Four Tips for Promoting Open Communication In Your Company

New ideas, multiple perspectives, and creative solutions are essential to any thriving business. However, they can get lost in bureaucracy as your company grows. How do you maintain open lines of communication and an environment in which ideas have an opportunity to flourish, even in companies with hundreds of employees?

Take our studio, for example. Plarium Kharkiv has more than 500 employees working on 12 projects. To keep traffic moving on the communication highway, we’ve come up with four easy-to-apply practices.

Hosting an internal social network with a thread for each project 

We invite employees to play every game and give feedback before the game is launched. No feedback is ignored–we look into every comment. To keep all the teams up to date on new product releases, we publish frequent posts, which help our play-testers provide meaningful feedback.

Holding meetings with upper management

While the format of the meeting varies, the purpose is always the same: providing upper management with a forum for describing the company’s plans and objectives in the coming year, discussing the project teams’ performance, and responding to employees’ questions. Understanding the direction of the company enables employees to seek out opportunities for their own development.

Maintaining open lines of communication with managers

All game specialists are free to communicate their ideas to their direct manager or other team leaders, either in person or in writing. Most suggestions, with the rationale behind them, are passed on in written form so that they can be shared easily. Submitting questions in writing is the preferred method, especially if they have to be approved by several people or shared during the implementation phase.

Assigning responsibilities that guide rather than limit

Employees have specializations but are not chained to them. We encourage each employee to point out problems not only in tasks assigned to the employee but also in tasks carried out in other areas–especially if the employee has suggestions on how to fix such problems.

These practices are not specific to Plarium, of course. Any company can implement these methods to improve communication. Experiment and innovate with these ideas to see what works for you!