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Communication, Credibility, and Trust When it Comes to Your Staff

22nd May 2019 Tips

Business leaders who win are those who communicate openly and regularly, have a clear and committed communications policy, initiate various programs to support communication and collaboration, and assess their own performance. Communication, credibility, and trust are all important to building a reliable team.

Leaders often talk about building trust. Trust is something that must be earned. It is not something that today’s business leaders can take for granted, because both internal staff and external customers and clients are increasingly less trusting. Establishing open communication, credibility, and trust when it comes to your staff is critical to the ultimate success of a business.

Trust is at the Foundation of Successful Businesses

With allegations of large corporations taking part in fraud out of greed, trust has been eroded in every direction and new rules have been set with regard to how businesses are expected to operate. This applies to communication, credibility, and trust when it comes to your staff as the internal workings of a business is where it all starts and where everything builds from.

Employees, investors, customers, government entities, and regulators are increasingly demanding greater corporate accountability and transparency. These types of measures are aimed at curbing excesses of businesses and protecting the public.

Despite these new developments and higher standards, business leaders of well-respected, high-performing businesses have long acknowledged the value of building and sustaining trust. Again, establishing solid communication, credibility, and trust when it comes to your staff is at the heart of all of it.

Great Communication Fosters Trust

Building trust in a business’ leadership requires a personal effort on the part of the business leaders themselves. It is a team effort as well, but it starts at the very top. The corporate function that is most likely to support business leaders’ efforts to build and sustain trust in the long-term is communication.

Communication contributes to the creation of a business environment of trust around the leaders themselves and enables them to lead more effectively, engage their employees, and ultimately deliver the best possible results. Communication serves as the primary positioning agent for overall message delivery and leadership development for managers. The most successful business leaders have learned this fact from the first-hand experience.

Communication Credibility and Trust
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Excellent Communication Leads the Way to Credibility

Communication cannot alone make a person trust someone who is not trustworthy, but it can help to create a culture in which trust can thrive. Building communication, credibility, and trust when it comes to your staff is absolutely essential.

Breaking it down to the basics, leaders are people who are followed and people will not follow a leader they do not trust. Trust makes it easier to get into alignment and stay there. Trust is an extremely powerful force that builds loyalty, increases overall credibility, and supports effective communication within an organization. Trust gives you the right to benefit of the doubt in a situation where you would like to be heard, understood, and believed.

As any business leader or employee knows, trust can be severely tested when there are periods of high uncertainty and change during mergers, acquisitions, and other periods of transition. Despite a business leader’s best intentions, during these times it is often nearly impossible to communicate as much information as one would like. If one has a well-established system of communication, credibility, and trust when it comes to your staff, this reservoir of trust that has been built will carry you through these times.

At the very epicenter of building trust, is communication. Today, with public confidence in many organizations failing, solid leadership, communication, trust, business performance, and reputation are all inextricably linked. A workforce that trusts its leaders and really understands what is happening within the organization will be more satisfied, more productive, and also better able to communicate and contribute ideas for improvements.

Leaders of successful organizations know that in order to create a culture of trust, one must share information quickly and freely, and build relationships with employees and other stakeholders, allowing for their businesses to thrive.

It is not just about providing information. Building trust also involves managing communications and consistently encouraging discussion around what needs to be done. Always providing opportunities for feedback is a great example of how this is done.

Communicating sincerely, honestly, and regularly may be challenging for some business leaders and managers, but the return on good communication is high. For leaders of large corporations, human resources and communications channels within an organization, a regular self-assessment of whether or not you are acting as a communications champion within your business model helps to cast light on what you are doing well and also helps to focus on areas that may need some improvement.

Measuring progress, getting feedback, and giving feedback are all supportive of the goal to strengthen communication, credibility, and trust when it comes to your staff and every effort will be well worth it.

Delegating Tasks and Managing a Team

9th May 2019 Tips

One of the primary tasks of an entrepreneur is to delegate tasks and managing a team. Without proper delegation, business owners run the risk of using up too much of their energy, ensuring burnout and inefficiency.

Effectively Managing a Team with GCF

Luckily, modern business models have made it incredibly easy to manage their staff, especially with the recent innovations made in telecommunication. In this article, we’ll take a look at several ways to delegate tasks efficiently using Global Call Forwarding’s telecom solutions.

Time of Day Routing

One of the more popular add-ons that aids delegation for subscribers to Global Call Forwarding is “time of day routing.” As implied by the name, time of day routing redirects inbound calls based on when the call is placed. This means that you can delegate tasks by the department, for example, when another group is in a meeting. Similarly, you can redirect calls with the time of day routing to ensure that even outside of regular business hours, customers can get in touch with a representative from your organization to answer their inquiries. This helps offset overwhelming your team with an abundance of callers daily, spreading the workload around.

Also, time of day routing enables your business to outsource inbound calls out of business hours to call centers that are located in more favorable time zones. For instance, if you have a business in New York, you’re probably aware of how few hours of overlap there are between London and your headquarters. To cover those early morning hours and late afternoon calls, time of day routing can enable your business to employ a call center in the United Kingdom.

White Listing & Black Listing

Using Global Call Forwarding’s whitelisting and blacklisting capabilities can focus on which department and staff members receive calls from various sources. For instance, you may want to keep your sales team whitelisted to ensure that only important company calls are made between departments. Or, you may want your accounts receivable department to blacklist problematic callers that can gum up the workflow. By limiting and enabling different parts of your company’s communication networks, your business is more easily managed and a natural flow of delegation is possible.

Managing A Team Woman on Phone
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The Use of Directories

Having a directory for your phone system automatically delegates inbound calls to the appropriate sources. By empowering your customers and clients with the option to self-select through your directory, each part of your organization and individual staff members have a higher likelihood of receiving inquiries from the appropriate caller.

Global Call Forwarding offers many customizable ways to create a functional directory system for your organization. These include IVR and PBX. PBX, short for Private Branch Exchange, helps create a system where customers can dial their choices numerically. For instance, using it, you can add extensions for key staff members for high-priority calls. IVR, or Integrated Voice Response, allows customers to use voice recognition technology to navigate through your directory. By having the ability to reach a staff member directly through your company, communication is easier when it comes to assigning tasks (especially in comparison to email, which may contend with important messages relegated to the SPAM folder).

Voicemail to Email

Voicemail messages are important for communication in your company, particularly when contacting staff members that have a busy schedule. However, they can be hard to access for team members on the go. Being able to access emails, however, can be an easier option. That’s where Global Call Forwarding’s voicemail to email service can make delegating through emails a cinch. When enabled, voicemails are immediately converted to mp3 files.

The advantages of voicemail to email are numerous. First, having a reference document for team members helps make sure your orders are carried out to your specifications. Second, it opens up access to documents that can be easily duplicated from user to user. Third, these voicemails can help log information and serve as a backup.

Simultaneous Ringing

Simultaneous ringing is just as the name implies: when a virtual phone number is dialed, devices connected to a particular virtual phone number ring at the same time. While this feature enables customers to have a minimum wait time, it also helps ensure that each available employee can handle incoming customers. For large volume businesses, simultaneous ringing is a must, but it can also serve as a great benefit for workplaces with a number of employees performing different roles. For instance, a call may be answered by a secretary, salesperson, or a customer service agent – which helps evenly distribute the workload depending on your team’s current availability.

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If you are interested in learning more about how Global Call Forwarding can make delegating tasks throughout your business easier, be sure to explore our website. You’ll find in-depth topics that can answer your questions and spark new ways for your business to manage itself effectively.