Excellence in Communication – Our Methods for Revolutionizing Workplace Culture

What causes 48% of affected workers to intentionally decrease their work effort? Or causes 78% of affected workers to lose commitment to an organization?

What costs $14,000 per staff member due to loss of production and work time (Harvard Business Review)? This killer of culture isn’t something that can be fixed with six sigma or faster technology – its workplace communication.

The statistics listed above all come from staff members across many different industries and companies who have been impacted by workplace incivility – in layman’s terms, people who have been affected by harsh, rude, or negative workplace communication.

Common examples of negative workplace communication include:

• Sending rude/disrespectful communication
• Ignoring somebody’s presence or work
• Speaking with arrogant tone
• Patronizing somebody

This article will examine how excellence in workplace communication directly impacts your culture and your customer experience, how Parker Technology has built a culture of excellence in communication and how to handle mistakes (on both ends) with empathy.

Why do we (Parker Technology) care about this?

As a workplace rooted in the parking and customer service industry, our workplace health directly impacts three important aspects of business:

1. Company Culture & Our Staff Member’s Happiness
2. Positive Communication with our Customers
   • Are we helping our customers provide a better parking experience? 
   • If we aren’t the right fit, can we find someone to help?
   • An honest line of communication
3. Positivity in Communication with our Parking Help Calls

These three lines of business directly impact each other in a symbiotic manner:

1. Creating a positive environment that values staff member happiness ensures better communication with our customers, as well as parkers needing assistance. 
2. If we have poor communication with our customers, we won’t be able to provide appropriate scripts for our call center representatives, and our parking help calls are directly affected.
3. If we have poor communication with our parkers, we’re hurting our customers and their relationships with their parkers.

No matter what we do, or who we’re talking to, our organization requires positive communication in all lines of business. Brian Wolff, our CEO, says it best:

“For me, excellence in communication is many things, but the single aspect I think about is picking the correct medium to deliver the message. It’s so easy to fire off an email “in the moment” and have the recipient instantly feel offended or disrespected with the communication. We all must be sensitive to messages that could be read multiple ways, especially negative, and pick a venue that removes doubt and interpretation from the equation. If you have a tough message to send, pick up the phone or schedule a meeting. And then just as importantly, if you are on the receiving end of an email that lands with a thud in your inbox, have the maturity and curiosity to pick up the phone or meet to provide feedback and investigate if it was intentional or not.”

Brian Wolff

CEO

As mentioned above, we also take care to maintain positivity in our workplace culture because it directly impacts customers as well. 

From surveyed respondents from industries/companies with negative cultures, 25 percent of survey respondents admitted to taking their frustration out on customers.

Can you imagine if 1 in 4 of your parkers have a bad customer service experience because of a bad workplace culture? (Harvard Business Review). Instead, practice what we preach – ‘Excellence in Communication’ is one of our core values and positivity in communication is built into our Customer Service Representative training.

When a parker calls our team through the helpline, we are called to help – parkers can be frustrated, angry, or desperate. Our CSRs are trained to handle these calls with empathy, not match anger with anger, and use effective communication styles.

Even our correspondence with our customers, throughout the process of onboarding, implementation, and ongoing customer success efforts, we are called to be honest and practice effective communication.

“Effective communication involves both providing the information in an easy to understand medium as well as active listening so that we too understand our client’s goals and expectations. This allows for a worry free and seamless onboarding process and sets the stage for effective communication throughout our business relationship.”

Claudia Lopez

Client Experience Manager

How to Build a Culture of Excellence in Communication

When trust is built with our customers and parkers by utilizing honesty and empathy, trust in our teammates is also necessary. For over 45% of workers, poor communication reduces trust in both leadership and in their team. Effectively, change comes from the top down.

“Communication is key for any organization to be successful. The more you can break down silos, the better. You want everyone moving in the same direction and unified in purpose – effective communication is essential for that to happen. Assumptions and filling in gaps without context can create serious problems, so the more you can get in front of it, the better it is for team morale and a healthy company culture. It starts from the top down – people will mirror what they see demonstrated.”

Heidi Barber

VP of Marketing

Creating a positive work culture is easier said than done, but you can take steps to get there:

1. Everyone from leadership to front line team members need to be on board and on the same page
2. Build communication standards and expectations in training documentation and practice it consistently
3. Implement training programs for communication styles, and working with different personality types (you can use enneagrams or MBTI)
4. Always use appropriate tone to handle tough situations
5. Handle mistakes (including communication mistakes) with empathy

Handling Mistakes with Empathy

Human connection is at the root of everything Parker Technology does, and with any sort of human interaction in the workplace, mistakes happen. So, what happens when a team member messes up? How do you handle their mistake and try to mediate the issue?

We’ve found the best course of action always begins with open and honest communication, while still allowing people to be human.

“The biggest key to being able to freely talk about mistakes is to have a culture that understands that there will be failures.  The key is to eliminate repeated issues while allowing space for everyone around you to still be human and stumble at times. Put in safeguards to minimize risk and catch errors, train on best practice, set high expectations around effort and dedication and then allow the team to grow and thrive.”

Tammy Baker

COO

You may encounter situations where mistakes are made, big and small – but at the end of every day, we are all striving for the same goal. When team members are empowered to make decisions, make mistakes, and move forward with knowledge instead of fear, we open the door to less mistakes in the future and better relationships with our peers.

Final Words

To conclude, the journey toward excellence in communication within the workplace is both a challenging and rewarding one, and is essential for a healthy company culture, staff satisfaction, and providing an exceptional customer experience for parkers and for operators.

Adopting a culture of excellence in communication requires constant effort and commitment from all levels of an organization – and we’re all on board!

Ready to learn more about Parker Technology and how we’ve built our culture? Visit our about page to learn more about who we are.