As the Covid restrictions ease, will you be returning to the office, continuing to work from home or a mixture of both? Whichever option you choose, Michelle Hoskin has some great tips on how you can build an engaging communication and collaboration strategy to ensure that your team works together for future business success
If we are truly on a drive to build a quality-focused, striving for excellence financial planning profession, it must all start with quality communication streams. In fact, I would go one step further and say that communication will only get you so far, but ‘collaboration’ will take you all the way.
I feel it is ironic that in a profession where we predominantly listen (and then talk) all day long in our interactions with our clients, when it comes to our relationships with our teams, the profession as a whole quite often falls short.
The ‘run for the hills’ approach that we all had to take at the beginning of 2020 has certainly stress-tested the communication methods of even the most amazing firms. But while chaos was raging through our profession, at both client and team level we had to step-up, regroup and focus on what is really important – and that is our relationships with those who matter the most.
In the absence of daily face-to-face, ad-hoc interactions and chats in the office kitchen, we have had to really consider how best to go about ‘chatting’, ‘meeting’ and ‘discussing’ all of the things we used to talk about in person. Why? Because we needed to become very deliberate and intentional with our communication strategies in order for everyone to know what was going on.
We know the drill. Endless meetings, de-briefs and catch ups, were starting to take over our working lives. They became seen as simply another drain on resources, especially when most teams (including financial planners and advisers) are constantly running against the clock to get their work done and clients through the door. So previously we’d been trying hard to minimise these, to ‘slim down’ or ‘find efficiency’ around our communications.
But when COVID came – it all changed. We became socially distanced but virtually connected and this has opened up a can of worms that none of us expected.
Are we heading for an iceberg that no one is talking about?
Having spent literally thousands of hours in financial planning and advice firms, I have seen that there is not one problem that cannot be tackled by being ‘together’, talking it through, and coming up with a solution.
Believe me, I am not talking about having meetings for meetings sake. I am talking about the magic of human interaction. It is so important to capture, and repeat, this magic with a good communications strategy encompassing regular catch-ups as teams, between direct reports and among those who are working on key clients and business projects.
Why? Because it is good to talk. Whether that’s remotely over one of the many wonderful and liberating platforms we can now tap into, or more intimately, face-to-face. Put simply, a team is a group of people working together on projects and tasks which help your business take one step further towards achieving its goals and then ultimately its vision. We won’t get there unless everyone involved understands exactly where they are at – and where they are going.
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