Improve Workplace Communication
If you ask about the one personal life skill you need to have better promotion potential, job satisfaction, and career success, it has to be your ability to communicate effectively in the workplace. Not only can you increase your ability to find success by improving your communication skills, but you can also help it noticed and be a candidate for promotions you deserve.
Similarly, you can hope to manage your business better if you communicate with your employees more effectively. Whatever the case, here’s how anyone at any designation can learn how to improve communication skills in the workplace.
1. Be an Active Listener
You need to learn to listen more actively to be a better communicator. Always ensure you’ve heard and absorbed all the information someone is providing before you respond in any way. If you’re at a managerial position, it becomes even more important to listen to your employees. In fact, sometimes, you have to listen to what someone isn’t saying clearly and then dig through that to find the main point.
2. Work on Your Body Language
So many people think that effective communication means they should speak the right words at the right time. Yes, that’s true, but you need to know that what you don’t say still matters. That’s where having a strong body language comes into the picture. You may have never realized that you walk around at work without being concerned about your posture. If you move around with your shoulders rounded in and drooped and you looking down most of the time, you’re not communicating effectively in the workplace.
Always work on your posture and do a self-check before you enter the office. Ensure that your shoulders are back and down with your head up and your chest opened up nicely. With your feet hip-distance, ensure that your weight is into your heels to get a solid base. This is a strong position to feel confident about yourself and that will go a long way towards helping you communicate nicely and effectively in the workplace.
3. Work on Your ‘Workplace’ Sense of Humor
Having a good sense of humor will surely help you communicate more effectively and get your points across with ease. However, you need to understand what workplace sense of humor is all about. Just understand that it isn’t about becoming a clown, but it is more about the way you take criticism and handle difficult people at work. It also refers to how you handle others’ mistakes without snapping their heads off in stressful times. If you can take the inevitable work setbacks gracefully and effectively find solutions to move ahead, you have a strong ‘workplace’ sense of humor.
The sooner you understand that your office is a sensitive environment, and though you should work to keep the moods light, the jokes you cracked during your college years won’t get the same response in the modern workplace. You need to be extremely careful with this or you might end up visiting the HR for inappropriate workplace behavior, personal attacks, and even sexual harassment.
To handle things well, be sure to work in your own space and know that you shouldn’t be laughing with everyone. Similarly, joking about coworkers is not acceptable. If you try to put someone down with your joke, it often makes you look like a guy with low self-esteem and looking to make you feel better at someone else’s expense. Always use humor to make people around you feel good, but don’t choose to be a comedian who never gets the kind of respect they should get.
4. Simplify the Onboarding for New Employees
It is natural for newer employees to have trouble understanding how an organization truly operates. When your company operates using a specific set of internal knowledge, it makes great sense to take the initiative, communicate, and help your newer employees learn how to proceed. Having a built-in training program can simplify the whole task, as it transfers the internal knowledge easily through training videos and documentation. Encourage your employees to ask questions and be actively involved to keep communication flowing.
5. Get Your Boss to Agree
If you’re looking for a promotion, you will always have to find ways to impress your boss, and that’s when your communication skills will get you far. Understand that what you say to your boss is not as important as how you say it.
In order to convince your boss to support your ideas, you need to do your homework first. It means you should work hard to get a better idea of functional and corporate goals and then ensure that your ideas logically align with those goals. The more you work on it, the higher the chances of you communicating those ideas better.
Another big mistake is to not emphasizing burden relief but talking more about unlikely and ambiguous future gains. Moreover, you should be ready to present your case more like a lawyer and express how your suggestions are going to help solve a problem.
Conclusion
It all boils down to the fact that working on your communication skills will help you get the desired results. If you’re the boss, you can improve the productivity of your employees by facilitating a better environment for communication. And, employees can work on their body language and communication skills to get the desired benefits. So, keep working to improve and hone those skills!
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