You're leading a global team through organizational change. How can you ensure effective communication?

This is clearly easier said than done. This can mean a whole lot of things effectively though. It can mean establishing clear guidelines on how communications occurs through official and unofficial channels. It can mean accountability for the actions of a team, and establishing clear guidelines around what that entails. It can mean encouraging participation by all team members, and establishing an environment, where people don't feel forced to participate, but genuinely feel like a part of the overall team objectives. It can also mean being very transparent about how decisions are made, and how conflict is resolved.

Nowadays, the world is extremely racist, and that can impact and seep into the mindset of an organisation. An organisation has to be wary of this, and eatablish clear Do's and Don'ts which should be recorded in their best practice guides. There should be formal and informal channels which can be used to escalate and bypass immediate superiors, if a subordinate feels that they've been wronged, in anyway. There should definitely be mandatory diversity related trainings to make sure every new member is onboard with the overall team culture.

This sword can cut both ways though. Sometimes too many tools can also spoil the broth. Remember, everyone is overloaded with data, so the key is to make everyone's lives easier. A great way is to ensure that meetings have a maximum time frame, emails should not rant incessantly, it should mean people who will not participate do not necessarily have to attend meetings, and it should definitely mean communicating the agenda of meetings in advance, otherwise a meeting should be optional. These things greatly help in making sure organisational resources are effectively utilised.

Team communication can be effective three ways. Utilize collaboration tools to communicate meeting minutes, timeline updates and deliverables. Meeting agendas can be focused on deliver outcomes, risk and issues. Applications that provide real time chat features are effective for project, product and change management teams. Flexible and integrated tools make team communication seamless.