them install the Krisp noise-cancellation app. With Krisp, they can ensure that all of their online meetings are free of distracting sounds and maintain personal privacy wherever they’re working from. On top of that, all audio is processed and stored on the individual’s device, not in the cloud, so you can ensure privacy.

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Lack of clearly defined goals and a digital strategy

It happens time and again: Your company adopts the latest technology—a new applicant tracking system (ATS) or promising cloud platform—but once the initial excitement wanes, it doesn’t get fully integrated into your workflows, hardly anyone uses it (or knows how to), and ultimately, it fails to transform your business in the way you’d hoped.

One of the main reasons why digital transformation fails is that the organization lacks clearly defined goals (the outcomes the transformation will bring) and a detailed digital strategy (the roadmap to get to those outcomes). Without both of these, no amount of money invested in tech tools can save an organization. At best, there will be only minimal adoption. And at worst, the tools will gather dust, and the money will have been wasted.

Lack of employee buy-in

Along your journey to leveraging technology to improve business processes, you might meet pushback from leadership and employees. Lack of employee buy-in can kill a digital transformation.

What can you do to garner excitement and support for your digital strategy?

• Show how it makes their jobs easier. When a new tool is thrust upon the workforce without much explanation of the value it could add, it ends up feeling like a burden. Instead, spend time preparing your employees by showing them how this new technology will lighten their workload and make processes more efficient.

• Show how it helps the business. Additionally, communicate how the technology ties into your business mission and values.

• Train them on how to use the new tech tools. Most importantly, once you begin integrating the tech tool, be sure to provide sufficient training to your employees to ensure wholehearted adoption.

• Listen to their feedback. And lastly, once you’ve trained your employees on the technology, keep surveying them regularly to get their feedback. Nothing is set in stone. If you find that the tool isn’t serving its purpose, it’s worth listening to your employees on how you can make tweaks so that your digital transformation is a success. This is why an employee feedback tool is necessary.

Misaligned leadership

Related to a lack of employee buy-in is misaligned leadership. When employees see that their leadership is scattered when it comes to the digital transformation efforts, they’ll likely lose faith in the whole idea altogether. Another reason why digital transformations fail is that the leadership team hasn’t gotten on the same page about strategy and goals. 

As Rodney Zemmel, global leader of McKinsey Digital, says on “The McKinsey Podcast”: “A common failure mode … is a chief executive saying, ‘We’re going to go digital,’ and then making public statements about digital strategy. Then every person on their leadership team creates their own digital road map. What you end up with, six months or a year later, are many digital pilot projects across the organization.”

Instead, Zemmel says, the CEO should work on getting the entire leadership team to communicate with each other and ensure they have the same priorities. “And then focus on having a talent and capability road map that is as detailed as their technology road map,” he says. 

Moving too slowly/being too rigid

Agile methodology is highly praised and commonly used in engineering teams worldwide. But the agile mindset is something that every organization undergoing digital transformation would benefit from adopting.Technology changes fast, as does the market. Your organization might have clearly defined goals, a solid digital strategy, and the resources to carry it out—but if you move too slowly and fail to adapt to changes, your digital transformation efforts will wither on the vine.

McKinsey research found that companies that moved the fastest on digital had nearly twice the revenue growth as those that played it safe “with average reactions to digital competition.”

The McKinsey authors give the example of Tesla, stating that in 2014, competitors could have bought the electric vehicle maker for $4 billion. But because they didn’t, by 2018, competing automakers had spent more than $20 billion on sensor technologies and research and development just trying to keep up with Tesla. 

Working on the culture and processes within your organization that can help it become more flexible and nimble will better prepare you for digital transformation success.

Is Your Organization Prepared to Overcome These Common Digital Transformation Challenges?

Now that you know why digital transformation fails for some companies, you’re better prepared to meet with your technologists and leadership team to create a plan for addressing these potential challenges. It is this kind of knowledge and preparation that will hopefully push you into the 30% that succeed at digital transformation.

The post Why Do Digital Transformations Fail? 7 Common Challenges to Tackle appeared first on Krisp.

What are the steps to digital transformation that you just can’t skip over? Let’s find out below.

9 Steps to Digital Transformation Every Business Would Benefit From

1. Understand what digital transformation really means

You don’t want to build a strategy atop a poorly defined or misunderstood idea of digital transformation. It can be a buzzword that loses meaning the more it’s thrown around, so let’s establish a clear definition before we dive into the next steps.

Here’s an excellent definition of digital transformation from Yokogawa: “the novel use of digital technology to accelerate business strategy. It is about the application of digital technologies to empower people, optimize processes, and automate systems in the organization to radically reorient its business performance.”

Do not confuse digital transformation with the act of digitalization. To understand the difference, let’s look at Adobe’s major transformation from selling one-time software licenses to creating the Creative Cloud and selling monthly subscriptions to its software. The digitalization part was its use of cloud technology. The digital transformation occurred when the company leveraged the cloud to completely change its business model and boost its profits.

So as you undertake the steps to digital transformation, keep in mind that it’s so much more than installing new software or automating a single process.

2. Assess

Once you have a firm grasp of what digital transformation is, it’s time to take stock of your current situation. It’s a good idea to reference any business plans you have, as this can be a way to measure whether you’re meeting those goals and whether you’ve outgrown those plans.

This is a fantastic time to begin listening sessions or focus groups with your customers, employees, and leadership team to gain a holistic view of the organization.

Questions to ask:

1. In what situations do we feel under-resourced? 
2. In what situations do we thrive?
3. What achievements are we proud of, and what did we learn from those achievements?
4. When have we failed, and what did we learn from those failures?
5. Do we currently have any digital strategy in place?
6. How can technology improve our processes, productivity, and performance? 
7. What are our current success metrics? Note things like revenue, profit, year-over-year growth, sales, etc.

Be sure to document these answers and store them in a centralized place. Consider measuring and tracking your metrics in a KPI or business metrics software. You’ll want to revisit this data throughout your digital transformation journey.

3. Define the goals and a vision

Goals are objectives with measurable outcomes. A vision is an overall view of what your world will look like should your organization achieve digital transformation. Both are crucial to tracking your progress and staying motivated throughout the journey.

To define your goals, revisit the answers you uncovered in the previous step. You can also allow each team to brainstorm their own departmental goals they’d like to add. Eventually, you’ll need to narrow down and solidify the goals you’ll want to make a part of the official digital strategy roadmap. You can institute a voting system or leave it up to your leadership team to make the call.

To come to an agreement on a clear vision, ask your team:

1. When we achieve digital transformation, how will the employee experience look and feel?
2. When we achieve digital transformation, how will the customer experience look and feel?
3. When we achieve digital transformation, how will our business operate in new ways?

4. Create a digital strategy roadmap

Using the goals and vision you landed on in the previous step, build out your digital strategy roadmap. This takes it one step further by detailing:

• Why do we need this digital transformation?
• How will we achieve it? What technologies will we implement? What is the estimated cost?
• When will we achieve it? Create a timeline and assign due dates for goals and tasks.
• Who is responsible for each piece of the strategy? Increase accountability by assigning owners to each task and initiative. Do not underestimate the importance of this.

According to global management consulting firm McKinsey: “Digital transformations are more likely to be exceptionally effective when companies give people clear roles and responsibilities and put an ‘owner’ in charge of each transformation initiative. The chance of superior outcomes also rises when companies hold people accountable for meeting the individual goals they’ve been given.”

If you want an example, here’s a digital transformation roadmap from Jibility.

5. Get buy-in

Without buy-in from employees and leadership, your digital transformation will fall flat. Buy-in means that all the parties involved understand the importance of digital transformation and are invested in its success. 

So how do you get buy-in?

• Listen. The focus groups mentioned earlier are an initial way of earning trust to get that employee buy-in. People want to feel listened to, especially when there is a big change coming. They will have concerns and ideas, and the more you listen to and heed their feedback, the better they will feel about the change.

• Show them the value of digital transformation. It’s tough to garner commitment to change when you haven’t shown the value of that change. Communicate the value of digital transformation in as concrete terms as possible, even with estimates. For example, will adopting this new process save your employees 10 extra hours a month? Will updating your products result in 25% higher profits, which will trickle down to salaries and pay raises? Show employees why it matters, and you’ll earn their commitment faster.

• Reassure them that you’re not out to replace their jobs, but enhance them. Many people are leery of technology because they fear it will replace them. Show your employees how digital transformation is about enhancing their jobs, not replacing them.

• Provide proper training and upskilling. Adopting new technology is only the beginning. Once it’s implemented, employees need to feel empowered to use it. That’s where training and upskilling come in, ensuring that your workforce knows how to leverage these new digital tools.

• Regularly celebrate the small wins. Maintain motivation throughout the long process of digital transformation by celebrating small milestones on a regular basis. This can be at the company all-hands meeting, where you give shoutouts to different departments on the progress they’ve made thus far in your organization’s transformation.

6. Test 

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your digital transformation, it’s time to start making changes. Look at this step as a trial phase. You’re simply testing out the different technologies that you’ve outlined in your digital strategy, making small bets before you invest completely in something that may not work. Many software companies offer demos and free trials to let you try out their product before you go all in.

7. Measure

Remember the step where you took stock of your situation? Pull out those metrics so you have a baseline to compare against. Now, take those measurements again. Did productivity increase? Did you see a revenue boost? Is customer satisfaction higher? Which new technologies and processes can you tie to any positive gains you’ve seen?

Here’s a real-life example from SupportZebra: When the contact center underwent a fundamental business change from in-person to work-from-home during the pandemic, there was a huge spike in customer complaints about noise. By installing noise-cancellation software Krisp, SupportZebra achieved a 78% drop in those complaints. The simple addition of this AI-powered noise-cancellation technology allowed them to continue their transformation. And they saw measurable improvements, proving they were on the right track.

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8. Invest

Once you’ve placed small bets on new technology, taken it for a test run, and measured the results—it’s time to go all in. Investing in the most promising technology that has shown results is crucial to digital transformation.

This doesn’t mean you can’t change course later; far from it. As we’ll talk about in the next step, you will need to continuously refine your tools and processes throughout your digital transformation.

9. Iterate

Your success in digital transformation will depend on your ability to iterate, measure, tweak, and iterate—over and over. Being agile in your processes will allow you to move quickly, which will give you a competitive advantage. 

McKinsey found that companies that moved the fastest had revenue growth that was almost twice that of companies that had only average reaction times. Why? According to the article “Why digital strategies fail,” published in McKinsey Quarterly: “First movers and the fastest followers develop a learning advantage. They relentlessly test and learn, launch early prototypes, and refine results in real time—cutting down the development time in some sectors from several months to a few days.”

Which of These Steps to Digital Transformation Will You Take Next?

Using technology to fundamentally change and improve your business takes time, and you won’t always get it right. Be open to exploration and pivoting as needed. 

Your organization is on its own unique journey, so go back over these steps to digital transformation to decide where you land. From there, you and your team can collaborate to figure out how best to approach your digital strategy roadmap.

The post 9 Key Steps to Digital Transformation Strategy That You Cannot Ignore appeared first on Krisp.

Digital transformation, or leveraging the latest technology to fundamentally improve the way you do business, is an investment worth making. But if you still need convincing, below, we’ll show you seven benefits of digital transformation, along with proof.

7 Key Benefits Digital Transformation Brings to Businesses, Employees, and Consumers

1. Increased productivity

Technology exists to make our lives easier. So leveraging digital tools to make your team members’ lives easier should be a part of your digital transformation strategy. In fact, it’s what they crave. When Microsoft surveyed frontline workers in 2022, 46% said they’d be less stressed if they could use technology that makes their job easier. 

To that end, artificial intelligence shows plenty of promise. Salesforce surveyed 750 hiring managers for The Future of Workforce Development report and concluded: “Of all the technologies influencing workforce change, hiring managers view AI as among the most transformational.” 

Further, research commissioned by Automation Anywhere found that when organizations use automation technologies, employees are 31% more productive. And Gartner predicted that in 2021, AI augmentation would create 6.2 billion hours of work productivity.

Despite the fears stoked by many, AI isn’t here to replace jobs—it’s here to enhance them. Krisp, for example, was built by some of the most innovative AI researchers who used deep neural networks to create an app that makes virtual meetings less distracting and more productive. How? By training the technology to identify and eliminate background noise in real-time on every call. 

When it comes to virtual meetings, one of the top complaints (second only to meetings that could’ve been an email) is loud background noise, with more than half of employees saying it annoys them, according to Zippia.

With Krisp installed, the background noise problem is solved. Your employees can be stress-free and more professional during online meetings.

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2. Higher profits

A fantastic example of how digital transformation can increase profits is Adobe’s cloud adoption journey. In 2012, Adobe had already established itself as a leading provider of graphic design and video editing software such as Illustrator and Photoshop in its Creative Suite. Users could purchase lifetime licenses to the software, but this was cost-prohibitive for many people, as the entire suite could cost more than $2,500. 

So in 2013, Adobe completely overhauled its sales model by launching cloud-based Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Now, users can purchase a much lower-priced monthly subscription to the software that Adobe sells.

The result? According to Deloitte, “The organization has achieved greater levels of revenue and profitability selling their software suite using a subscription‑based model than it did selling it as a hard good.” 

3. Improved efficiency

Increasing operational efficiency is a goal every organization wants to achieve, but doing so without taking advantage of the latest technology is impossible in this day and age. Digital transformation, by its very nature, will help your organization do more with the resources it has and decrease waste because it changes your very business model or a major process.

Just like the assembly line made it possible to build cars faster than ever, digital transformation will make it possible for your organization to minimize waste and maximize output. Something as simple as automating payroll with the right software has the power to save hours of time each month.

Look at the healthcare industry, for example. In 2020, Lalita Abhyankar, M.D., shared in an article on the American Academy of Family Physicians website that her practice shifted more than 90% of her 20-minute face-to-face visits to 10-minute telemedicine visits. That nearly doubled the number of patients she could see in one day.

Further, when practices ask patients to fill out intake forms online before their appointment, they can reduce waiting room wait times and late arrivals. Many patients arrive at their appointment without allowing enough time to fill out paperwork, meaning they start the appointment late. By using software that sends reminders to fill out digital intake forms, providers can save time and create a more efficient waiting room process.

4. Decreased employee burnout

Employee burnout is at an all-time high, much of it driven by increased hours, poor work-life boundaries and digital fatigue—all exacerbated by the pandemic. But if you use technology correctly, digital transformation can ease the burden on employees and decrease burnout.

In the second edition of its Resetting Normal study, The Adecco Group surveyed 14,800 people across 25 countries and found that, compared to the 2020 survey, more people in 2021 said their mental health had suffered. The report calls burnout the “new worker pandemic.” And yet, The Adecco Group found that managers feel ill-equipped to tackle this. Two of the top challenges for managers have been identifying when a worker might be struggling with mental wellbeing and overwork/burnout. 

But in terms of technology, monitoring for burnout is a solved problem. Enterprise mental health software such as FlourishDx helps companies manage risks to employee psychological health and safety by gathering data through surveys while maintaining employee anonymity and confidentiality.

On top of that, new uses of AI continue to drive technological advancements in preventing and reducing employee burnout. Currently, West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute is conducting a study in partnership with Oura ring to see how machine-learning algorithms in wearables can monitor burnout risk and deliver therapeutic programs at the right time.

Leveraging the latest technology to decrease employee stress and monitor risk factors can help prevent the burnout effects that many are experiencing today.

5. Cost savings

A large part of the resistance to digital transformation is that, yes, it costs money upfront. But what if it could save you money in the long run? Do it right, and it could. That’s because the increased productivity and improved efficiency mentioned above inevitably lead to cost reduction.

Research by The Hackett Group found that digital transformation reduces process costs by 30% for typical procurement organizations. This is due to digital accelerators such as robotic process automation (RPA), analytics-driven insight, and artificial intelligence. 

6. Better customer experience

Digital transformation is highly customer-focused. By integrating the right technology into your business processes, you can bring buyers a better customer experience. For example, the AI-powered Krisp app helps contact centers provide better quality support to callers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when contact center SupportZebra had to transition 90% of its workforce to work-from-home, customer complaints about noise rose. After installing Krisp, those complaints dropped by 78%. 

In the healthcare sector, digital transformation improves the patient experience as well. In fact, better patient satisfaction is the top expected digital transformation outcome for 92% of health systems surveyed by Deloitte in 2021. 

During the pandemic, when safety concerns necessitated a shift to digital methods of delivering care, being able to attend telemedicine appointments made healthcare more affordable and accessible to patients who previously would’ve gone without care. A Deloitte health care consumer survey found that consumer usage of virtual visits went from 15% in 2019 to 28% in April 2020. And 80% of respondents said they’d likely do another virtual visit even after the pandemic was over. 

In this way, digital transformation is able to provide long-term solutions that lead to happier customers.

7. Longer business lifespan

Do you want your company to be around in the next 50 years? If the answer is yes, then that is, by far, one of the biggest benefits of digital transformation. It’s absolutely crucial to survival. As technology advances, businesses are struggling to hang on. A report by Credit Suisse found that the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company is less than 20 years; that’s down from about 60 years in the 1950s. 

The following story of Studebaker cars, as told by Tony Saldanha in Why Digital Transformations Fail, highlights the harsh reality that no company–even the most innovative—is immune from failing at digital transformation. 

Studebaker was a leader in the horse and wagon industry, but at the turn of the century, when automobiles started to take hold, Studebaker had to change its product. It began manufacturing gas-powered cars that, even today, are seen as the most innovative of their time—but the company still failed. Why? Because it lacked a plan for sustainability. Digital transformation requires strategy. It is about leveraging technology to make permanent changes, not just to your product, but to your entire business model so that your organization can last. 

Ready to Reap the Benefits of Digital Transformation?

As you can see, investing in the right technology now will allow you to realize the benefits of digital transformation for years to come. Higher profits, happier customers, and a healthier workplace are just a few of the upsides—what’s not to love?

If you’re looking to get started with integrating tools that make work better, leverage the latest AI technology to cancel out background noise and improve online meeting quality. Try Krisp noise-cancellation for free.

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The post What Are the Main Benefits of Digital Transformation? appeared first on Krisp.

So what can you do to fix it? Thankfully, a lot. But first, you need to understand what causes poor workplace communication and what kind of damage it does.

What Causes Poor Communication in the Workplace?

Lack of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety, as defined by Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson, is “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” When Google set out to find out what makes an effective team, psychological safety stood out as the most important quality.

Without it, your team will be too afraid to speak up for fear of retribution or punishment. When it doesn’t feel like a safe space to voice concerns, criticism, or failure, people will keep quiet–even to their and their team’s detriment.

Unclear Expectations

Organizations without documented communication guidelines or an internal communication strategy are leaving their employees in the dark. When your team doesn’t know how, when, or how often they’re expected to check in, they’re unlikely to say anything at all.

Low Employee Engagement

Disengaged employees are mentally checked out of their jobs and do the bare minimum to get by. So they don’t see a point in going the extra mile and communicating. If your organization has low employee engagement, this might cause poor communication in your workplace.

Chaotic Work Environment

A chaotic work environment may be one where there is no clear chain of command, unsafe working conditions, or even loud and distracting spaces. All of these make it difficult to communicate.

And working from home doesn’t necessarily solve this. Even those who get to work from their living room are not immune to the distractions of home life—noisy neighbors, crying children, and needy pets can interrupt their workday.

Managers’ Fear of Giving Feedback

A survey by Interact and Harris Poll found that 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with employees. When managers fear giving feedback, or haven’t been trained on how to deliver it effectively, that’s a huge barrier to communication. On top of that, your team will never know what they’re doing well, or what needs work, and they’ll be held back from their full potential.

A Shift to Remote Work

While there are many benefits to working from home, a big downside is the extra effort required to communicate effectively. Sure, you have plenty of virtual ways to get in touch, but it lacks the same sense of closeness that in-person communication provides. When you don’t see your coworkers at the desk next to you, it becomes much easier to lose touch with them.

Research using data from more than 61,000 Microsoft employees over the first half of 2020 found that remote work decreased cross-group collaboration among employees, causing them to become more siloed.

So not only can a shift to remote work lead to poor communication in general, but it can also contribute to less communication between different departments, which hurts collaboration.

Lack of Time

One final reason for poor communication in the workplace? Lack of time. We’re all busy, and often, communication falls by the wayside because we think it’s easier to just get things done on your own instead of talking to your team about it. But this can often lead to less creativity, as we miss out on crucial differing perspectives.

6 Disastrous Effects of Poor Communication in the Workplace

1. Stress and Burnout

Feeling confused about what you’re expected to do and not knowing what’s going on within your organization is understandably stressful. If this goes on for too long, it can lead to job burnout.

2. Poor Performance

People cannot do their jobs well if they don’t have access to the information they need.

3. Lack of Appreciation

When leaders fail to verbally recognize their team’s hard work, this can lead to employees feeling unappreciated, which takes a toll on morale.

4. Decreased Employee Engagement

It’s tough for employees to feel enthusiastic about an organization that doesn’t keep them in the loop or show appreciation for their work.

5. Low Retention

Eventually, employees that suffer from poor communication in the workplace may leave for a different company.

6. Lack of Creativity

Creativity thrives with collaboration, and collaboration is only possible with communication. If your team doesn’t know how to talk to each other effectively, ideas and product development will stagnate. 

How to Deal With Poor Communication in the Workplace

Begin by Listening

As we saw above, poor communication in the workplace is often a result of leadership failing to listen. So before you do anything to try to improve the situation, begin by asking your team for their feedback. Where do they see miscommunication happening? What would they like to see improve? What ideas do they have? Gather this information via online surveys, and consider making them anonymous so people feel more comfortable being completely honest.

Listening goes beyond just gathering feedback, though. You have to act on it next, and below, we’ll discuss some action steps you can take to bring your team feedback to life.

Draft a Communications Handbook

Based on the information you gather in the first step, draft a communications handbook. This will be the go-to source for your entire organization when it comes to when, where, and how to communicate with one another.

If you need some inspiration, check out Gitlab’s communication handbook, which is available to the public online. It’s more than 24,000 words beautifully detailing expectations when it comes to how Gitlab employees should convey information within their organization and outside of it.

Create an Internal Communication Strategy

In your communications handbook, you can include an internal communication strategy. This lays the groundwork for how each team member should communicate with one another and for how the leadership team will keep all employees in the loop.

Your strategy might include:

• Internal newsletters: Consider emailing a monthly newsletter to your employees with important organizational announcements so your employees stay in the know.

• All-hands meetings: All-hands meetings, also known as town halls, are a great way to bring the entire organization together to hear directly from the CEO, celebrate team and individual wins, and get answers to questions.

• Slack channels: Many companies create different Slack channels for different types of communication. You can have more serious ones, such as Slack channels to discuss bugs in your software, or lighthearted ones, such as a channel for sharing pet photos. Whatever the topic, it’s really about staying connected to your team.

Build Psychological Safety

Without psychological safety, your efforts to fix poor communication in the workplace will be futile. Psychological safety is crucial to effective communication and high performance in general. Building it takes time and effort. It begins with taking a step back and looking at how your company conveys its attitude about failure. Is failure punished? Or is it viewed as a learning opportunity? Do leaders actively solicit feedback from their team? Or do they go on a power trip and make decisions on their own? Find ways to create a safe space for risk-taking by letting your employees know that you want them to dare and innovate, and they won’t be punished if things don’t go as planned.

One way to build psychological safety is to show that you truly have an open-door policy. When an employee has critical feedback to give, is it welcomed? Does your team even know how to bring forth a grievance? Make sure this process is clearly outlined in your communications handbook. If you want to have good communication in your workplace, it begins with leaders showing vulnerability and displaying how they welcome tough conversations. 

Remove Audio and Visual Distractions With the Click of a Button

The office—even the home office—is a distracting place. One easy way to make it more conducive to good communication is to install Krisp. Krisp is an app that eliminates background noise from virtual meetings (in real time!) and it works across all of your communication apps. 

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Just install the app and toggle the switch on, and you can communicate clearly during every call, without any distracting sounds.

Host Virtual Town Hall Meetings

Another way to build psychological safety is through virtual town halls, where every employee—from the CEO to the receptionist—can get together to discuss wins and losses and learn from both. This is a rare chance for the CEO to show vulnerability by discussing setbacks with the entire organization and showing how you, as a team, can overcome them.

A virtual town hall may also be the only opportunity that a team member gets direct access to the CEO to ask a burning question. You can hold these town halls once a month or once a quarter. They usually include an update from the CEO, updates from each team, “shoutouts” where team members can thank each other, and a Q&A. 

Hold Regular One-on-Ones

Never underestimate the power of a manager meeting with a direct report, even if it’s once a month or once a quarter. It’s difficult for anyone to be vulnerable in front of a group. One-on-ones are an effective way to allow an employee to discuss hard topics and can establish open communication between managers and their team.

Be Selective About Communication Channels

When it comes to good communication, less is more. Having 15 different ways to talk to each other only leads to confusion and noise. Instead, be intentional and selective about the communication channels that you and your team use. 

For example, you might designate email for external communication (such as between your team and their clients) and Slack for internal communication. And you might ban texting about work, and save phone calls for emergencies. Whatever you and your team decide works best, be sure to include it in your communications handbook.

Provide Communication Training—Especially to your Managers

As you saw earlier, most managers fear communicating with employees. Why? One reason might be that they’ve never been trained on how to do it properly, especially when it comes to delivering negative feedback or bad news. Consider hosting a communication workshop for all employees to attend, especially your managers. You can bring in a guest speaker or consultant who can provide the proper expertise and training to your employees, making open communication a less scary thing.

Say Goodbye to Poor Communication in the Workplace

Poor communication in the workplace can be fixed—you just need to know the causes. Once you know why it’s happening, you can start applying the tips in this article to overcome confusion, mistrust, and chaos in the work environment.

Good communication, especially for remote teams, begins with cutting out distractions during calls. Install Krisp today to experience distraction-free virtual meetings.

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The post What Causes Poor Communication In The Workplace—and How to Fix It appeared first on Krisp.