About 86% of employees and executives believe a lack of collaborative working and effective internal communication is responsible for workplace failures. This alone proves that it is one of the most crucial factors in the success of a business or organization, but a lot of the time efforts to improve communication within the workplace are ignored.
As part of a leadership team, it is your responsibility to ensure that effective communication strategies are implemented in your workplace. This guide is designed to give you a starting point for introducing and maintaining excellent workplace communication.
Types and methods of communication
Generally speaking, there are a variety of different methods of communication that people will use day-to-day. However, there are four common types of communication that you can expect to see and make use of in a workplace:
- Verbal communication, the most common form, which is simply talking, can be made effective by the clarity of speech, tone, word selection, speech rate, and other factors. The listening skill also plays a part in determining its success.
- Written communication, transmitted by the person writing and the recipient reading the information, and made effective by the tone of writing and selection of words.
- Non-verbal communication, which is transmitted using gestures, postures, and facial expressions.
- Visual communication, which is transmitted using signs, illustrations, graphics, and pictures, is made effective by the right choice of visual elements for the situation.
Before you begin
Communication strategies can be short, straightforward, and focused, or they can be longer and more detailed. Before implementing a strategy in the workplace, an organization’s leadership team will need to decide what needs to be achieved within said organization. The most useful one will all depend on the outcome that the organization as a whole needs to achieve.
In any case, management will need to:
- Understand the organization’s needs and requirements; before team members start working they should understand why the strategy exists in the first place.
- Involve people; bringing in other team members means getting more input on the idea, increasing the chances of implementing an effective strategy.
- Know the audience; understanding the needs and requirements of an organization’s target audience is key to the success of any strategy.
- Define clear objectives; clear, well-defined communication objectives will lead to increased focus and clarity – resulting in better quality communication.
- Evaluate; checking as you go to understand what’s working and what is not saves time, and means you can improve and refine your strategies as you go.
Good communication strategies to introduce in your workplace
Here, we have elaborated on some of the most effective elements and individual strategies that can be incorporated into an internal or HR communication strategy plan. These are designed to help leadership teams foster employee engagement:
Ensure you are prepared
Members of leadership teams, management, and executives should always prepare themselves before sharing important information. This helps to prevent any part of it from accidentally being overlooked when the time comes to communicate the message.
Making sure all points are covered is easily done by first noting down all the points that should be communicated to a team. You should then strive to present this information to your team in an interesting way that keeps them engaged. Depending on your audience, this might mean customizing your information and your strategy of delivery.
Be transparent and concise
When delivering a message to employees, leadership should strive to be as truthful, clear, and complete as possible. This includes informing them if you do not know the answer to a question or if there is something you cannot tell them due to confidentiality. Doing this demonstrates your honesty. It’s also more likely to make employees more supportive of your efforts and more engaged with their work.
Be timely with information that you have
It is unnecessary to wait until you have all parts of the information to deliver a message, and there should never be a vacuum in information. Employees can quickly fill gaps in information delivered by leadership with rumors and assumptions that can lower morale, sow distrust, and disrupt productivity, so it is important to consistently communicate. This means sharing what you have as soon as you can.
Focus on consistency
Any messages should be aligned with the mission, vision, and values of the organization. Helping team members to understand why a decision or change in direction has been made builds trust and a strong team mentality.
Tailor messages
Messages communicated should be meaningful to employees of the business, answering the question “What’s in it for me?” to them. This creates buy-in and makes it more likely that they will be motivated into moving forward with the change more easily. A part of employee engagement is the employee feeling like they are a part of something bigger, and these employees are more encouraged to advocate for their organizations.
Use multiple methods of communication
Keeping to the communication methods that you find easiest is unlikely to make it easy for others to communicate with you. All employees have preferred methods of communication, and everyone in leadership will need to make themselves comfortable with different types and modes of communication to effectively communicate with everybody.
Reinforce messages
Employees will all learn and process information differently. This is why it is important for leadership to communicate using diverse communication channels and to communicate things multiple times in a range of ways across these channels.
For example, company meetings and emails are the recommended and most appropriate forms of delivering formal messages. Meanwhile, smaller meetings, social media, designated work chat clients, and a company’s intranet or instant messaging systems can act as informal forums for reinforcing messages already communicated.
Encourage one-to-one communication
One-on-one communication encourages bonds and understanding between teammates or colleagues. You get to know others when you talk to them on a personal level; you learn to read their body language, understand more about the communication methods they find most comfortable, and know more about the visual cues they use most often, to name a few things.
When you need to share confidential information, you also need to be able to communicate it to someone you trust. Encouraging one-to-one communication makes it easier to communicate in private and receive suggestions from a single person without having to involve an entire team.
Hear out all voices during meetings
Meetings with set agendas and involving only those who are related to a particular issue are not productive for everyone. Allowing everyone to express their thoughts encourages openness and inspires innovation. It also encourages others to listen carefully to what others have to say without interrupting and to ask questions for clarification and better understanding.
Doing this also allows employees the opportunity to hone their listening and speaking skills.
Encourage and promote feedback
As well as using multiple communication channels to communicate messages, leadership should also consider utilizing those channels to encourage feedback from employees.
Two-way communication is more effective than one-way because information cannot be effectively exchanged if only one party is receiving it. Feedback is an excellent method of ensuring two-way communication is achieved.
The most common example of feedback is the questions received at the end of a presentation, but this is not the only way it might present itself. It can also come in the form of doubts, suggestions, or thoughts that can be brought to you after your message has been communicated. This is why it is important that employees feel comfortable in sharing with those in leadership positions – so that communication will naturally become two-way.
When feedback is encouraged within an organization and employees feel as though leadership is listening to what they have to say, they feel valued because they have received the message that their opinions matter.
Keep it light and humorous
Making conversations too serious can harm all participants, leaving them in a worse state of mind than they were before. This affects how information is perceived and how conclusions are drawn. It also usually results in people wanting to leave the conversation as soon as possible, meaning the flow of information is restricted.
Often, it will be the case that leadership teams need to convey information that is particularly intense and it will not be possible to avoid a stressful communication session. In cases like this, it is important to know how to lighten the mood. A good joke can do it, helping everyone to relax and retain their interest in what is being discussed.
Remember there may be difficult conversations
There may come a conversation where other participants have thoughts, opinions, and feelings that are completely different to your own. The first two actions that may come to mind from this are “have an argument” or “avoid the conversation entirely”, neither of which are productive or professional in a workplace. Communication needs to happen and it needs to happen effectively, and individuals have to put aside personal differences to do so.
To have difficult conversations, an individual must stay relaxed and try to understand what the other person is trying to say before responding. Team members should also be encouraged to practice with each other and their managers.
Note down all the key points of a discussion
When communicating with a team, especially in the context of a meeting or discussion, you should notice a large flow of information and ideas. But it is difficult to retain all of the useful information that is shared in one of these sessions when it is only shared verbally. As such, it may be the case that information that might otherwise have been vital becomes lost.
Ensuring this doesn’t happen is easy; all an individual needs to do is note down all the information that seems valuable in a conversation. This keeps the ideas from being lost before they can be explored in greater depth.
Use communication tools
In the modern era, there is more than one tool that an organization can utilize to make it easy for team members to communicate, and share information, thoughts, or ideas. Online tools designed to help colleagues collaborate can be added to instant messaging, video conferencing, brainstorming, note-taking, and a range of other activities designed to help productivity in the workplace.
Project management software with integrated chat tools and other collaboration features is also available. This keeps teams connected while simultaneously managing all work projects in a single application.
Empowering managers
Senior management should be keeping middle management involved in the process from the beginning. These people work as conduits between upper management and employees, so by empowering them with information and an effective communication strategy plan they will be better equipped to deliver consistent messages to their teams. They will also be able to answer any questions that their team members have.
Under specific circumstances, for example during a company reorganization, it can be beneficial to hold regular meetings with middle management to update them on developments. Leadership may also want to provide them with talking points that they can share with their teams to ensure consistent messaging across departments and to avoid miscommunication.
When creating talking points, there are a few questions that should be considered:
- What information are we ready to communicate now?
- What information cannot yet be shared?
- What communication channels (both formal and informal) will we use?
- What questions can we anticipate that our employees will ask when they see this message?
- What are the appropriate responses to these questions?
Other communication strategies within workplaces
Internal or HR communication strategies are not the only communication systems that go towards running an organization. Below, we have provided some starting information and links to more advice, information, and strategies that you might find useful for your business:
Effective remote communication strategies for your workplace
The communication needs of a remote team are different to those of a team working in an office alongside you. Leadership needs to understand the nuances and challenges of keeping in contact and working collaboratively with a remote team as well. To learn more about this, please see our piece on remote communication strategies.
Effective crisis communication strategies for your workplace
In a crisis, providing the right information and providing it accurately can make a world of difference to stakeholders – and subsequently to the business.
Crisis communication in relation to PR focuses on the collection, organization, and dissemination of information for crisis mitigation and management, with an individual’s primary concern being providing counsel to the CEO.
If you would like to find out more, please see our advice on crisis communication strategies for organizations.
Effective marketing communication strategies for your workplace
As you are sending a message to target markets, rather than an internal message to your employees, marketing communication strategies have to be conducted differently. It means creating a message that’s easily understood by the customers you want and that helps your organization to carve out a unique space in your industry.
To find out more about how you can do this and stay ahead of competitors, please see our information on marketing communication strategies.