Why Team Members Need to Talk to Each Other — About Work

If your company is like most others, your team members talk to each other – about work (mostly complaining about it, or your customers or even you), their families, weekend activities – but mostly the usual “stuff” people talk about. These types of conversations will always exist and no matter how repetitive they may be, they will never go away, nor should they.

The type of talking I want to discuss today is very different and may even be taking place in your organization, but I’ll bet not to the extent it should if you want to truly tap into the power of your team.

For example, how consistently do the following conversations happen within your organization? Do your team members:

Share with each other what, from their experiences, works best in given situations?

Share with each other what solutions they have come up with?

Share their mistakes with others and what they learned from them?

Share their ideas/experiences on how to improve operations and/or your customer’s experiences?

Teams who communicate with each other regularly are better than those who don’t. Nothing brilliant in that statement. It’s just good old common sense. Yet many never focus on it and even fewer take advantage of what their team can offer, not just your customer but each other.

Teams who regularly and consistently share ideas, knowledge, experiences and practices end up sharing value with each other. And that value is reflected directly in their individual and collective performance, which positively impacts the results of your company and the experience delivered to your customer.

So – here comes the point of all this – what are you doing to create the environment where these conversations can take place regularly? It’s not that difficult or time-consuming to get started. You just have to make the decision and commitment to do it.