“Effective Communication is 20 what you know and 80 how you feel about what you know.” – Jim Rohn
9 Effective Communication Skills. Effective communication doesn’t happen overnight, it is a skill that has to be cultivated and nurtured. Below are some skills that can be practised to build on or develop your communication skills. Active Listening – some ways to actively listen include: listen twice as.
Business Communication Techniques – With the rise in technology and business getting globalized even the means of effective business communication are changing. With the growth and rise of your business, you will certainly require practical as well as informative modes of business communication in your workplace.
Even the research indicates that the business organizations’ way of handling employee communication is changing vitally to make business communication effective at workplace.
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In a research done by Towers Watson in 2012, it has been found that the companies promoting effective business communication strategies are frequently using one-on-one discussions along with interactive media in order to stay connected with their team.
Such organizations are 2.5 times are found to be higher-performing firms because of effective business communication. Considering the importance of effective business communication we have come up with best ten ideas that promote it. Let’s check them out:
Effective Business Communication:
1st Idea: Important Business Communications can be visualized
Let’s find out which works best- telling or showing someone how the things need to be done?
Indeed the answer will be showing, because visual learning is very beneficial mode of business communication. In case when companies want to transfer lots of information, some of it will be lost once the business communication process is over.
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To create the “sticky effect” on the receivers mind be it for customer demographics or sales cycles, the team will not use up all the information in text pages. On the other hand, visuals will certainly help in making sense of each everything the team needs to imbibe.
Create infographics, which are simple yet very attractive tool of presenting the information in a pleasant and palatable manner. These can be easily created by using tools like visually and Infogram.
Infographics are very proficient styles of making facts and figures easily digestible as well as can be easily referred back too.
Example Warby Parker uses infographics in the form of visuals in order to recap the entire year for their team. Warby Parker, specialist in glass frame designs makes its annual report using visual content, depicting important milestones of the year.
2nd Idea : Give and Take Constant Feedbacks
Feedback’s are not always negative, rather positive feedback’s always focus on making improvements and help in developing trust and mutual cooperation. Both employee as well as employer can improve their way of operating by using constructive feedback’s.
By being open to feedback, the company portrays an image of being open to constructive criticism, while welcoming input from everyone in the company.
This certainly helps in enhancing the workplace efficiency as everyone will be doing their work in better way. What is the best way to get feedback’s?
Survey is the simplest way to collect input or feedback of the staff on everything from work culture to employee new hiring process or job satisfaction.
Some of the well-known survey tools are SurveyMonkey (helps in sending surveys) and 15 Five just needs 15 minutes from the employees to quickly reply to few questions every week.
In order to make the responses more honest and to get critical responses the team members should be allowed to respond without disclosing their identity.
Example: ING Direct Canada empowers its employees by providing them with no job titles as well as no offices.
Thus anyone is allowed to talk with anyone and leaders always try to remove the barriers by welcoming any kind of feedback or inputs from their team.
The feedback’s can be positive or negative and the employees are never policed regarding collaborative environment in which they operate.
3rd Idea: Stay Attentive
Many of us get confused between listening and paying attention. Thus most of the employees overlook this easy and simple tip for effective business communication.
While speaking or interacting with someone, don’t just listen to whatever they are saying- rather be attentive and make mental notes.
If you get an email regarding any issue in the team, do not ignore it. Try searching for the issue of the major details hidden in the message sent.
If one of the team members is airing some kind of grievance, lend an ear, make sure you pay attention to the issue.
4th Idea: Be Clear and Confident
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
-Albert Einstein
Clarity is the most important part of effective business communication. While writing or speaking, one should be clear about what one wants to convey. Mostly the meetings are short and time bound, so it is better that you should develop clarity about what you speak and want to explain.
Confidence is another important element which needs to be clubbed with clarity. Most of the effective public speakers portray conviction through their style of speaking.
This is the best way of keeping people engaged in the conversation. This engaging technique requires self confidence along with better business communication skills.
You should demonstrate willingness to share expertise as well as knowledge with the team members; this will certainly promote clarity and confidence within work culture.
5th Idea: Create a Positive Culture
Culture is the people whom the organization hires and the way the people are managed in the organization or the manner in which the team members communicate.
Therefore any organization that promotes healthy culture will actively share the culture with the team. Reinforcing a positive and supportive culture will develop a clear understanding between employees.
Culture is something very tricky to define in terms, because it develops over a period of time and with cultural diversity rising amongst organizations management of culturally diverse employees is becoming a prerequisite for every organization.
By simply framing the practices along with organizational values in written form, the firm can easily promote the culture within teams. This way the team will effectively follow its leaders, while putting these practices into action.
One of the very effective ways of communicating company’s culture is by taking help of culture deck. Culture Decks are a kind of visuals created by organizations that can be consulted later on as well by the employees.
The creative aspect of culture decks makes them very easy to read as well as quite enjoyable stuff.
Some of the great features a culture deck should include are:
Mission of the organization
Type of people recruited and hired in organization
Company values in detail
The tools as well as styles of business communication being used
Challenges faced by the company
Managing styles and expectations of employees
For example Netflix uses culture decks that were instant hit in the business sector as they were entertaining, authentic , very simple , clear as well as forward-thinking.
The transparency shown in the culture decks helped in strengthening the organization’s credibility and portrayed Netflix as a great place to work.
6th Idea: Keep Announcements and News Posted Regularly
The larger the size of the organization the more difficult it is to convey the message to each and every employee of the organization. To tackle this issue of business communication within organizations, effective methods or modes need to be developed.
The emails are not read regularly by the staff; most of the staff completely ignores the intranet messages. It is just the kitchen chatters that travels fast and reaches everyone in the company.
A very effective way of communicating with the entire team within stipulated time is to post the news or the updates regularly on the office displays. With technology by your side you can put television screens to the best use by sharing updates that are related to:
Company’s homepage or blog
Upcoming events or meetings
Favourite News feeds
Photos the products along with the team pictures
Sales Metrics and KPIs
New Job openings
New Recruitments or promotions in organization
Promotional campaigns or videos
Rewards and Recognitions
Like ESPN, the Wall Street Journal etc. keep on informing the employees about the latest related stories of the industry or about the popular outlets. This will certainly keep the team updated about latest news that is relevant to them.
7th Idea: Make Updated Company Announcements
What is the new product on the block and when is the launch date? What would be the price tag for the new product? What is the target date to do the rebranding launch for the product?
It hardly matters what is being sold by the company, what is important is that all the employees and managers should be on the same page in relation to the latest development in the organization.
In this case to inform all the team members or the employees of the company about the current position project or product roadmap is the best tool.
A roadmap, just like infographics is very handy visual tool that helps the employees to know in detail what is still required of them before anything new is to be launched.
Some of the distinguishing features of a roadmap include:
The product vision
Detailed product features
Metrics and KPIs
Timelines and Milestones
A roadmap is very effective tool which contextually depicts each and every team member’s role along with the end goal. It also develops a framework that helps every team member to plan for a successful future for their product.
You can use a very effective and useful tool that assists in making roadmaps and that is called Aha! It is very useful tool that can also be updated along with the progress made by the company.
8th Idea: Encourage Self-Reporting
Everyone in this world wants to be the leader and does not like to be controlled or managed. The same theory applies in case of organizations also. So stop micromanaging, by giving the teams the freedom and making them accountable for their work.
Every employee simply wants that their work is complete. Being a good manager, you should stop keeping a tab on the employee time and again. Rather give them the liberty to check in at the end of either every day or by the end of the week.
This can be done easily either through daily / weekly updates emails, short rapid fire meetings or slacks conducted regularly. Self- reporting will make them responsible for their work without having the feeling of being controlled.
This will certainly help in promoting effective business communications as done by Shopify that uses a tool called iDoneThis, for sending regular reminders in the form of email to the teams.
9th Idea: Adopt the H.O.T Approach
H.O.T approach can be elaborated as:
H- Honest
O- Open
T- Two-way
This is highly effective approach fro promoting effective and positive business communication in organizations. Most of the successful organizations today implement HOT strategy to maintain higher business communication standards and to get desirable results also.
Some of the basic fundamentals of this strategy are:
Always follow the path of truth- telling false information or divulging the facts will lead to worst situations if found out.
Always be open as this will help in promoting openness within the team members.
Always adopt two-way communication by being receptive to the viewpoint of others in order to establish better business communication, while providing others also to speak.
10th Idea: Handle the Conflicts Diplomatically
The recipe of creating a conflict is very simple just put few people in a common room for 7 hours every day, and 5 days in a week. It is for sure that after a week or so conflict would be created even in a very intellectual and compatible team. Before the conflicts spoil the communication between the teams try to nip it in the bud.
Just tell the employees that the door of the room is always open, promote transparency and ask them to get in touch with the manager whenever any conflict or issue arises in the company.
Create an honest and comfortable environment round you, where they feel comfortable in coming to you and voicing the real concerns. It’s the manager’s duty to resolve and find the solution to the issues with an open mind and without adopting a judgmental approach.
Communicating the company goals to the employees and asking them right questions and attentively listening to their responses will help in resolving the disputes in effective manner.