The higher you go up the hierarchy, life doesn’t get easier. Leading a convoluted team and managing multiple clients is your story and mine too.

Effective communication, great empathy for team members and drive for adopting newer and simpler technology can you take a long way ahead of time.

Agency – client relationship, vendor - client relationship, client – media relationship, internal team relationships, all require impeccable communication stream. It is not only the communications line, that of a PR agency or media agency or corporate communications where communication is priority. Today, good communications is the need of the hour for any business to grow and prosper.

Talking of communication, to what extent can communication be made seamless? No lapse, no wrong communication, no adultery, no repetition and no overflow. Can you even imagine what life would be if this is the scenario and how effective communications can change the destiny of any business? Start thinking now!

Move to elevator speeches, make your mails concise and meaningful, be accessible at all times and avoid repetition are some of the points we come across over and over again in books, articles, lectures, training sessions and meetings. All this said and done, our press releases are still long, meetings over run by few hours, chain mails clogging our inbox, long explanations to make a statement and justify… after all, there is limit to how much we can store in our human memory, multi task and physically run around to meet deadlines in the time bound world we live in. We are humans but treated like machines, aren’t we? Doesn’t that feeling creep in when work seems never ending and after a point managing work becomes a bigger challenge than doing work itself.

Managing documents, managing business relationships, managing team members in a small firm or a big network can be carried out with ease if we learn the art of good communications and channelizing. Even if you don’t fully agree with me on this point, I empathize with you. The reason is simple and twofold. There are way too many communication channels we are using that we forget what was said, when and where. E-mails, sms, facebook, linkedin, phone, a hand note, a meeting…argghh! Secondly, not everyone can be a master in effective communication skills by attending classes or reading books.

Let machines work like machines and humans like humans.  Hence originated TaskTrek, it is a communication and document management application.

We all want to become planners than organizers; strategize than do operational work, rise from executive level to manager level, forefront the activity than being engaged in backend, and for all this we change jobs like we change clothes in the hope of better job roles and positions.  Seemingly, found in public relations or communications line more.

The management in various PR agencies is cognizant of this but do little to correct it. Focus is on growth, expansion through acquiring more clients, offices and partnering with PR agencies offshore and extensive management policies.

The need of the hour is to hold on to resourceful talent and invest in them along with growing your business. Giving a day off from work to attend training sessions and seminars, rewarding best sellers, organizing pr award events is a step forward but certainly not enough. Nothing can beat self realization, self learning and self development.

In the light of increasing productivity and harnessing talent, PR agencies should adopt superior technologies and simple management policies to cut down unnecessary time wasting processes!  By doing this, resources will not only be able to invest time judiciously on their self learning, attaining more in-depth knowledge of client’s business, understanding of their industry better, and focus on planning along with basic operation work but value add in whatever they do.

Citing a common example of intranet here: Almost all companies and agencies have intranet with multiple features to keep everyone connected, informed, and also perform basic operation such as timesheets, appointments, and store files. How many actually make use of it? Or I would say, spend time understanding and using it efficiently. Either, it is too complex, or there is no time for it. Even then, just because the management has invested in it so you must use whether you like it or not.

Simplifying work life is the key. Technology is good but it should be simple and user friendly, and most importantly resonate with all.

No chatting, checking personal mails, social media sites allowed. All this in order to protect work related data from leaking out but this isn’t going to work anymore. We all want to stay connected through chat, and be able to access all our files and folders online.  Everything can’t be possibly stored on webmail or mobile. So, there has to be a system where I’m equipped with information where ever I go and needless to bother colleagues for mailing the documents to me when I need them the most.

Accessibility is important.

Mistakes happen; after all, we are human. Having said this, there are times when you are held against for something you haven’t done or was wrongly communicated which resulted in crisis. Do you keep all your communication documented? Is all your communication in one place? Maybe not! Perhaps, you keep all your exchanges in outlook and spend hours locating that one mail which will fence you from the acquisition laid by your boss or client.

Communication is an essential process in the world in which we all live on a day to day basis (our work place). It is difficult to master, but essential to make a good effort in achieving. Communication is essentially the effective and complete exchange of information from one person or persons in team to other person or persons. Communication on an effective team starts from day one, from the moment a project is thought over, assigned, and continues on a daily basis, if not hourly basis, throughout the life cycle of a project, once the project is complete it also becomes essential to archive all old communication as it might become vital in dicision making for future work.

In today’s world when people can communication through all sorts of media, chat clients, emails, social networks, telephones and what not, there is a need to bring all communication back into one one place. You cannot let the information be scattered all over the place or someone will end up in trouble, either by spending hours to look for what was agreed or biting the bullet and doing what was NOT agreed upon just because they cannot find the communication anywhere. Larger the projects, larger the penalty.

There can be no doubt as to the critical importance of effective communication management in terms of successfully facilitating not only the ultimate success of any particular project, but the meeting of criteria as far as planning, cost and deadlines are concerned. Most project managers would admit that around eighty percent of their time is spent communicating in one form or another with the various members and groups within the project team.