How to Optimize Your Response Time with Communication Templates

Do you feel like your team is constantly in a state of confusion? Are you always the last person to know about important changes, meetings or deadlines? Does it seem like your team members are speaking different languages when it comes to communication? You might think that these are the natural side effects of having a diverse workforce or organization. However, communication inconsistencies need to be addressed to ensure safety, productivity and the continued resilience of your organization. This article will show you how using communication templates can help your team work better together, create less stress by reducing internal friction and misunderstandings, save time by reducing unnecessary manual steps, increase trust through transparency and respond better during emergencies.

What are Communication Templates?

A communication template is a standardized set of language and information meant to be used when communicating with internal team members or external parties. They can be used to structure emails, voice mails or other written communications. Communication templates — such as the ones available in Regroup’s platform — are often created to address recurring issues, repeating processes in logistics and supply chain, questions, emergency situations or other occasions where communication is critical to an organization.

Communication templates are also useful when managing remote teams. These pre-built templates can be used to specify a consistent language used in team meetings and daily standups and provide necessary information to team members when they are on a project. Communication templates are used in organizations of all sizes and industries. They allow teams to use a more consistent language when communicating across departments or with customers. This can help create a sense of cohesion and organization.

The Problem with Communication in Most Organizations

At Regroup, we’ve helped clients identify a number of shortcomings in their communication strategies. Many can be overcome quickly and simply by maintaining a consistent voice in communication. This means the information you convey is of an expected format, addresses specific action items, imparts expectations clearly and is familiar to the members of your team.

Similarly, communications that lack specific information or actionable items can often be left unacted upon. This can create issues when deadlines are approaching or definitive responses are required of team members. In virtually every business or organizational model, it is critical that every team member clearly understands what is expected and what the next steps should be.

Benefits of using communication templates

Having a platform like Regroup Mass Notification allows you to create custom templates to be used in day-to-day communications and during emergencies. Using a convenient, predetermined format for a variety of messaging can bring clarity to your communications strategy and help overcome some of the bottlenecks created by miscommunication. Here are just some of the benefits of using templates for your communications:

1. Increased productivity – Team members will spend less time clarifying each other’s messages and more time focused on their work.
2. Reduced internal friction – When team members use a consistent language and understand each other, they can resolve issues faster. This reduces the stress caused by miscommunication and internal friction.
3. Increased transparency – When team members use consistent language, they can see each other’s work in the same way — even if they are in different locations. This vision of transparency can also be used when working with remote teams.
4. Trust – Increased transparency and more consistent language can also build trust between team members. Familiarity and concise messaging helps boost harmony between team members and departments.
5. Safety and Security – having customized and standardized templates for emergency situations such as wildfires, active shooters, extreme weather and other unforeseen situations can help keep people and assets safe.

How to Implement Communication Templates

Communication templates are best used when they are an integrated part of the team’s culture and communication platform or software. While it’s important to have the right platform in place, it’s equally essential to establish internal and external communication strategies so that all team members are using a recognizable voice.

1. Start with yourself: as a manager, you set the example. If you use templates, your team members will follow.
2. Use templates for important recurring events:  team meetings, one-on-ones and stand-ups can all be made more successful with the appropriate messaging.
3. Use them for important recurring topics: planned safety drills, policy updates and other needed communications can be better served with more predictable messaging.
4. Integrate them with the tools you already use: tools like Slack, Basecamp, Microsoft Teams and Google Drive allow you to create templates that can be applied with a few clicks.
5. Engage your team: ask them to use the templates more often in their communication and ask them to give you feedback on ones already in use.

Your Next Steps

We all have  unique ways of communicating. Communication templates help teams use consistent language so that everyone understands important messages and their action items. They can help save time and reduce internal confusion by reducing miscommunication and improving response.

Regroup clients can take advantage of unlimited messaging templates for email, voice mail, push notifications, texts/SMS alerts and more. Book a free demo with us to see how communication templates available in our mass notification platform can help your team work better together and keep the flow of information coming.

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