Improving clarity of communication within the team

Clarity is an important factor in communication, within my team the internal communication is a huge factor of success, do people know what is expected of them, by when, why and how?

For a long time now as part of regular meetings with my individual team members I have taken notes of what has been agreed in terms of objectives and actions etc (hopefully tied back to our operational plan), typed these up in word and emailed them to the individual as a record of what was discussed and agreed.

This can be time consuming, however, in terms of people knowing what is expected of them it is a worthwhile exercise.  As well as there being an amount of effort on my behalf what was happening was team members were then taking the document I had sent them and then duplicating all their actions in their own to do list.

In a bid to become more efficient with communicating actions we have started dabbling with technology to provide a solution.  Some team members were already managing their to do lists electronically with software such a Omnifocus or Remember the milk, these packages allow tasks to be added in a number of ways, one of which is by an email.

So now I can type up a list of actions for a member of staff and when I send an email it automatically populates their to do list.  This means less duplication and less chance of actions being missed as they weren't transfered across.

Its still early days and we are assessing the success of this, and also looking at its use in a wider context.  

Surely good communication has to start within your own team and with many solutions being free its got to be worth giving it a go.