As its name implies, my job as Communications Manager at Soprano involves a lot of communication! My role is all about sharing Soprano’s story and establishing ourselves within our industry, which means I’m constantly employing my skills in PR and media relations, content creation and executive communications. Simply put, I rely on communicating with my colleagues, both internal and external, for all of it!
On any given day you’ll find me brainstorming with colleagues, collaborating with our product team on the newest advancements to our products, or working with our marketers on upcoming campaigns they’re driving. And due to the global nature of our business, in one day I could speak to people in three different countries.
Strong communication is crucial to any team’s success and is certainly key to our success at Soprano. Fortunately for us, we’re given all the tools we need to stay connected and productive as one global team. Our constant communication across teams and time zones allows us to get to know one another, how we work and who we are as people, and from a business perspective, it helps us get closer to achieving our goals.
Global communication: achieving success together
Good communication makes us more effective, encourages collaboration, and creates a trustworthy relationship between colleagues. Work is also a lot more enjoyable when you’re able to share your wins with others.
My colleague, Abril Saglietti, Content Marketing Specialist, explains that teamwork and communication are fundamental to achieving different tasks and specific objectives from all the teams.
“The heart of what we do is transmitting our company’s story and sharing our expertise in helping organizations create better relationships with their audiences. Our internal communication is fundamental to achieving that. We share opinions, insights, and data, and help each other no matter the distances and different time zones.”
Indeed, one of the biggest communication challenges with a global team is the time differences. With people working from all over the world, you could be emailing someone while they’re headed to bed and you’re just starting your day. This can create a disconnect with deadlines, details and deliverables. However, our platforms at Soprano account for this. After all, we’re a company that prides itself on helping businesses to communicate amongst teams and with their customers, so it’s important that we mimic best practices for this in our own practices.
As Abril, who is based in Spain, puts it: “We were actually already used to working remotely when the pandemic hit, because we’re a global company. We have teams on five different continents. But, despite not seeing each other in person, we implement communication best practices for remote teams that helps us feel close no matter the distance.”
Basically, we really do understand the challenges facing global teams and have designed our Soprano communications solutions to reflect this. We use them ourselves right across our own business because whether we’re connecting over a global team meeting, showcasing pictures from the office in our group chats or sending emails with critical information, our platforms enable productive global collaboration that leads to business success.
A key element of our approach to better global communication
At the end of the day, we’re not robots. We’re all people, and we need to communicate with each other in ways that are mindful of our different personalities, strengths, needs and preferences. Therefore, it’s important to understand everyone as individuals so we can bring out the best in each person.
“At Soprano, we adopt a talent management and optimization tool to dig deep into our employees’ and managers’ personalities to understand how they like to work and their work preferences to achieve better results” explains Abril. “This helps us know how to interact with each other positively and engagingly. It’s an excellent chance to learn more about ourselves and also helpful in learning how to collaborate and unlock the team’s potential.”
“We also use Yammer, from Microsoft, as a private ‘social media’ account where we share personal news, photos, and funny stuff to keep us connected and know each other on a more personal side.”
Overall, keeping our teams connected as a collaborative force rather than individual ‘funnels’ is something Soprano does really well. I believe that our global approach of ‘one team’ is a big part of what makes our business so successful.