Effective workplace communication is an essential element of your business’s success. Without good communication between team members, your business will suffer. But even basic communication can be a difficult skill to put into practice and master.
Here, we’ll help you understand why effective workplace communication is so important and discuss ways to improve the lines of communication in your business.
The formal definition of communication is: The act of exchanging information, ideas, and feelings through written or verbal means. Workplace communication is exchanging information in a business setting.
With effective workplace communication, your team will receive your message accurately, understand how it affects them, and know what to do next.
Good communication avoids confusion and improves productivity by ensuring everyone knows what they’re supposed to do.
Effective communication encourages creativity and innovation by keeping the lines of discourse open.
Strong communication helps build stronger teams by ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Good communication minimizes confusion, helping teams work more effectively toward common goals.
Effective communication ensures that every team member feels heard, valued, and engaged.
Clear communication helps eliminate uncertainty and contributes to business growth.
Take the time to explain why tasks are important and how they fit into the larger project.
Ensure everyone knows the deadlines, responsibilities, and small details that can make a big difference.
Clearly define roles and responsibilities to prevent confusion and ensure smooth project completion.
Communicate in a clear and accessible manner, avoiding ambiguous language and jargon.
Regular progress reports keep everyone informed and ensure consistency in communication.
Select the appropriate communication medium (e.g., instant messages, emails, face-to-face meetings) based on the message's importance and context.
Build trust with your team by showing genuine interest and engaging in non-work-related conversations.
Promote trust through empathy, keeping promises, and supporting team members.
Regular one-on-one meetings help maintain open lines of communication and build stronger relationships.
Effective communication is a two-way street; actively listen to your team's feedback and concerns.
Take the time to understand issues fully before making assumptions or jumping to conclusions.
Using the right tool can make a significant difference in your business’s success. The Sling app, part of the Sling by Toast suite, offers powerful features for effective workplace communication, including:
Sling includes features like cloud-based storage, Newsfeed, and Messages to streamline communication. For more resources on managing your business effectively, visit GetSling.com.
Sling is now Sling by Toast! Learn more
Discover the best employee roster apps available on the market today. We’ve compiled a list that will help you make the right choice for your team and business needs.
Sling is an employee roster app designed specifically with busy managers in mind. Combining calendar simplicity with cloud-based functionality, Sling offers:
Sign up for a free Sling account and enjoy a 15-day trial of all features available. After that, basic features remain free.
Inch helps remote and on-site team members stay on task with features such as:
Connecteam facilitates managing, training, and communicating with your workforce. Features include:
7shifts is tailored for restaurants, moving all scheduling, communication, and team management to the cloud. Stay connected and organized with ease.
Homebase takes your employee roster online, offering features like scheduling, time clock, timesheets, and team communication. Effortlessly update and share rosters from anywhere.
Humanity allows you to manage schedules, shift changes, and communications from anywhere. Available on the web and mobile devices, it keeps your team connected and efficient.
Shiftboard uses data intelligence and automation to create adaptive, employee-friendly rosters. Access it on the web or through mobile apps.
Deputy offers comprehensive tools for scheduling, labor cost control, timesheets, overtime management, and attendance tracking. Compatible with various platforms.
Fourth provides scheduling solutions based on business demands, forecasts, and labor rules. Available on the web and mobile devices.
Geared towards service and repair businesses, mHelpDesk automates repetitive processes and enhances scheduling with online and mobile tools.
Paycor Scheduling offers features like shift trading, labor-cost monitoring, and time-off management. It is part of the wider Paycor HCM suite for comprehensive business management.
Tanda helps managers create schedules, track staff, manage shift-swapping, and collect frontline information from any device.
With drag-and-drop scheduling and time-tracking, QuickBooks Time is ideal for managing in-office, remote, and mobile teams.
Snap Schedule offers scalable options for team and individual shift management, overtime tracking, and comprehensive reporting.
Findmyshift is a scalable solution for all business sizes. Its features include scheduling, time tracking, payroll, and integration with third-party apps.
The apps mentioned work well for various industries, including restaurants. Sling, specifically designed for restaurant management, offers tools for scheduling, communication, and labor cost optimization.
Choose an employee roster app that offers more than just scheduling. The Sling software provides features for organizing rosters, tracking work hours, controlling labor costs, and simplifying daily tasks.
Try Sling for free today and elevate your business productivity to the next level.
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We are excited to announce that Sling is now Sling by Toast! This integration brings you an enhanced suite of team management tools designed to optimize your restaurant's efficiency. Learn more about this exciting update and how it can benefit your business.
Preparing a restaurant budget offers numerous benefits, from predicting operating expenses to making informed growth decisions. Without a budget, you're essentially flying blind, unsure of how much to spend or earn. A well-prepared budget can set you on a path to profitability and business growth.
The foundation of your budget is numbers, so choosing a method to track them is essential. This could be as simple as a piece of paper or as complex as specialized accounting software.
Start with basic columns such as Date, Payment Method, Description, and Income. Customize columns to fit your needs, including headings like Advertising, Food, and Supplies. Record income upon bank deposits and expenses as they occur for accurate tracking.
Understanding your costs is crucial. Track fixed costs like insurance, semi-variable costs like employee wages, and variable costs like supplies. Summarize these totals monthly for a clear financial overview.
Projecting sales, especially if you're new, requires estimation. Use historical data to refine these estimates. Tracking sales daily, weekly, and monthly helps identify trends, improve forecasting, and adjust strategies.
Compare your monthly sales and costs to understand your financial status. If costs exceed sales, consider strategies to either increase sales or reduce costs. Analyzing these figures reveals areas for improvement.
Identify actions to align your sales with costs. This may involve driving new customer traffic, adjusting pricing, or sourcing cheaper supplies. Balance between increasing sales and cutting costs to maintain profitability.
Once you achieve a balance, aim to increase profits. Enhance customer experience, refine marketing strategies, and control expenses. Leverage data insights from your budget to identify growth opportunities.
Software like Sling by Toast can streamline employee scheduling and wage management. Efficiently manage schedules to avoid overtime, improve communication, and enhance overall productivity.
Utilizing budgeting software alongside scheduling tools like Sling by Toast offers comprehensive control over your restaurant’s finances and operations. Achieve detailed insights and efficient staff management for enhanced profitability.
If you want your business to succeed, you need to exercise effective talent management. Doing so will make it easier to hire and retain high-performing employees. But implementing a productive talent management process is often easier said than done. In this blog, the management experts at Sling provide tips to help you find, recruit, and keep the best team members for your business.
Instead of jumping right from reading résumés to interviewing prospective candidates, start the process with a phone interview to help you eliminate less-qualified applicants. The phone interview is a stepping stone to the in-person meeting, so keep it short — usually around 30 minutes — and ask specific questions in order to get to know the prospective team member.
Effective phone interview questions include:
If you can’t decide whether to proceed to the next stage, schedule a second phone interview to gain a bit more clarity.
A face-to-face interview is still one of the best ways to get to know a prospective employee and find out if they are a good fit for your team. The in-person interview is the ideal time to ask deeper questions, such as:
Conversation starters like these will help reveal the candidate’s real potential and whether or not they would be a good addition to your business.
Finding a prospective team member with the right set of skills is important. Equally important, though, is finding a prospective team member with the right behavior, attitudes, and work style to fit your company culture. Company culture matters more than you may think because it’s the “day-to-day” life of your team. If a potential hire isn’t a good fit, they are far less likely to enjoy their time at work, meaning their relationships and productivity will suffer.
An onboarding process is a set of steps that eases new hires into their work environment so that their first days and weeks aren’t such a shock. You can tailor your talent management and onboarding process by implementing any or all of the steps below:
Each of your team members — whether new-hire or long-time veteran — is unique. They all have different skills, work habits, and personalities. And each of them finds motivation in a different way. This is especially true when it comes to compensation and benefits. Talent management doesn’t revolve exclusively around these variables, but they are two of the most effective means of increasing morale and job satisfaction. Consider offering such benefits as:
You can even create your own set of benefits that reflect your company values and the way your business operates.
One of the best ways to improve your talent management process is through scheduling. Offering unique scheduling options gives your high-performing employees more control over their work/life balance and makes your business more attractive than other businesses that operate on a strict 9-to-5 schedule.
Examples of different work schedule types include:
Scheduling software like Sling simplifies even the most complicated shifts so that you can sit down, make your schedule, and move on to more pressing matters. All of Sling’s cloud-based features — from schedule creation to time clock to payroll calculations — make it easy for you to create the best schedule possible, distribute it with ease, make changes, and juggle time-off requests.
The Sling app even provides suggestions and warnings when you’ve double-booked a team member or created a conflict in another part of your schedule. All of this makes Sling the best choice for simplifying your scheduling process. Regardless of whether you need to schedule flextime, split shifts, a compressed workweek, or all three, the best way to simplify and streamline your talent management is with scheduling and time-tracking software like Sling.
For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit Getsling today.
Learn more about Toast acquiring Sling to expand its team management suite.
Nothing saps a positive attitude faster than chaos in the workplace. Efficiency keeps everything running smoothly, reducing stress and fostering a more optimistic environment.
For more on improving efficiency:
Building a positive atmosphere starts with hiring individuals who have the right skills and a positive outlook.
For hiring tips:
Providing enough breaks and time off helps employees stay energized and positive.
For more on work/life balance:
Alternative schedules like 9/80, flextime, and split shifts can help balance work/life and improve attitudes.
Explore alternative work schedules:
Training can reinforce the importance of maintaining a good attitude.
For onboarding tips:
Diversity brings more skill, talent, and experience, which translates into higher productivity and a positive attitude.
Learn the importance of diversity:
Disorganization can affect your attitude. Staying organized helps maintain a positive outlook.
Staying organized tips:
Team cohesion fosters a positive atmosphere and improves group dynamics.
For team cohesion tips:
If you want to have and promote a positive attitude in your workplace, and be more productive in the process, use Sling to create the perfect work schedule for your team.
Sling simplifies and streamlines every aspect of the scheduling process, giving you more time to focus on maintaining a positive atmosphere in your business.
Visit GetSling.com for more free resources to help you manage your business better.
When employee morale is low, your team will feel it. They’ll suffer from poor performance, lack of motivation, and even a deep dissatisfaction with their job that leads to increased turnover.
When employee morale is high, your team will enjoy stronger bonds, a deeper sense of camaraderie, and a willingness to cooperate that wasn’t there before.
In this article, the workforce-management experts at Sling give you tips to boost employee morale for a better work environment.
Diversity plays an important role in improving employee morale throughout your organization. Business as a whole is becoming more global every day. Hiring a diverse team gives you access to those markets like never before.
Cohesion, cooperation, and unity are the heart and soul of all successful teams. When your business feels like a group of people working toward a common goal rather than individuals just trying to get stuff done, employee morale will skyrocket.
Asking for — and listening to — feedback from your team is a powerful tool for boosting employee morale. When your team sees that you take their suggestions seriously, they’re more likely to feel valued and like they’re a part of a family rather than just someone who shows up, does a job, and leaves.
Don’t view onboarding as something you need to get through before you can get back to the “real” work of managing your team. Instead, view it as a way to boost employee morale like never before.
There’s nothing more frustrating — and a bigger hit to employee morale — than not having the resources to do your job effectively and efficiently. So, make sure your employees have those resources!
To be happy, productive, and enjoy high morale, your team needs a clear set of responsibilities that every employee abides by.
Guidelines and standard operating procedures are the foundation on which your team — and your business — operates. Establish clear procedures and instructions for everything that has to do with your business.
At its most basic, employee morale depends on communication. It doesn’t matter if that communication revolves around scheduling, inventory, clocking in and out, ethics, or customer service.
We developed the Sling app for just that — to streamline communication and improve employee morale in every corner of your business.
Sling is a suite of integrated tools that makes scheduling, tracking labor, finding substitutes, assigning tasks, and building employee morale extremely simple. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.
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