016 - Master Effective E-Commerce Communication: Top Tips Inside!

016 - Master Effective E-Commerce Communication: Top Tips Inside!

(00:00):

Welcome e-commerce empresses to this episode of Woman Powering e-Commerce. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday as I take you behind the scenes of my journey as a female e-commerce entrepreneur. Together we'll explore the highs, the lows, inspiring you to take action and achieve your own business goals. So let's get started.

(00:33):

I want to share my personal story, struggles and valuable lessons I've learned about building a virtual team through effective communication. So when you have a small team, it's pretty easy to communicate well with everyone, not miss out on anyone. But then when you start counting employees on two hands or more, you realize at some point that you'll need a system or possibly some people to help you. And then when you have maybe several businesses, I currently have two, that brings it up a notch. So I want to talk to you about this today because it's something I'm going to actively work on this quarter. So I promise you not only success stories or things like that, I just really want to share with you my journey and I feel like I've been able to master some of this type of management, but I also feel like I've got a lot more to learn.

(01:28):

So as to where I am right now, I can share with you what works for me. Not everything I've done since the beginning is something I want to throw in the garbage and start new. Not at all. A lot of things work really well, which I will keep, but there are also other things I want to implement in the next couple months, which I'll also share with you and just document as we go and tell you. "It's been going a while. This has worked, this has not," and we'll see. So I can see what I've mastered so far is the managers, the team leaders. Putting that into place has been so valuable. It allows you to delegate to scale to a certain stage, and that I feel very confident about. I see, like I said, the value in it and it just makes my life so much easier.

(02:15):

I don't have to micromanage a lot of things and I don't encourage anyone to micromanage anyways, but just a way of saying that way I don't have to deal with everyone individually all the time, which would not be sustainable anyways. So that's going well and that I will keep for sure. Now, the challenge is I'm facing now and I want to attack this quarter are the following. It's one thing to have people in place to help you take care of your team. They help you, I would say with quantity. But what I want to work on is the management style. So more on the quality of how we do things. And one aspect of my management style I want to take care of and pay more attention to this year is communication. I'm seeing communication because I find that juggling various tasks in the business makes it difficult to actually communicate properly with everyone and make sure we prioritize meeting with everyone on an individual level.

(03:18):

So having one-on-ones, doing regular check-ins, I'm going to be very honest, I'm lacking in that area. I want to do regular check-ins, but sometimes it just slips away because we just try to juggle with the rest. And any other forms of effective communication, I really want to work on mastering that. Now, one thing I want to make sure is that I make time to communicate properly, and I want to do it in the sense that it'll be of a good quality too, because I feel that staff, the team members, they all need to feel heard and supported in their growth within our organization. So for me, that's really important. Why? Because we want to create a players. And in order to do that, I think it goes through really good quality communication. So next up, I want to share five communication tips of things I've learned over the years I hope maybe can help you, but also things that I want to currently work on because I see that there are things I'm lacking and I need to focus on that.

(04:28):

So first thing is establishing clear goals and expectations. So defining your team's purpose, objectives, and individual roles. I love to do it per department. And so we set goals for every department and every department with their goals they will have one owner per big goal. So we make sure that everyone is accountable for one of those goals. So that ensures that everyone understands what their responsibilities are and how they can contribute to really making that goal a reality. And one thing we've done this year and I find has really helped us is the accountability chart. It's very similar to an organizational chart. However, we list also everyone's main core responsibilities under their names. So everyone knows in the organization who sits where and what their main role is, what are their main tasks within the role. So that's good. Point Number two is choose the right communication tool.

(05:30):

So I've selected up till now appropriate platforms for video conferencing, instant messaging, file sharing. Right now we're big fans of Slack for just direct communication chatting. That has worked really well. And as for tools to optimize team collaboration and connection, we're actually building everything into Notion at the moment. Everything used to be in like a Google Drive within Docs, Google Sheets. I'm not saying those will 100% die off. We'll probably keep some, but we're trying to really integrate everything into this wonderful platform called Notion. I would really recommend it to you if you at least check it out. It's great. We want to really put all the trainings in there, the playbooks, SOPs, resources, and if we need to Google Drive or Google Docs and things like that, then we can actually just link within Notion to that external resource. So for now, we're setting that up and that's part of the things I really want to put into place this year, Notion. And right now it's going well. So very excited.

(06:38):

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(07:04):

So whether it's scheduling consistent team meetings to discuss progress challenges and updates, that's essential. So usually one of the channels and ways we do it is we have a team meeting with everyone on the team once a month. So we do that through Google Meet right now. That's what works best for us, and it works. It works great.

(07:27):

We also do daily, we call them nine at 9:00. So it's basically a little daily meeting. Everyone on the team hops on the call at 9:00 in the morning, and it should not last more last longer than nine minutes. Right now we're keeping it down to about five, but we're leaving that space for scaling and growth, but never do we want to go over that. But the main purpose for that meeting is just to keep a good communication, and that's set in our calendar for everyone. And that's it for now. That's what we've got. I'm sure we'll add more eventually, but for now, this has been working really good for us. Okay, number four, practice effective virtual meeting management. So when you get a chance to plan and structure your meetings with shared agendas, assigned roles, it is a game changer.

(08:24):

This year we have implemented, we're trying out this EOS system, the entrepreneurial operating system. And within that business structure and or way to organize your business, we are encouraged to do a weekly leadership meeting called the L10. So honestly, it's been going great. There are similar other formats of meetings that you can do. I've done some in the past, and it's honestly very similar. So basically it's sharing your wins, taking a look at your metrics, are there any headlines we need to talk about? And then we discuss issues, we discuss also any last weeks to-dos, things like that. So just having something structured makes a whole world of difference. And I would never go back to what we had before. What we did was just maybe have an agenda and kind of just throw in whatever we wanted to talk about during that week.

(09:30):

And by the way, the all 10 meeting is leadership meeting, meaning that it's not with all the team, but just the team leaders. And we do that on a weekly basis. So it just keeps us on top of things. And before we still had one, but it wasn't as structured. And since we implemented that, and it's lovely. I love it. And I would not go back to what we had before. It just really keeps us focused as to where we're heading. And another thing is you need the right tools to really create those agendas, create that structure. And again, we use Notion, which we love. So all of our meetings are done within Notion, the agendas and all of that. So works great. And last thing is provide feedback and recognition. So offering regular feedback to team members individually and as a team is a must.

(10:24):

And that's definitely something I've been lacking. So I really want to work on this quarter until the end of this year. I really want to implement a structure around having one-on-ones. And the reason for that is I want to make sure everyone feels heard. I want to make sure everyone feels accountable for their work. I want to make sure everyone knows where they're heading, what we're measuring them on, and also if there's anything they want to talk about, update us on if they have any ideas, then that's definitely the place to do it. And another thing is I really put a lot of value, and Matt, especially, he's my husband with who I'm running the business, he's very good at that. And at really bringing that culture into the company is acknowledging contributions and celebrating achievements, wins, even the smallest one.

(11:22):

And we have set up something in our Slack, channel called you are awesome. So during the day, we just encourage everyone to just tell us about their wins, small or big, just write what you're proud about in your day. And it just keeps the virtual culture of the company beautiful. I think it really helps and it's wonderful. So those are just a few things that have helped me communicate better with my team from the years back till now. But also I wanted to share with you what I'm lacking and really want to work on this quarter.

(12:03):

So that's it. Take a moment to read and share this podcast episode. Subscribe if you're on YouTube or on Spotify. The reason for that is we need your support. It's crucial to reach more women in the e-commerce space. So thank you very much. Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I hope you gained valuable insights and inspiration today to keep growing and taking action towards your goals. Please follow me on social media. Also follow us on your favorite podcast platform to get notifications every time a new episode is uploaded. See you next time.