Joy Sceizina — Four Communication Skills To Help You Succeed At Work

You communicate with people every day. Have you thought about how you could improve? Everyone can work to do better at communicating in the workplace. This is a skill where continuous improvement can make a huge difference in your career.

As an employee, it can help you get ahead. As a leader, it can help your team move forward on the right goals and be appropriately motivated to achieve success.

Let’s look at the key areas for improving communication skills in the workplace.

Choosing The Right Channel For The Conversation

It used to be that your most significant concern for a meaningful conversation was whether to have it with one person versus a group. Today, you need to consider whether a conversation needs to happen in person, over the phone, in an email, or in an instant text communication.

When making these considerations, don’t forget to consider what you know about who you are talking to. If you’ve known this colleague for a while, do they tend to prefer email over text? People are busy and have communication preferences. You can be a lot more effective when approaching them by their preferred method.

Practice Active Listening

Everyone likes a good listener. This means paying attention when people are talking. Do your best to hold eye contact and otherwise keep positive body language, like keeping your arms open and not fidgeting.

The best listeners let people know they’re paying attention by asking smart questions for clarification on essential points or by rephrasing what they’ve heard.

Don’t Put Off Replying

While you can practice active listening in person using the above techniques, digital communication is different. One of the best practices for effective communication digitally is to always reply to your messages promptly. Try to never let something go more than one business day without a response, even if that response is to tell them that you’ll need to get back to them later in the week.

Repeat The Most Important Part

If you’re communicating an important idea to a colleague, it’s helpful to repeat the most crucial part of what you’re saying at the end. If you have a lot to say, they might be overwhelmed picking out your main point, but repeating it will help them clue in.

Improving your communication skills will help you gain respect, let your colleagues know you’re listening to them, and make sure your ideas are heard as well.