Did you know that a lack of communication within an organization can have a direct impact on its results? Perhaps this fact isn't taken into account as much as it should be, but the way a company and its employees communicate has a huge impact on how they will perform.
Good internal communication aims to provide a rich flow of information between the departments of an organization, regardless of the existing hierarchy. The transparent exchange of information is essential for good team performance. Solid internal communication consolidates company culture and increases employee engagement.
Lack of communication in the company can cause it to slowly lose its purpose, affecting its results and negatively impacting on the organizational culture. Among the problems involved, we can highlight loss of productivity, lack of feedback, lack of understanding of objectives, communication noise and rework.
With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the need to migrate to working from home officedaily personal contact has been lost and a challenge has arisen: How to maintain assertive and effective communication in the remote model?
Here at Pareto, we are using an excellent tool that is proving to be extremely effective. We present to you Discord.
Discord is exactly what you and your company need to communicate
Discord is an instant messaging application. Here you can exchange text, audio and video messages with your contacts in private or open channels. The tool allows you to create and join servers that bring together a certain group of people.
The tool is very popular in the gaming community. community. But the fact that free and its easy to use and excellent quality has attracted the attention of other groups, including professionals.
The app's fame has spread to the business world and many companies now use it as the main means of communication between their employees. And with very satisfactory ratings among its users.
A survey carried out by the company itself shows that in 2019, four years after its creation, Discord exceeded 250 million registered users.
It's Free
Before talking about the platform's features, we need to point out that one of the great advantages of using Discord is the price, or rather the lack of it!
The free version leaves nothing to be desired and beats its competitors. With a simple, fast and free implementation, there's no reason not to give it a try.
If necessary, Discord also has a paid version with two different plans: the Discord Nitro e Discord Nitro Classic. These promise a "turbocharged" experience with improved emojis, an increase in the size of files sent, personalization and customization of the user's profile, higher quality video transmissions and server boosts.
Creating Discord Servers
Discord allows you to create serverswhich are groups of people with a common interest. Like the group for a company or a specific game.
Basically, it's the place where posts, members, channels and categories will be created. Any user can create a new server and invite their colleagues to join.
Creating servers can be done from scratch with the customizations you want, or it can be done using personalized templates depending on your purpose. These include online gaming groups, groups of friends or family, and study or work groups.
You can also explore Discord's public servers. A very interesting example are open servers that have a common study objective, such as programming languages or language courses.
Text, voice or video channels on Discord
One of Discord's main positive features is that it allows for light, relaxed and assertive interaction between its users.
An example of this is the possibilities they have for communicating, such as uploading images or files, sharing screens or sending gifs and emojis. In addition, interaction takes place in real time via voice and video calls from any device at any time.
Apart from private chats, there are also channels (closed rooms) that can be restricted or open to members of the server, which can be text or voice chats.
The level of restriction is fundamental so that only certain members have access, while the type of channel will dictate how interaction between members will take place. Voice channels are very important for holding meetings, while text channels are preferred for exchanging messages throughout the working day.
Here at Pareto, we divide the channels by department, with permissions by job level, so that everyone can enter their team room. Each department has at least one voice channel and one text channel, each used for its own purpose.
Video calls are also possible on Discord, but are used less frequently. One feature that is used a lot is screen sharing during a voice call or text conversation. This intensifies and enhances the interaction between members since the sharing is done instantly.
Positions and Members within Discord
Within a Discord server, you can create jobs in the way your company needs!
Classification, for example, can be done by the employee's level of seniority (trainee, analyst, coordinator, manager), by type of department (finance, HR, marketing), or even in other ways (project team, advisory team, study teams).
Each member can have as many roles as they need. It is interesting to create and assign roles with access permissions in mind to ensure that they can join the correct channels.
This functionality even helps with company management, as it is possible to bring people together with a view to the overall level of delivery.
For example, if the company has matrix management with dual reporting, a finance employee in a local subsidiary can be as close to the chief executive of that unit as he is to the company's CFO who is based at the headquarters in another location. This is an incredible productivity gain.
Integrations with other platforms
Discord enables integration with more than 2,000 applicationsincluding Google Drive, Twitter, YouTube, Google Forms, Google Calendar, Pipedrive and Zapier.
As Discord is a communication platform, integrations often involve automatic messages based on actions and activities in other software. Through these, you and your team will be informed instantly if you have answered a form, signed a contract, changed an event in the agenda or made a certain edit to a spreadsheet, for example.
A Discord integration with your CRM is highly recommended for notifying each completed sale. As well as allowing the sales team and the after-sales team to be monitored, this also contributes to engagement with the company's mission by observing new customers arriving.
Other business communication alternatives
In this article, we've covered in detail the advantages that Discord can bring to your company in the field of communication. But it's worth noting that this isn't the only tool for this purpose on the market.
Other options include Slack, Skype and Microsoft Teams. We'll give you an overview of each of them below.
Slack
It is an internal communication platform focused on business environments. Its functionalities are reminiscent of chat, but with greater capacity for customization and interaction between participants.
Comparing these two tools, only Discord has voice channels. This is a positive point for companies that have had to adopt a remote working system. The fact that you can enter a room and talk to the people there makes it easier to reduce the distance that the home-office provides.
Another point to consider is group screen sharing, a feature that in Slack is only available with the paid plan and in Discord you can use it with the free plan.
Slack, on the other hand, has an interface that is easier to use and navigate, with customizable themes, which makes it easier to use, especially for new users.
What's more, Slack has more integration options with other applications than Discord. In fact, with the recent acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, it seems that this advantage will be even greater.
Skype
Like Discord and Slack, Skype is a tool designed to allow users to communicate over the Internet via voice and video connections.
Discord's main advantage over Skype is its interface with other platforms. Discord allows users to synchronize with Facebook, Skype, Twitter and other applications, making it easier to connect with other users. This functionality is limited to Facebook on Skype.
With regard to Skype, one advantage to be mentioned is group calls: you can make a group video call with up to 25 users, while Discord only supports group calls with up to 10 members.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is another well-known and relevant platform on the market with similar features to the others mentioned for communicating with other users via text messages and video calls.
In a comparison between the two platforms, both are similar in almost all their features. The free version of Teams has a slight advantage over Discord because of the sharing of larger files and greater integration with other applications.
Microsoft Teams is the most popular option for companies that already use the Microsoft Office suite (Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, Word) because of the convenience of working with tools from the same supplier, all integrated with each other.
Interestingly, at the beginning of 2021, Microsoft announced that it was considering acquiring Discord, but the deal did not materialize.
How would you like to make it easier for your company to communicate?
In short, Discord initially gained fame within the gamercommunity, but today there is every effort on the part of its developers to change that. And over time, the trend is for it to become even more complete for companies.
Here's a great solution for bringing your employees closer together and engaging them even more, regardless of where they are. It's a fantastic change that this platform can bring about, all the more so because it's free, with an invaluable cost-benefit ratio.
What do you think? Tell me on Discord!
We've put together some other articles that might interest you:
How to increase productivity with 9 tips from Pareto's CEO
6 Task Management Features with the Pareto Ads Marketing Board
