The success of any company or organization depends to a large extent on the effectiveness with which all its workers communicate. In the digital age, effective business communication goes beyond sending emails and taking calls. These days, it's about listening carefully, while creating a high level of collective participation bonds among workers. It is also important to be clear and direct in the messages you want to convey.
What Do We Mean By Effective Communication?
Talking about effective communication is knowing how to convey in a concise and clear way to our work team two essential things: where we want to go and in what way we want to achieve it.
Therefore, it is of great importance to talk about the role played by each of the workers and their relevance within the organization. This will help motivate people to accomplish their tasks to reach the organization's goals.
How To Identify That There Is A Bad Communication In My Company?
If in your company, you are living a toxic work environment, your employees seem to be constantly unmotivated, you are having a lot of staff turnover or you are presenting a lot of talent loss…. You are probably having a communication and motivation problem with your staff!
Why Is Communication So Important In The Workplace?
· It helps to avoid confusion
· She foresees the goal
· It creates a positive corporate culture
· It creates a responsibility
Improving communication starts at the top to meet your business intent. Oftentimes, effective communication in the workplace is what sets a good leader apart from a great leader. Communication in the workplace defines organizational goals and helps colleagues collaborate. It is a step towards a fundamental business practice for an engaged and productive workforce. In one study, companies ranked communication skills twice as important as management skills. Here are the skills that employers most look for in new hires, ranked in order of priority.
· Oral communication
· To listen
· Written communication
· Public speaking
· Adaptability
It is essential to measure communication in order to see what works, what does not, and adjust it accordingly. Communication in the workplace is important to your growth and success. It allows everyone to share their contributions and to feel that their ideas are appreciated.
Strategic Workplace Communication
Having good handling of information and understanding of messages can be a difficult challenge to meet, however, considering these factors can help improve communication within companies:
Report On Time:
Communication management within a company must be in charge of a person or a work team. As with most defined processes, the existence of a single element that is in charge of unifying the messages and delivering them on time to all employees in a uniform way is the best way to ensure constant communication and avoid misunderstandings. BroadSoft UC-One provides employees with fast and effective communication between members of different departments in the organization.
Avoid Negative Criticism
One of the biggest obstacles blocking communicative effectiveness is the problem of criticism.
Receiving criticism should become an opportunity to point out and improve some aspects in view of a process of communicative growth.
Receiving criticism, in the positive sense of the term, should become a favorable moment to avoid unnecessary clashes.
The criticism itself is not dangerous or unpleasant, it is the rude ways adopted by society that make it sound so.
If it is expressed with offensive expressions such as "you are incapable!" or "you don't understand anything!" even the most self-confident person would be deeply shaken.
You will have to learn to leave behind negative criticisms, a source of destruction and incivility, giving credit only to those that can improve your character traits over time.
Develop A Communication Strategy:
Company managers must think, know and define how the organization will communicate with employees as part of a strategy; all with the purpose of achieving better communication. This will detail in the future who needs to know what information; when they need to know and how they will be notified. The strategy will help create a standard for organizational communication. Consider scenarios such as What is the best way to communicate new company projects? When is an idea in the planning phase? How is it financed? Or when is it ready to launch? They can be resolved through a good communication strategy.
Explain The Why Of Information:
Often leaders come up with a great idea, plan it, implement it, and may even communicate it, but they may not think to explain why a particular initiative makes sense. It is highly recommended to present information in such a way that everyone involved in a project benefits from obtaining and retaining such information. Even better, having work teams that have the same belief system will align the objectives of the organization.
Follow Up And Repeat The Message
It is essential that the message reaches everyone in its entirety. For that, the treatment of the message must be unbeatable: direct and clear. But there are circumstances inherent to the workplace that cause a de-virtualization of the content and lead to misinterpretations that can affect the performance of the work.
That is why it is convenient to start from a 'case of misinterpretation' of the message and carry out a follow-up to verify if it has arrived correctly. Repetition is also necessary to ensure the apprehension of the target. Redundancy ensures that if on the one hand, the end of the message has not fully arrived, in another part of it there will be a reminder or some type of complementary information that will reinforce the objective.
There are also techniques that help the message get through; like Storytelling, which appeals to the emotions to convey the objective message, telling it like a story or story.
Create A Feedback Process:
Communication strategies rarely work well without enabling a feedback process with all employees. This ensures that messages are received as planned every time. Regardless of the structure or processes, employees need to know that their opinions are taken into account, and as a result, this helps the organization identify areas that can be improved.
Development Of Empathy
For some time now, empathy has been talked about as the solution to all problems within the company. Although this sentence is an exaggeration, it is true that we are facing an essential point for quality communication and the proper functioning of the company. So much so that it is becoming a real source of income for international companies.
Empathy tries to understand, to observe the other, to put oneself in their place; internalize reactions and responses. In this way, communication becomes easy and you cancel the surprise factor, you go to the appropriate language and the feedback is satisfactory.