How HRTech Helps Cultivate Collaborative Corporate Environments

According to Forbes’ State of Workplace Communication in 2024, nearly half (48%) of people link effective communication to their job satisfaction. Not all communication tasks are created equal. Noteworthy tasks that led to employee stress included crafting digital responses with the right tone of voice (42% ) and deciphering the tone behind digital messages (38%).

By some estimates, employees spend about 20 hours a week using digital communication tools like emails and chat apps across industries. In HR, digital communication is used to properly share company information, policies and updates with employees across all levels of an organization. For HR team efforts and individual tasks, it is relied on to share and solve workplace problems, to ask questions or give guidance to other employees, and to help build strong professional relationships and solidarity across teams.

Most employees join an organization, sign into their chat platform account, and then incorporate the technology in their day-to-day workflow without much thought. However, the capabilities of the platform and the different messaging tools built in can shape an organization’s culture.

How the chat platform is designed and used can reveal a lot about the culture of the organization itself. For example, is it acceptable to give a “thumbs up” reaction as a complete answer to something? Does this reaction clearly show that an instructional message has been received and everything is understood? In some workplace communications, it may be required for an employee to verbally confirm in a reply that, “Yes, I will complete this task”.

There may be a time and place for each reply that indicates the same message, but each way of responding sets a different tone with varying degrees of professionalism. Whichever is broadly used across the organization tells the wider story of the workplace culture and the digital working environment of the employees.

With regards to the thumbs up response, if this is the norm of the corporate environment, it could indicate a more passive and indirect workplace communication culture. In turn, this “promotes a culture of avoidance and lack of clarity.” Not asking any follow up questions or not confirming exactly what the instructions were in a response, may lead to confusion. Down the road, this can result in important issues and messages being misunderstood or ignored.

On the other side of the spectrum, requiring employees to re-explain themselves in every reply may create a culture of assertion and directness. While this technique promotes open communication and transparency across teams, these messages can sometimes come across as authoritarian or hostile. A recent survey indicates that 96% of employees want their workplace communication to be more empathetic, showing that this approach may not be ideal for what workers want from their communication, either.

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HR professionals need to consider how they want employees in the organization to communicate with one another. After identifying the values of workplace communication, the next step is to observe whether this behavior is encouraged or hindered by the communication platform currently in use.

Some questions for HR leaders to explore about their current communication tools include:

1. Is there a lot of siloed communication in the organization, or are things clearly written and received across all members in the platform? With some platform designs, there are large groups of employees who get left out of important decisions. Even worse, some make it easy for people to miss widely circulated, crucial company information.
2. What notifications do your organization’s members receive and how often are they alerted? When it is time for employees to concentrate on focused work, it is important that they can switch off notifications. This builds a trusting relationship between the employees and the organization, demonstrating confidence that they are doing their work and can come back to see any missed information later.
3. Is the way to gather the information inclusive and accessible to all learning styles? If the display on the platform is hard to read and not customisable to individual needs, there is a higher chance for miscommunication.
4. Do the available tools (integrations, plugins, etc.) allow people to collaborate effectively? Can people fully explain themselves in their chats or are there character limits? Do important messages get lost in a seemingly endless stream of discussion?

The platform an organization uses to communicate sets the tone for how problems will be solved, how company information will be received and how coworkers will interact with each other while they work together. It is important to ensure that the right tools are in place to help employees do their jobs and to create a collaborative, inclusive work environment. The questions outlined here may guide the search for a platform, but there are other specifics HR leaders should look for in communication platforms. Some tools create a more collaborative, trusting working environment and empower effective communication within the organization.

Forums are one model that makes sense for HR professionals to consider, instead of the alternative quick chatting platforms. Forums create a collaborative space where everyone can be involved in conversation and decision making. Their long-form, conversational nature makes forums an excellent platform for the workplace. There may be a technical problem that needs to be explained step by step. In a chat platform, this may quickly get buried underneath shorter messages between other group members.

If management wants to hear feedback on how to handle a client problem, there is a history they can quickly and easily locate the next time they need to discuss similar strategies. Long-form communication promotes a sense of comradery within the workplace and gives employees the space to talk through complicated issues or challenges.

Ideal features include:

• A built-in trust system: With trust systems, those who are most involved in the discussions become moderators of their community. That means that the people in the organization who are most engaged, say helping another developer solve a deeply technical problem, are innately rewarded on the platform. For enterprises, this is a good metric of employee engagement.
• Tone and toxicity regulation: Along with allowing the community to resolve their own disputes, these features work to create an inclusive, collaborative working environment. AI can flag a message if the tone may be perceived as unkind, meaning that employees can also learn how to communicate more positively and empathetically with one another, which was a desire for most people surveyed.
• Safety of data and messages: The organization must ensure it owns its data. Employee and organizational data is not secure on the commonly used chat platforms for enterprises, for it can be used to train AI models. With the data owned by the organization itself, it can stand as a resource for years to come and the threat of losing legacy knowledge subsides.

In the age of digital communication in the workplace, platforms play a key part in setting organizations up for success. To HR professionals, it is well known that employees become frustrated at miscommunication within the workplace. One action item HR leaders can take is to ensure the communication tools their employees use daily work for them to promote a collaborative workplace culture.

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