Improving Team Communication with monday.com

Why is communication so important?

If you’ve worked anywhere, in any industry, any company or team, you’ll know that communication is an integral part of success.

Not communicating can lead to mistakes, wasted time, misunderstandings and an unpleasant working environment.

Communication is vital in team work, to align everyone and make sure they’re working towards a common goal. It is also an important aspect in increasing transparency and accountability.

So, what can monday.com do to help improve communication?

Monday.com knows just how vital communication is to achieving success. In this guide, you’ll see how monday.com can be used as a central communication platform to channel the most effective collaboration and communication within teams and companies. 

You’ll see how it can help eliminate repetition of messaging in multiple channels, avoid inevitable mistakes due to manual communication and save time, so that you can get working on the things that matter most.

In almost every use case, there is an element of communication. Here, we’ll focus on Creative requests, where communication is key as there are multiple teams and people working on a single project.

A Creative request a document usually put together by the requester, such as a clients, marketing teams or account managers and maps out all the details of the desired creative project. Creative teams, designers and agencies who'll be working on these projects, use them to organize their upcoming projects and manage creative production processes from beginning to end.

Setting up your board

A typical creative request board looks as follows, where there are multiple requests from different people, represented by people columns and status columns to show the different phases that will take this project all the way to completion. On our board, we have a content, design and review phase -where each is done by a different team member. 

To learn more about setting up your creative request board in the best way possible, check out this article. Now that your board is all set up, let’s get down to business!

Set your company up for success by creating teams on your account

Creating Teams allows you to bring order and organization to your entire account.This helps in providing clarity on who is in which team and what everyone’s role is. We highly recommend creating these teams in the initial account set up to keep things simple right from the get-go!

 

Note:  Creating teams will enable you to take advantage of some very useful communication tools on the platform - stay tuned to learn more later on 

Communicate internally within your team or company as a whole

The very essence of monday.com is built to enable transparent, clear communication. Using the columns on the boards themselves can promote effective communication through simple actions: 

• Status Column Updates 

Utilize this column to update a project or tasks’s status to indicate where it stands at all times. By doing so, it allows for teams to communicate to their team leads without the need for meetings, status emails and needless to say - time wasted. On top of this, it aids in getting all team members organized and focused on what’s on their plate!  

• Deadline Setting

This is great for expectation setting and for providing transparency for everyone when things are expected to be done. It will help eliminate all those “I was never updated”, “we didn’t set a deadline” type of miscommunications. To learn more, check out this article.

This is especially great for team leads and managers who oversee different projects and need to manage their resources!

  

• Communicating Ownership of Projects using People column 

Assigning people to tasks is a great way to push something forward and make sure it gets done. We all know how it is in meetings to spend lots of time discussing great ideas, but without setting actual action items and assigning tasks to people, things just fall between the cracks and don’t get done. 

With the help of the People column, entire teams can be assigned or just simply individuals. We always assigning a specific person who will be responsible for the entire project from start to finish to provide ownership and accountability.

Tip: Assign a project lead, as well as a buddy to all major projects. The project lead and buddy can delegate tasks and work together but it's still important to give ownership to one person. Having a buddy, makes every team member feel like they always have someone to back them up when things get stuck!

Communicate on a micro level about the specifics

monday.com has useful tools to encourage context-specific communication about tasks or projects, ensuring no details to ever get lost. These include:

• Updates Section

This the perfect place for communicating on a specific project-  to add notes, reminders, checklists or even just to check in with the team member working on it. Tagging specific teams or team members allows you to have direct contact with your teammates, and communicate about specific aspects of your work life. You can then use the eyes icon to see who saw the updates and know exactly who's following. 

The update section even allows you to attach files and documents, add a Q&A section and make sure these are all placed in the relevant place. No more searching back through hundreds of emails to find that one file you sent your colleague a couple of months ago!

Tip: Turn your board into a Files View and see all files together with a quick, easy glance. Check out this article to learn more about the Files View.

• Status column notes

This allows you to add an extra layer of details relevant to any specific status. This is great if you’d like to point out something specific, make an important note or even tag the person who you’d like to review or approve your work.  

 

Note: We’ll see later on how team members are alerted to all things relevant to them.

High level communication 

Sometimes, you’ll need to communicate with your colleagues and team members on a more general topic, rather than about a specific project. Monday.com allows you to do this, in multiple ways to ensure that you no longer need to follow those long email threads, and that everything can be found in one central hub for better collaboration.

• “General” group at the top of each board

We love to have a general section at the top of all of our boards. We use this to place our guidelines, important updates, processes, and anything else that needs to be discussed internally but that doesn’t refer to one specific project.

This allows your team to discuss more general ideas and concepts but still benefit from having them placed in context on the relevant boards.

• Entire boards specifically for discussions and questions

Creating specific boards for discussions, documents and questions is another way to boost communication within the platform and encourage team collaboration. This option is great for cross departmental communication whereby each group can be a different department and it serves as a forum for questions, sharing of information and more communication between departments.

• Team Brainstorming/ Meeting Summaries Board

 You can also create boards that are department specific whereby teams can place all their brainstorming sessions, meeting summaries and updates and more.  

• Master Document Board

This is great for keeping all documents centralized and easily accessible, minimizing wasted time searching through archives and email threads for attachments.

Notifying and Communicating projects to team members

The platform has multiple types of notifications whenever actions on your boards have been performed, to keep everyone in the loop and making sure that nothing falls between the cracks. Here are some notifications you can take advantage of to reduce your manual work of notifying team members:

• Bell notifications

These notifications are by default and will notify each user whenever any actions relevant to him or her has been taken.These include when you’re assigned to an item, mentioned in an update or replied to an update, mentioned as a part of a team, subscribed to items and more.

• Email notifications

Email notifications also appear by default and notify users for the same actions as the bell notifications. You can manage all your email notifications from your profile settings on the platform.

• Automations for Notifying team members

Using monday.com automations, you can now expand and customize the bell and email notifications you and your teammates receive! Simply set the trigger (the action that must occur) and select who you wish to notify. 

• Example 1: Set an automation to notify the team lead whenever a new creative request is received.

• Example 2: Make sure that the designers are ready and prepared before the publish date arrives by notifying them a couple of days before. 

• Example 3: Every month, notify team leads to put together their weekly reports by using this recurring automation 

• Expand your internal communication with Slack integration

Monday.com’s integration with other platforms such as Slack allow even more instant notifications to be sent out to teams. This might be great to use in urgent situations, when specific creative requests come through or even to celebrate all the wins by the creative team.

Because we like to give credit when it’s deserved, we’ve added the following integration recipe which will send a notification in our Creative Team Slack channel whenever the final review status of a project changes to Done:

External Communication

We’ve mentioned the different ways that your entire company can communicate internally, but what about your clients, freelancers and external vendors that you need to communicate with regularly? With creative requests, it’s really important to communicate with clients that are waiting on certain projects, to get their feedback for review and align on deadlines.

Through our email integrations, you can be assured that everyone can stay up-to-date and in sync at all times, without the hassle of sending out multiple emails everyday. One extremely helpful and time-saving recipe is notifying the requester whenever something is ready for their review:

This is also great for sending out confirmation and thank you emails, as well as reminders to freelancers.

Other useful tools monday.com offers to empower communication

• Use Search everything to search updates made on specific topics

While so much information is getting added to your account, an easy way to find updates is imperative! That’s when Search Everything {link} comes into the picture. Use this tool to find any update that happened across any board at any time:

You can sort it by relevance and time, as well as filter out other information.

Tip: Search by Files to pull up any attachment that you or your team members have uploaded to monday.com.

My Week Widget on the Dashboard

Remember the days of weekly syncs with your manager to discuss all your projects and their but all you could really think about is how much there is still to do and how little time? We feel you and we’ve got the perfect solution for you!

Using the My Week Widget on the dashboard, managers can get an overview of what their team members are working on per week as well as be up to speed with their own work. To set it up, make sure that all team members are being followed from the settings in the widget.

On the widget, managers and team leads can get a clear picture about all big and small upcoming, completed and overdue tasks.

Now that this information is available and accessible at all times, there’s no more need for extra meetings!

Use reporting to understand team members’ availability

Communicating to a manager when you’re overloaded with projects is no easy thing. Luckily, the Chart Widget allows teams to see the division of work visually, sparing those uncomfortable conversations, or backing them up with some data. To set it up, add the Chart Widget to your dashboard, connect the relevant boards, then group by person and you’re ready to go!

While Jess might be heavily overloaded, Shelly and Ron can take on more. This allows for both better planning and resource management, and also making sure that all team members are aligned and collaborating efficiently.

Note: Check out the Workload widget for even more in-depth resource allocation!

There you go! Start communicating better with monday.com today!

Have any questions? Let us know at [e-mail] and we'd be happy to assist :)