91% of employees said their employers lacked critical communication skills.
That means a lot of businesses aren’t communicating effectively.
The knock-on effect of this is huge and as wide-ranging as missing deadlines, to limited collaboration and engagement between employees.
So how do you facilitate effective communication in the workplace as a manager?
In this post we’ll cover:
- What is effective communication
- The benefits of it
- How to analyse whether your business is effectively communicating
- And 6 ways to improve effective communication
What is effective communication in the workplace?
Effective communication is a pretty subjective concept. Everyone is different and what is effective for some might not be effective for others.
However, there are a couple of things every company that effectively communicates will do. They’ll :
- Have 1-2-1 feedback sessions
- Collaborate across departments
- Have regular team meetings
- Set clear and coherent goals at a business, team and task level
The benefits of effective communication in the workplace
The biggest benefit of effective communication is improved productivity.
But that isn’t the only benefit. Here are some of the craziest stats around employee communication:
- 28% of employees cite poor communication as the reason for not being able to deliver work on time.
- Well-informed employees are 77% more likely to outperform their peers.
- Employees who feel they’re listened to and heard are 5 times more likely to feel empowered (Forbes).
- CMS Wire found 97% of employees believe communication impacts the efficacy of their daily task completion.
- Effective communication = engaged employees, meaning they are 87% less likely to leave the organisation.
How to analyse whether your business is effectively communicating
It’s all well and good practicing good communication and collaboration in the workplace, but how can you measure the effectiveness of it?
A survey conducted by Involv found that 12% of the respondents don’t even try to measure the impact of their internal communications.
So here are a few ways that you can use collaboration analytics and avoid being part of that 12%:
- Understand collaboration networks
The value of communication is only realised when you’re working in functional teams. Your people might only work in departmental groups, or broadly with cross-functional teams, but the same questions remain;
Are team members talking with the right people?; Are they having to work with too many people?; Or are they failing to integrate fully with the business, and communicate with too few people?
Not to mention the challenges of hybrid or distributed working. If you never spend any quality time in person with your most frequent collaborators, extra effort should be spent to preserve relationships.
With Analytics 365 you can view the collaboration networks within your organisation with our reports and dashboards.
- Understand activity and overload
When the pressure is on, communication is often brief or overlooked. Watch for patterns that suggest your team are stretched, for example working out of hours, or low collaboration between individuals you’d expect to be working together often.
You can use our employee wellbeing feature to spot which teams are spending too much time in unnecessary meetings and get a view on which teams are working out of hours.
- Understand time spend communicating
By being aware of how much time you and your team spend talking in chat, meetings, phone calls and Team/channel messages, you’ll get an appreciation for how much communication is the right amount. Compare trends over time to see if the ratio of collaboration to alone time changes. High amounts of collaboration time can be untenable for many (but not all!) roles, and low values may suggest that individuals – and those around them – are limiting their performance by not having the information they need to succeed. This might be task-based, leading to missed deadlines or incomplete or substandard work. However, it might also relate to their overall role or business strategy, causing misunderstandings around goals and priorities – so it’s a really critical piece to get right.
- Identify changes in engagement
Simple metrics such as meeting habits – showing up on time, not chatting with others during meetings and so on – can signify a less engaged team.
In addition, mood and general levels of positivity can be important indicators for pressure in times of change, as well as signifying when a workforce has become disengaged. Sentiment analysis can therefore play a really important part in keeping your finger on the pulse of engagement. And, if your team is struggling to get motivated, they will often fail to reach out to others.
6 ways to facilitate effective communication in the workplace
1. Address underlying structures that impact communication
According to HR leaders, overly complex processes and lack of clarity throughout companies are some of the main issues surrounding communication breakdowns.
Some of the biggest barriers to this are usually:
- Lack of mobile-friendly communication methods.
- Unengaging content and tedious emails.
- Incomprehensive and unclear communication styles.
By addressing these, you’ll instantly improve the structures around internal communications.
2. Simplify communication methods
In a business, there are a lot of channels and platforms that people can communicate on.
Trying to keep track of them all can lead to a lot of anxiety and stress. With53% of employees saying excessive emails are a regular issue, adding extra platforms on top of that will only increase their stress levels.
So a quick win for any organisation is to limit the number of platforms they can communicate through.
When reviewing the channels you communicate through, you need to:
- Limit communication to 2-3 methods
- Utilise a formal everyday work chat (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Meta Workplace)
- Create an informal work chat (Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger)
- Keep emails for client and formal business use only.
3. Improving Your 1-2-1 Meetings
1-2-1 are vital for effective communication.
It’s dedicated time in a manager’s and report’s calendar where they are able to openly and honestly discuss work. As well as make sure they are aware of things going on around the business that they aren’t exposed to.
But the problem with 1-2-1’s is that they’re inconsistent across teams.
They’re dependent on how a manager runs that meeting.
And that means one manager might be great. An absolute rockstar at running 1-2-1’s. But go along to the next team and you might have someone who is going through the motions and doesn’t have the skills and structure to be able to run them effectively.
So as a business, one of the biggest ways to facilitate effective communications is to invest in training managers to give great 1-2-1s and setting a framework for every manager to follow.That means outlining:
- Their purpose
- What you need to cover in each of them
- A framework for preparing for them
- How to effectively follow up with a 1-2-1
Do that and you’ll quickly improve the comms from the top down and see it start to seep into other aspects of their role.
4. Conduct team-building activities
Team building exercises can help facilitate effective communication among teams.
It allows them to get to know each other’s top skills and talents so that when they work together in the future, they can communicate in a collaborative and productive way.
Examples of team-building exercises are:
- Communication activities
- Group problem solving
- Trust building exercises
5. Encourage two-way feedback
We know that feedback is a great tool, with 75% of employees saying it is highly valuable for their work.
One of the easiest ways to open the lines of communication and make employees feel heard is by creating processes for collecting two-way feedback. This way, employees are 5 times more likely to feel empowered and valued in their job.
A couple of quick and easy ways to do this are:
- After every major project, have a debrief. Within this debrief, ask the team how they felt about the task and where improvements can be made. The impact is that they’ll suddenly feel like they’re part of improving the process.
- Encourage 360 feedback on managers and their performance. This allows them to have a less direct way to highlight any issues.
6. Practice active listening
Active listening is key to achieving engaging conversations and facilitating effective communication.
If you appear distant and uninterested while they are talking to you, they will feel disrespected or that you just don’t really care.
The knock-on effect of this is that they might start to question why they should care. And once they’ve done that, they’re in the fast lane to being unengaged.
Some key tips for active listening are:
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- Holding eye contact
- Non-verbal involvement
- Paraphrasing to show understanding
- Asking questions in relation to the conversation
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Summary
According to Gartner, 70% of corporate failures result from poor communication.
Improving your company’s communication is a simple yet effective way to drastically improve the overall efficiency and success of the whole company.
Here are just a few of the ways in which you can facilitate effective communication within your business:
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- Choose your communication platforms carefully, focusing on 2-3 methods at most.
- Conduct team-building activities to improve relationships within the team.
- Encourage two-way feedback between leadership and employees.
- Practice good listening to make sure employees feel heard.
- Always look for ways to improve communication within the workplace.
