This guide outlines smart and commonsense workplace communication strategies that make any business more effective and efficient.
What can we say about workplace communication strategies that hasn’t already been said? It is the bedrock of every organization’s efficiency and effectiveness. As businesses progress, it becomes more apparent than ever that communication is the fundamental skill that binds everyone together.
The toughest thing is that these days, we can struggle to create some form of consistent communication because of remote or hybrid working. Organizations run the risk of feeling more disparate than ever due to the remote working revolution, but the ripples can also be felt further afield.
If an organization does not feel connected, there will be greater dissatisfaction amongst the ranks and can contribute on a cultural level to general unease. Therefore, consistent workplace communication strategies should be a priority.
Top workplace communication strategies
What are the things that we need to do in order to cultivate this consistent communication?
Treat Everybody as Per Their Needs
While there are a lot of tools we can utilize to send information company-wide, whether this is a mass texting service or mass emailing service, this is only one piece of the puzzle.
One of the most important components of workplace communication strategies is to speak to people on their level. One of the biggest problems in business leadership is that there isn’t that sense of back and forth that is necessary to allow the other person to freely speak their mind. Because a business leader is effectively the person in charge, there is this underlying sense of superiority that can color any conversation.
As business leaders, it is our responsibility to make sure that while we may be pulling the strings, the puppet is completely independent and should feel so. It becomes more apparent than ever that the culture of an organization should be built on effective workplace communication strategies arising from a sense of transparency but also equality.
Treating everybody as per their needs and cultivating the importance of making others look good is critical to an ongoing culture of support, but it makes for the best lines of communication.
Fine-Tune Your Skills
Communication consists of three things: how you look, what you say, and how you say it. How you look accounts for the vast majority of how you are perceived, and this is something that is commonly cited as key to workplace communication strategies, but this could mean that potentially salient information is going unnoticed.
Fine-tuning your skills, whether it’s personal skills, soft skills like active listening, or genuinely being a confident individual, is not something that can be harnessed overnight. It’s critical that we use what we have to build effective relationships but understand that we are always a work in progress.
It’s so easy to think that because we’ve got to get a lot done in super quick time and someone comes to us with a query, we can instantly come across as unwelcoming because we’ve got so much to do.
Every great leader always makes the other person in the conversation feel like they are the only one in the room. Abraham Lincoln had it, Hillary Clinton had it, and you could have it too. It’s just about making sure that you learn what makes you an approachable and communicative individual.
It can certainly seem like a lot of work, but the great thing is that we already have a lot of these innate abilities. It’s just about making sure that we smooth out those edges in our workplace communication strategies.
Personal skills are pivotal to developing those great relationships, and a great leader can understand what aspect of their personality makes them an approachable individual. But also, those who do not understand it can still benefit from gaining better insights into who they are and exploiting the most useful aspects of their personality to build those important relationships.
Regular Relationship Building
Consistent communication, whether it’s throughout the business or with external stakeholders, is the most important thing that cultivates an effective working relationship.
Regularity is critical in workplace communication strategies if you want to have a good level of communication with your employees and throughout the company. It’s essential to build rapport and capitalize on this by cultivating trust.
Trust is an essential skill that may seem hard to come by, especially if you are a leader behind closed doors. It’s therefore essential to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your relationships flourish in a matter of weeks or even months.
Regular meetings with your employees allow you to establish rapport and build trust that, over time, can strengthen the bonds between colleagues around the company. It becomes an essential part of how your colleagues think of you, but it also becomes critical to how the business is perceived.
It’s easy to think that an organization should be showing its teeth constantly, and while you may think that this gets results in the boardroom, it’s very much like a game of Risk where you are going in and taking everybody else’s supplies.
This all-conquering attitude is not a good foundation for a working relationship with external stakeholders or even within your organization. You may very well be making profits, but if you are struggling to build a sense of togetherness, it shouldn’t be founded on the bottom line but rather needs to come from within.
Whether this is through celebrating achievements to help you navigate away from failure or regular team-building excursions there is a lot to be sad about the importance of building relationships on a regular basis.
As simple as it sounds, a weekly meet-up allows employees to gradually lower their walls, but it also allows you to do the same. When we talk about the concept of workplace communication strategies within an organization, there’s a lot that can be said about those soft skills and addressing communication on a more clinical level.
For example, in choosing whether to email or speak to someone over the telephone, there is a lot to be said for just letting those barriers down and being yourself. We can all feel that there is a lot at stake if we show some form of vulnerability, but if there’s anything that can create a sense of trust among individuals in an organization, it is the ability to be vulnerable.
This will not just foster transparency and authenticity but will also make people feel the same as one another, and therefore, natural communication
will follow.
