While it is crucial to streamline communication across your company’s supply chain, you should not overlook the importance of creating a happy and connected workforce. To develop a positive and engaged team, which will ensure the smooth running of your shipping and logistics business, you should read the below five ways on how to improve internal communication.
1. Clearly State Your Company’s Priorities
By clearly stating your company’s priorities to your employees, you can ensure everyone adopts the same approach to your operations each working day, which can support communication across different departments.
For example, you should select various key performance indicators (KPIs), such as:
- Onsite safety
- Customer satisfaction
- On-schedule deliveries
- Shipping fees
- Container revenue
- Product damage and claims
By ensuring each member of staff is on the same page, they will prioritize the company’s KPIs and will work together to achieve the goals.
2. Gather Feedback from Your Employees
Ignoring your employees’ concerns and not gathering their insightful opinions could be detrimental to your brand. If you do not give your staff a forum to air their grievances, worries or ideas, your team will not feel valued by your business, which could lead to poor morale, lower productivity levels and high employee turnover.
If you would like to create a positive and productive workforce, you must routinely gather feedback from your employees. To do so, you could use employee engagement surveys from inpulse.com, and you can then use their feedback to make changes to your internal processes and improve the company culture.
3. Establish Responsibilities
Internal communication and collaboration will naturally improve when responsibilities are clearly defined for individual staff members. Every employee must understand what their position entails when they join your company, which can prevent confusion, frustration, and inefficiency. Role clarity will support communication in your business and across the supply chain, as your staff will know who is responsible for a specific process or action.
4. Successfully Train Your Team
Training need identification of the reasons why the employees should be trained and trained for what. If you do not adequately train your shipping and logistics team, it is likely the communication between both your vendors and third parties will break down. It is essential to train your team to handle unexpected events, which will ensure fast communication and swift action to create a stronger and resilient supply chain.
5. Map the Supply Chain Flow
Your employees must know who they should talk to when a process or technology breaks down. To support communication, you should provide your staff with a map of the supply chain flow, so your team members can identify who they need to talk to if a freight container fails to arrive at a port or there is a problem at customs entry. By providing the map, your employees can quickly resolve problems on their own over-relying on members of management.
So, if you want to improve company communication, you should clearly state your company’s priorities to your staff, gather feedback from your team, provide practical training and define employee responsibilities.
