The Top Three Ways Our Team Communicates
Years ago we used Facebook Groups for our main mode of communication. After a while, many of the team members wanted a separate platform for work communication outside of personal social media which is understandable! Here are the three main ways we communicate with each other at our salons now…
Slack
This is our number one method of communication at the salons. Slack allows us to create channels, groups and send private messages. Slack offers free versions and paid versions. Your team can easily turn off notifications during “off work hours” or enable notifications. We have different channels for things like “Extensions Specialists”, “Service Desk Team”, “Weekly Updates” and others. It is super easy and can be used through a downloadable app or on a desktop through a browser.
Close Friends Story on IG
We don’t use Instagram or Facebook for any main communication, however, there are times that we need to explain new things in video form or share relevant information with the team quickly and easily. The salon Instagram account has a Close Friends group that we use for these things. When we onboard new team members we add them to the Close Friends group. It is nice for sharing content that is relevant specifically to hairdressers such as inspiring posts about how to cut or color hair, how to post on social media and more.
Google Drive/Google Calendar
Google Drive is my personal favorite platform of all time. I wanted to dress up as Google Drive for Halloween a couple of years ago haha. We use Google Drive to share documents, photos and information. We have a specific Drive for the Team to utilize with all of the things they need from the policy handbook to slideshows from meetings. This makes things easy because all of the documents live in one place digitally. We used to have handbooks printed regularly but they would go out of date so quickly that we moved to digital and it has been great.
In addition to Google Drive and Google Calendar, we also frequently use Google Forms and Google Meet.
Finding ways to keep communication clear is always a challenge with groups of people. These are just some of the ways to communicate in a vast multiverse of options. There are things like WhatsApp, GroupMe and other platforms that can be very useful for small businesses.