How to streamline communications across remote teams using Eko

Efficient and effective communications are essential to the success of any business. When done properly, it creates a more collaborative, inclusive, and engaging flow of information that allows teams to succeed on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, it helps to bring out the best of each employee by allowing them to communicate strategies and ideas openly and, at the same time, helps reduce conflicts by creating avenues for everyone’s voice to be heard.

However, maintaining this becomes more challenging when teams start working remotely and are constantly dispersed from each other. How can you ensure communications stay as streamlined across so many locations and functions? Here’s how to utilize Eko’s features to optimize your approach.

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Use Broadcasts to share information across all departments instantly

When working together in one location, it’s easy to gather everyone around for company updates and town hall briefings. However, this becomes much more difficult when everyone is working remotely. Here’s where Eko’s Broadcast feature comes in — an announcement tool that sends updates to all members in the organization at once, regardless of location, seniority or job function. At Eko, we use this to share company-wide updates such as changes in business direction, update on exciting news or achievements, sharing big target milestones or simply to share a holiday greeting. Better yet, Broadcast comes with a read receipt functionality, which allows you to see who has or has not read your message. This is a great way to ensure everyone in the workplace stays informed: it streamlines communications to come from one single source, ensures everyone receives it at the same time, and doesn’t rely on word-of-mouth to pass on news which can lead to inaccuracies and delays.

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Use Chats for on-to-go syncs with individuals or teams

In a fast-paced work environment, instant messaging enables you to reach any individual or team in the press of a button and communicate with them in real time. This helps enable on-the-go decision making or problem solving within and across teams. To ensure quick adoption, Eko’s Chat is built to resemble features found on various commercial messaging tools, ensuring that the interface feels familiar to everyone. It also comes with the functionalities to send files, pictures, videos, emojis and customized stickers to foster a more engaging and collaborative communication channel. Whether you’re using Chats to discuss work-related topics or to casually socialize with teammates at work, communicating with everyone has never been easier.

Create Topics to keep conversations organized

When communicating virtually with people, it’s common for various topics to come up at the same time and lead to a flurry of overlapping conversations in one room. Because of this, it might get challenging to trace information later on, especially if you want to reference a certain discussion point. To streamline your chat messages, Eko’s Topics feature allows you to create subtopics in both individual and group chats, creating threads that can easily be traced back later on. In a conversation between a manager and their direct report, you might create topics such as “Daily update”, “Targets” or “Priority projects”, for example. By segmenting your topics, you will have a more organized messaging system ensuring crucial details don’t get lost in conversations.

Use Voice and Video calls to maintain the human touch

Sometimes, brainstorming ideas or discussing complex topics isn’t as effective through written messages. That’s why Eko supports Voice and Video Calls where you can directly speak to someone, or a group of people, through the platform. This helps to bring in the personal touch to your conversations, where you can see each other’s body language and expressions. Besides work-related huddles, you can also use the Voice and Video call features to connect on a more personal level with your colleagues. While working remotely at Eko, we use these features to do team lunches, happy hours or even game nights. In doing so, we maintain the social element of the workplace even when we’re all dispersed, and can maintain strong friendships even when working from separate locations.

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Create interest-based hangout hubs in Discover

Since working from home, you might miss the opportunity to be able to spontaneously catch-up with your colleagues for small talk as you take a break from your busy day. But who said you couldn’t have this experience anymore when working remotely? Eko’s Discover feature enables peer-to-peer interaction, initiating insightful discussions with your colleagues via the platform. With this feature, you can still build a community online through knowledge-sharing hubs that go beyond work-focused chats, where polls and quizzes can be shared for further engagement. Some hubs we’ve created here at Eko include “Coffee lovers”, “Work from home tips” and “Ask Management.”

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So there you have it — a quick run through of the suite of communication tools on Eko and how they can all help to keep you and your teams connected in various ways depending on your needs. At Eko, we’ve found that optimizing the variety of ways to reach out to one another helps to keep everyone engaged in the way that suits them best, while also ensuring that there is a suitable channel to relay various types of information in the best way possible.