Good internal communication is essential for seamless workflow and productivity. Whether you’re delegating tasks, collaborating with your teammates, giving employees performance feedback, or simply having a watercooler chat with your colleagues, communication is the core of every workplace activity.
It is especially important for leaders to be able to communicate their expectations clearly. Poor communication from top to bottom of the organization can lead to misunderstandings, workflow lag, and lack of employee satisfaction, productivity, and motivation.
However, according to the Interact/Harris survey, 91% of U.S. workers think their bosses lack communication skills. The survey shows that more than 50% of leaders simply refuse to talk to their subordinates. Also, more than half of leaders don’t have time to meet their employees, as reported by survey respondents.
So, what are some of the mistakes they might be making and how can you avoid them?
Too many meetings and emails
If the current pandemic proved anything about workplace communication it’s that that meeting really could have been an email.
Besides multiple relatable memes and internet rants about excessive meetings, Doodle’s The State of Meetings Report 2019 shows that meetings can be quite time consuming and unproductive, but also costly.
In fact, the report shows that nearly 71% of professionals lose time every week due to unnecessary or canceled meetings. Ineffective or poorly organized meetings cause annoyance in 89% of respondents, while conference calls and video meetings with bad reception irritate more than 80% of respondents.
Moreover, poorly organized meetings have a significant financial impact as well. In the U.S. alone, these poorly organized meetings cost companies a whopping $399 billion in 2019.
So, the next time you want to schedule a meeting, ask yourself if it’s really necessary. If it is, make sure to create a clear agenda and only invite those employees who really need to be there.
However, even though some issues can easily be addressed via email rather than a meeting, you shouldn’t get too carried away with emails either.
According to SaneBox, it takes 64 seconds to recover from an email. These email interactions can seriously affect productivity and increase stress levels. Moreover, 60.8% of employees ignore emails at work, and 47.7% of employees would be more satisfied with their job if they would receive fewer emails, a SlickText survey found.
To avoid this, try to address multiple issues in one email instead of presenting them in separate emails. However, be mindful not to create information overload. Also, ensure that the emails are well-structured and easily readable — use concise language, bullet points, and bold fonts to accentuate the most important parts.
Lack of personalization
If you want to avoid spamming your employees, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to send fewer emails. In fact, it might even mean that you’ll need to send more of them.
You might think that sending a single company-wide email is the most efficient way to spread information, but you’re wrong. Not many announcements are relevant to everyone, so this practice can only create information overload and reduce engagement.
SaneBox’s data shows that the average inbox consists of only 38% relevant emails. The rest (62%) of the emails are not important and can be processed in bulk. So, keep in mind that not every employee needs to receive every single piece of information.
Instead, create personalized feeds based on positions, departments, and locations and use them to share only the information that’s truly useful to those particular groups.
Not using email archiving
Even if you try to reduce the number of emails you’re sending, they will eventually add up and potentially clog up your email server.
On average, an office worker sends or receives 126 emails per day, according to the Radicati Email Statistics Report from 2019. Even with new communication tools, email is still going strong and the number of emails sent and received is constantly rising each year.
Many of those emails contain information you’ll need to look up in the future and even sensitive data that needs to be protected and prevented from being altered or deleted.
Although you can’t simply delete your business emails, you can and you should archive them. Setting up an email archiving solution will help you ensure that your email servers are not cluttered and create an email base that you can easily search through if needed.
If you fail to implement such a solution, you risk not only running out of storage space, but you also risk getting into legal troubles if you ever need to present your correspondence as evidence in a legal case. Data protection laws require keeping email records up to 7 years and email archiving solutions can help you easily ensure compliance with these regulations.
Focusing on a single channel
Email is far from the only channel you should be using to communicate with your employees. There have never been more communication tools available, so make sure to give your employees different options.
Day-to-day communication can be much more efficient via instant messaging platforms. It’s faster and more casual, making it easier to quickly pass messages. Besides, instant messaging is also more suitable for mobile — and now that everything from search to communication is switching to mobile-first, this is definitely an important factor to keep in mind.
Video calls are especially important today, as most of the workplaces are unable to operate from the same location. Facial expressions and tone of voice can alter the meaning of the message, so being able to see and hear the person you’re talking to can help you communicate more clearly and avoid misunderstandings.
Collaboration tools are also something you should look into. Instead of sending edited documents back and forth via email, use collaboration tools that allow multiple people to work on the same project and keep track of the changes in real-time.
Not listening to your employees and not giving feedback
According to OfficeVibe’s State of Employee Engagement Report, 96% of employees state that regularly receiving feedback is a good thing. However, 32% of employees wait more than 3 months to get feedback from their manager and 31% of employees wish their manager communicated more frequently with them.
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Failing to communicate with employees on regular bases is obviously something that managers struggle with. But besides feedback, another thing employers often neglect is listening to their employees — even though employees who feel heard are 4.6X more likely to feel empowered to give their best performance at work.
The best way to find out what your employees really want and what they would change is to simply ask them. From surveys and polls to one-on-one meetings, asking your employees for their opinion can drastically affect their motivation and engagement, but also help you detect any communication issues and find the best way to resolve them.
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Especially now, with new difficulties that the global pandemic has brought us, communication can be challenging. Even under “normal” circumstances, human interactions can be unpredictable and employees can perceive and interpret information differently.
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That’s why it’s important to always be as clear and concise as possible, try not to overwhelm others with information, use technology to your advantage, and last, but certainly not least, listen to your employees and give them feedback!
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