Trevor Quinn-Thomas considers the most effective method of maintaining strong communications lines with a remote sales team
Alexander Graham-Bell invented the telephone – a form of e-mail that enables users to hear another person’s voice in real-time. It makes you think about whether in fact we have made real progress in our ability to communicate or not.
Some weeks ago I wrote about the use of e-mail within organisations and the extent to which we are all suffering from e-mail ‘overload’. The communication issues that I highlighted are particularly important for those people who operate as part of a remote team.
There is undoubtedly an increasing tendency to use e-mail as a way of communicating important regulatory matters to remote teams. To judge the response from the previous article it is clear that many of you are looking to reduce your e-mail load and to improve the quality of communication in your businesses.
The great thing about e-mail is that it is quick and you know that you’ve sent everyone the same message. It’s also much cheaper than sending a letter or bringing the team into a central location. In addition you have a record of the e-mail that was sent, pleasing the compliance team, the regulator and most importantly covering your backside. And the great thing is that because we’ve all got e-mail it doesn’t really cost anything. Everyone’s happy. Or are they?
Loss of clarity
The problem is that, although the same words went out, we don’t really know if the recipients ‘heard’ or ‘received’ the same message. Wars have been fought and lost over poor communication. People simply interpret written communication in different ways. E-mail creates more e-mail as people copy each other in – discussions begin and clarity is lost.
In the regulated world in which we operate, communicating information around your team is vital and of course requires an audit trail. But you can’t take your sales people off the road every time the FSA issues a press release or the compliance team makes an alteration to systems and procedures – and God do they love to do that.
Regulation has placed a stranglehold on the life and pensions industry, creating a web of bureaucracy and red tape. Interestingly the FSA’s intention was to improve our communication with customers in terms of the information we provide, the things we say and how customers are encouraged to make choices. We probably all have a view on whether or not this has actually happened.
Key requirements
The key requirements for effective communication to a remote sales force are cost, clarity and record-keeping. Let’s examine our most popular form of information transfer against those needs. Does it really stack up?
Cost – As we described above there are costs involved in sending and receiving e-mail.
Clarity – I have spoken frequently about the opportunities for mis-understanding and misuse.
Record-keeping – How well do we actually store e-mail that we have sent or received? How many times have you tried to find something and not been able to?
If we believe that a short, potentially ill-prepared and poorly-worded message will do the job why not just text a message to everyone? Stop it – text is just as bad and it makes your thumbs ache.
Teams need short, clear communication that provides them with the opportunity to ask questions. The person delivering the message needs an opportunity to check understanding and there needs to be a record of the conversation.
Cost is also a key factor in the method chosen and is not necessarily all that easy to quantify if you are thinking about communicating a message to a remote team. There are costs involved in sending or delivering the message, reading it and for replying.
There are also costs involved in getting it wrong and for misunderstanding. This is in addition to potential costs for travel and for opportunity for the time that staff have spent away from their normal place of work. Everything has its price. It is value that should be the mantra of the effective communicator.
Alternatives
So what are the alternatives? For short meetings with the opportunity to record the conversations that took place, tele-conferencing is one effective solution. Tele-conferencing allows you to talk to three people or more by phone using your ordinary landline or mobile.
The benefits of interaction and checking of understanding are provided without the costs of a face-to-face meeting. Clarity and the opportunity to question are provided without the possible difficulties that e-mail can cause.
Tele-conferencing grew in the UK last year by 300 per cent and most large companies now make some use of it. The directors within our business are remotely-based and we hold a tele-conference at least once a week to catch up as a group and to ensure that communication between us is clear and open and is not confined to private conversations between small groups within the team.
Communicating messages is only one part of managing a remote team. Diary management and sharing of critical documents are also of prim-ary importance. How do you monitor where the others within your team are each day? How do you ensure that changes or entries made to diaries can be picked-up by the relevant parties with immediate effect?
How do you ensure that critical documents are easily accessible by those operating in geographically remote locations? And what controls are in place to ensure that shared documents are not circulated and amended? I’ll talk more of the ways in which you can address these issues in my next article.
Trevor Quinn-Thomas is director at The Coaching Platform Ltd
