How does your multi-state business handle communications?

[yh125d]

My company has 4 major offices in as many states, and are trying to improve our communication methods between these offices (which also represent formerly separate companies, recently combined under one company)

We are in the engineering/design/consulting/EP+C business, ~250 total employees with interoffice capital projects involving 5-50 people regularly. We've only been together for about a year and don't have any particular methods or softwares in place to enable communications. Basically the leaders in each office communicate with the leaders in other offices (email and phone only really), which puts a lot more load on them to communicate everything to everyone all the time (and that's not working too well). Management is pushing for ideas to improve this and frankly not really anyone in our organization has much experience with this

I've suggested promoting more direct worker <-> worker communication, rather than forcing everything through a handful of coordinator/manager types, and there have been other ideas like an almost forum type of setup, with a new subforum for each project


Anyone have experience with this or ideas? Whether general methods or ideas for softwares or framework are very welcome, or just your experience with how other companies have handled this. We're all a bit out of our element here

 

[Gunslinger08]

Sounds like you need an intranet and internal IM client.

 

[deadlyapp]

We have Lync which comes with the office 365 package I believe. I use it a ton. Also allows for easy collaboration and desktop sharing and stuff like that. We use intercall for conference calling.

Those are our two big ones. We also use gotomeeting every now and again.

 

[Ns1]

webex + trillian + email + phone