Transforming Workplace Communication

Transforming Workplace Communications

In any large organization, miscommunication isn’t just an inconvenience—it can be a major source of inefficiency and disengagement. Consider this: a 2019 report by The Economist Intelligence Unit found that poor communication in the workplace led to increased stress (52% of respondents), missed deadlines (44%), and even loss of business (18%). If clarity is lacking at the top, it filters down, eroding the foundation of trust and cooperation that makes organizations work. This is where internal communications (comms) teams come in.

Why Internal Comms Teams Exist

Internal comms teams are the glue that holds organizational culture and operational coherence together. They’re responsible for aligning messaging across departments, ensuring that everyone—from the C-suite to front-line workers—understands the company’s objectives, priorities, and day-to-day happenings. Without them, silos form, confusion reigns, and strategic initiatives falter. Data from the 2020 State of Internal Communication Report reveals that 60% of internal comms professionals believe their role has become more essential due to the shift to remote work, with more companies realizing that maintaining a clear line of communication is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have.

But here’s the kicker: despite their importance, internal comms teams still struggle with engagement. According to a 2021 Gallup report, only 36% of employees report being engaged at work. Worse still, even in organizations with formalized internal communication strategies, just 45% of employees feel like they know what’s going on. In short, internal comms teams are doing their job—but they’re not winning the war.

The Tools of the Trade

Today, organizations rely on a variety of internal comms tools to bridge these gaps. Popular platforms include:

Slack: With over 12 million daily active users, Slack is the poster child for team communication, with real-time messaging, channels for projects, and integrations galore. But the platform has a downside—conversation overload. Important messages get buried in a flood of memes and non-urgent chatter.

Microsoft Teams: Another powerhouse, especially in enterprises, Teams offers seamless integration with Office 365. However, its reliance on written text for communication means nuances can get lost.

Email: Still the most widely used tool, despite its many shortcomings. Studies show that the average worker spends 28% of their time managing email, with many emails going unread or misinterpreted.

These tools have their advantages, but they are not perfect. Written messages can be misinterpreted, important information can be missed, and clarity can easily fall through the cracks in the flood of messages. In a complex environment where everyone is competing for attention, internal comms teams are fighting an uphill battle.

Enter Sound Branch—a voice-first, voice-note communication platform that is quietly but significantly disrupting the internal comms landscape.

Why Sound Branch Is Different

Sound Branch stands apart because it leans into a simple but powerful truth: the human voice conveys more than words—it conveys emotion, emphasis, and intent. Voice notes cut through the noise, providing a direct, authentic connection that written communication struggles to replicate. They’re faster than typing out an email or crafting the perfect Slack message and avoid the cognitive load of reading long threads. This enables employees to engage with communication in a more natural, intuitive way.

Now, let’s dive into the stats.

Communication speed: The average person speaks at about 125-150 words per minute, while they type at roughly 40 words per minute. Using voice notes through Sound Branch means that information can be shared and consumed in a fraction of the time it takes to type and read.

Retention and engagement: Research from the University of Southern California shows that people are 40% more likely to retain information delivered via audio versus text. That’s because voice creates a more immersive experience, engaging listeners on multiple levels—tone, emotion, and inflection.

Sound Branch solves problems that traditional internal comms tools often exacerbate:

1. Alignment across teams: With voice notes, there’s less room for misinterpretation. Imagine a CEO sending out an email detailing a new strategic initiative. A lot can get lost between the lines: “Is this urgent?” “How important is this really?” Now imagine the same CEO sending out a voice note, where tone and emphasis make it crystal clear that this new strategy is a top priority. The sense of urgency, commitment, and excitement is immediately apparent.

2. Clarifying objectives and reducing ambiguity: The intonation in someone’s voice can reveal hesitation, conviction, or enthusiasm. This clarity helps teams align faster and eliminates the need for follow-up clarifications that are often necessary with text-based communication.

3. Eliminating written word fatigue: In the world of Slack and email overload, internal comms teams often face a tired audience. According to a 2020 Adobe survey, the average worker receives 121 emails a day. After processing that volume of information, it’s no wonder employees are disengaged. Voice notes from Sound Branch offer a refreshing alternative—quick, engaging, and to the point. Instead of reading yet another paragraph, employees can listen on the go, while multitasking, or during their commute.

4. Inclusivity and accessibility: Voice notes democratize communication. For employees with disabilities or language barriers, Sound Branch’s voice-first approach removes a significant hurdle. They can listen and speak, rather than struggling with typing or reading long emails, making internal communications more inclusive and accessible.

The Shift Toward Voice-First Communication

As organizations become more dispersed—whether through remote work, global offices, or complex hierarchies—the demand for more effective internal communication is only increasing. According to McKinsey, companies with strong internal communications outperform their competitors by 3.5 times. The ability to align teams, foster collaboration, and drive engagement directly impacts the bottom line.

Sound Branch represents a new way forward, one that leverages the immediacy, emotional resonance, and efficiency of voice notes. In a world saturated with written communication, voice stands out as a tool for clarity and alignment—solving problems that have long plagued internal comms teams. The spoken word is more than just a message; it’s a bridge to connection and understanding in the workplace.

By making communication more human, Sound Branch is enabling organizations to communicate more effectively, with fewer misunderstandings and a deeper level of engagement. As companies look toward the future of work, perhaps the answer lies not in typing, but in speaking.

Voice Messaging: Work Made Easy

Sound Branch is an innovative communication platform that enables users to share voice notes, collaborate, and streamline their communication workflows. It is available across various platforms, including the web, iOS, Android, Alexa, and Google Assistant, ensuring accessibility and convenience for users across different devices.

On the web, users can access Sound Branch directly through their preferred web browsers, making it accessible from desktops, laptops, and other web-enabled devices. This allows for seamless communication and collaboration without the need for any additional installations.

For users on iOS and Android devices, Sound Branch provides dedicated mobile applications available for download from the respective app stores. These mobile apps offer a user-friendly interface and optimized functionalities to ensure a smooth and intuitive experience on smartphones and tablets.

In addition, Sound Branch integrates with voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, allowing users to leverage voice commands to interact with the platform. Whether it’s recording voice notes, accessing messages, or managing settings, the integration with these voice assistants adds a new level of convenience and hands-free operation.

With its availability on the web, iOS, Android, Alexa, and Google Assistant, Sound Branch ensures that users can access and utilize the platform from their preferred devices and platforms. This multi-platform approach enables users to communicate, collaborate, and share knowledge seamlessly, regardless of the device or environment they are in.

How did Sound Branch start?

In the modern era of remote work, staying connected across different time zones can be a challenge. For Sean Gilligan, the founder of Sound Branch, this challenge sparked an innovative solution to avoid late-night video calls and bridge the communication gap between his team in Chicago and his base in the UK. By leveraging the power of voice notes, Sean and his team transformed their remote communication dynamics and fostered a more efficient and connected work environment.

With Sound Branch, Sean and his team discovered a game-changing platform that allowed them to send and receive voice notes effortlessly. Instead of scheduling time-consuming video calls that disrupted their workday, they could simply record concise voice notes and send them to their colleagues. This new form of communication eliminated the need for real-time availability and provided flexibility for both sides of the Atlantic.

Replacing traditional meetings with voice notes can save endless hours of valuable time. By adopting this asynchronous communication method, teams can eliminate the need for scheduling and attending lengthy meetings that often involve unnecessary discussions or delays. With voice notes, individuals can convey their thoughts concisely and clearly, allowing recipients to listen and respond at their convenience. This streamlined approach not only promotes individual productivity but also avoids the common pitfalls of unproductive meetings, such as distractions, interruptions, and inefficient use of time. By embracing voice notes as an alternative to meetings, teams can reclaim their time, focus on essential tasks, and achieve greater efficiency in their work processes.

Replacing traditional meetings with voice notes can save endless hours of valuable time. By adopting this asynchronous communication method, teams can eliminate the need for scheduling and attending lengthy meetings that often involve unnecessary discussions or delays. With voice notes, individuals can convey their thoughts concisely and clearly, allowing recipients to listen and respond at their convenience. This streamlined approach not only promotes individual productivity but also avoids the common pitfalls of unproductive meetings, such as distractions, interruptions, and inefficient use of time. By embracing voice notes as an alternative to meetings, teams can reclaim their time, focus on essential tasks, and achieve greater efficiency in their work processes.

With approximately 7 billion people worldwide using voice notes on platforms like WhatsApp for personal communication, it begs the question: Why not embrace this effective communication method in our professional lives as well? Voice notes have become an integral part of our personal interactions, allowing us to convey emotions, tone, and nuances that text-based messages often fail to capture. By adopting voice notes in our professional lives, we can bring the same level of clarity and personal touch to our work-related conversations. Voice notes enable us to communicate complex ideas, provide detailed instructions, and express ourselves more effectively, all while saving time and fostering a deeper understanding. As we witness the widespread adoption of voice notes in personal communication, it’s high time we recognize their value and leverage their potential in our professional interactions, leading to improved collaboration and enhanced productivity in the workplace.

We understand that receiving long voice notes may not always be preferable for everyone. However, with Sound Branch, you have the flexibility to limit the duration of recordings on your site, tailoring them to your preferred time frame. This ensures that voice notes remain concise and focused, making them more efficient to listen to or review. Moreover, Sound Branch offers full transcription capabilities, allowing you to scan read the content of voice notes if you prefer a quick overview or need to refer back to specific details. Whether you choose to listen to the voice notes or rely on the transcriptions, Sound Branch provides the versatility to adapt to your preferred communication style, ensuring that you can engage with the content in a way that suits you best.

What makes Sound Branch different?

Personal Voice Site

Voice Message Inbox
Voice Message Inbox with Transcription of  Voice Messages and Sentiment Analysis Emoji Tagging 

Sound Branch offers a unique site that enables you to share with others when they request to schedule your time. This feature ensures asynchronous connectivity, allowing you to preserve productivity without compromising effectiveness. Instead of engaging in lengthy back-and-forth email exchanges or the need for immediate availability, you can simply direct individuals to your Sound Branch site.

This streamlined approach eliminates the need for unnecessary coordination and frees up your time to focus on important tasks. With Sound Branch, you can maintain control over your schedule while ensuring seamless connectivity with others, optimizing productivity and enhancing your overall effectiveness.

Transcripts of Audio Recordings

Sound Branch employs advanced technology to transcribe voice notes into text, making it easier to skim, search, and reference important information. Through powerful speech-to-text algorithms, your voice recordings are accurately converted into written form, allowing for quick navigation and accessibility.

In addition to transcription, Sound Branch utilizes sentiment analysis to tag voice notes with corresponding emojis that represent the sentiment expressed in the recording. By analyzing tone, intonation, and contextual cues, Sound Branch can identify the emotional undertones of the voice note. Whether it’s a happy, sad, or indifferent sentiment, the appropriate emoji is assigned to provide a visual representation of the recorded content’s emotional context.

These features provide an enhanced user experience by facilitating efficient content management and retrieval. The transcriptions enable you to skim through voice notes, search for specific keywords, and extract key insights easily. Moreover, the sentiment analysis and emoji tagging add a layer of expressiveness and facilitate quick understanding of the emotional nuances within the voice notes.

By combining accurate transcriptions and sentiment analysis with emoji tagging, Sound Branch offers a comprehensive solution that not only captures the content of voice notes but also enhances the communication experience. It simplifies information retrieval, helps in interpreting emotional context, and promotes efficient knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams.

Plays nicely with familiar platforms 

Seamlessly incorporating private voice notes into your existing workflows has never been easier with Sound Branch. Our platform allows you to effortlessly integrate voice notes into various communication channels, including email, Slack, Twitter, and other platforms you rely on. By simply sharing a link to your voice note, you can ensure that your private recordings are securely accessible to the intended recipients within your preferred workflow. This integration enables smooth collaboration, effective knowledge sharing, and efficient communication, without the need for complicated file transfers or additional software. With Sound Branch, you can seamlessly weave voice notes into your existing processes, enhancing productivity and streamlining your workflows for maximum convenience.

Voice Messages Timeline - Share Voice Notes to Slack, Twitter or on Email
Voice Messages Timeline – Share Voice Notes to Slack, Twitter or Email

Clear your Calendar

Sound Branch empowers you to replace meetings with voice notes, revolutionizing the way you communicate and collaborate. By leveraging the power of voice notes, you can streamline your schedule and reclaim valuable time. Instead of spending hours in lengthy meetings, you can record concise voice notes that convey your thoughts, ideas, and instructions effectively. These voice notes can be shared asynchronously, allowing recipients to listen and respond at their convenience, eliminating the need for synchronous coordination. With Sound Branch, you can streamline your communication, enhance productivity, and free up time for more meaningful work. Say goodbye to meeting overload and embrace the efficiency of voice notes with Sound Branch.

Users highlighted the immense value of leveraging Sound Branch to replace a wide range of calls. Users discovered that Sound Branch effectively replaced “pick your brain” sessions, one-on-one meetings, feedback exchanges, investor updates, reference checks, and many other types of calls.

The versatility of Sound Branch’s voice notes proved invaluable in these scenarios, allowing users to convey their thoughts, provide updates, seek feedback, and exchange information in a concise and efficient manner. By utilizing Sound Branch, users were able to streamline their communication, save time, and maintain productive workflows while still achieving the desired outcomes of these various types of calls.

We wholeheartedly invite you to embark on your Sound Branch journey by signing up for free at soundbran.ch for you and your team. If you prefer to have your own personal account, head to soundbranch.com to create your individual account. By joining Sound Branch, you will experience the power of our platform firsthand, revolutionizing the way you communicate, collaborate, and share knowledge. Discover the convenience of voice notes, the efficiency of asynchronous communication, and the seamless integration of Sound Branch into your workflows. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to unlock the full potential of your communication and take your productivity to new heights.

Embrace the future of asynchronous communication with Sound Branch, where productivity and convenience converge in perfect harmony. Say goodbye to the limitations of real-time interactions and welcome a new era of efficient and flexible communication. With Sound Branch, you can effortlessly share voice notes, collaborate seamlessly, and streamline your workflows like never before. Experience the power of asynchronous communication that allows you to communicate on your own terms, eliminating the need for endless meetings and email chains.

Embrace a workstyle that empowers you to work when and where it suits you best while staying connected and productive. Join the revolution of asynchronous communication with Sound Branch and discover a world where productivity and convenience thrive hand in hand.

Sign up for Free to Sound Branch

Clubhouse vs Sound Branch

Clubhouse is a phenomenon at the moment. The invite-only audio app is becoming popular during the lockdown and has risen up the App Store ranks. Users join clubs or rooms for live audio conversations. The experience is similar to listening to podcasts but instead, you can speak up and get involved in the conversation. When audio rooms are small listeners are able to speak when invited up by the host. The problem is when rooms get large it’s really just live digital radio. Most people don’t get to ask a question or voice their opinion.

Sound Branch is more democratic and inclusive. If Clubhouse is the synchronous social audio app then Sound Branch is its asynchronous twin. Sound Branch is audio-only but is asynchronous in nature. Whilst Clubhouse is live Sound Branch is on-demand and works by users posting voice notes and listening when they want to.

There are pros and cons to Clubhouse’s twin Sound Branch. It’s good to frame the differences between the two audio apps with the similarities between listening to live music vs playing songs on Spotify. Whilst the majority of people would find a live music experience more memorable the vast majority of people don’t attend live music events. Instead, they listen to streaming music on their chosen smartphone apps. Clubhouse is a live experience Sound Branch’s strength is it’s on-demand nature.

On Clubhouse you have people joining audio rooms from around the world. Some people join in the middle of the night others early in the morning. It’s fair to say that some people don’t join because they’re asleep. Clubhouse does not record audio so there’s no way of playing back any sessions that you miss. You can speak to people on Clubhouse using audio but you can’t share a hyperlink, add images or text. Sound Branch allows you to add images, links and text to voice messages.

Clubhouse started very exclusively with venture capitalists and various celebrities before opening up to the public. Currently, people are given a number of invites they can send on. Much of the success of Clubhouse has been born out of it scarcity and it’s exclusivity. Sound Branch is quite the opposite. There is no waitlist for Sound Branch which makes it inclusive for anyone who wants to sign up for a free account. Not only is the audio app free but it’s accessible via Alexa, Google Assistant, iOS, Android and the web. Clubhouse currently is only available on iOS. Clubhouse and Sound Branch share similar traits being united by audio but they are divided by their approach.

Sound Branch means time zones don’t matter because you can tune in when you want. You can post voice notes and everything is recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions mean that all the audio is searchable and accessible. You can even create a traditional podcast from the social audio curated from Sound Branch. This works through playlists where are you can invite other users to join in the conversation. You can re-order voice notes, delete voice notes which are inappropriate and publish to major podcasting platforms such as Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google podcasts.

Sound Branch is learning from Clubhouse and will soon launch live audio. Sound Branch started in 2016 and is the older of the two audio apps. Both apps are well suited to the pandemic and social distancing where we often find a lack of empathy online. People are tired of video calls and want the ability to multitask. Listening to audio allows you to cook, garden or do other work simultaneously.

If you’ve got screaming kids in the background or other inappropriate noise you can mute yourself on Clubhouse but you do miss out. Alternatively, Sound Branch gives you greater flexibility when handling interruptions. You can join a conversation even if your environment is noisy. You simply wait for a quiet pause and then post your short voice note and playback audio. This means you can still be part of conversations rather than missing out.

Clubhouse audio rooms can last many hours. Sound Branch and it’s asynchronous nature means that conversations can go on for many days, not just many hours. On Clubhouse an audio room naturally comes to an end. Conversations on Sound Branch, in theory, can go on forever.

In conclusion, there is a golden age of podcasting. Podcasting doesn’t have a social graph and is quite one-dimensional. Both Clubhouse and Sound Branch make audio social. You can meet new and interesting people globally in both applications. Which one you choose really comes down to how much time you’ve got and what is your mood. If you don’t have an iPhone you will have to wait for Clubhouse. Sound Branch is already available for all smartphones, smart speakers and the web.

If you don’t like being put on the spot and you’re introverted then Sound Branch allows you to pause to think before you speak. There is no simple answer to whether live audio or async audio is better. It really does depend on the use case. I can imagine many cash-rich time-poor individuals finding Sound Branch more efficient in fostering conversations. Sound Branch and it’s audio-on-demand nature gives greater flexibility for busy schedules diaries and other personal commitments that we all have to juggle.

Clubhouse has helped with the renaissance of the audio medium. It will be one of many apps that start to change the way we communicate and interact. Clubhouse and Sound Branch are both a force for good against fake reviews and fake news. The empathy of audio and its authenticity is a breath of fresh air rippling through the Internet. It’s getting people talking more and texting less. Bring on the audio revolution. I can see users who join audio rooms on Clubhouse continuing over on Sound Branch so that conversations never end.