How to Develop Effective Communication in the Workplace
Are you the owner of a company? Or maybe you are a senior leader responsible for HR or the people strategy? Well, if so, I have a question for you. Do you know who is about to hand in their resignation? What difference would it make to your organization if you were able to predict who’s gonna hand in their resignation with their honest reasons why? In this blog, I’m gonna share how you can create and develop an effective communication at work. My name is Andre, I am the founder of Thomas Telman. And on this website, we deliver guidance to medium size organizations on how they can attract and retain talent in a practical way. How to develop effective communication at work? This might surprise you. It sure surprised me when I found out. But did you know that disengaged employees is costing the UK economy 340 billion pounds a year? Put another way. Three out of five employees are disengaged. This is, of course, a significant problem but also, it’s a great opportunity for employees or employers to position themselves as an organization that knows how to engage its employees. Effective communication is at the heart of good, effective engagement. I’m gonna share with you what I think is an excellent principle, whether you are a Hindu, a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian or not it, or even an atheist, it really doesn’t matter. What’s important is this principle. And what I like about it is its simplicity and its impact. Imagine your leaders exercising this principle. What would that look like in your organization? How would they think differently? How will they be perceived by the rest of the organization? A great principle that I think could be certainly considered. With that principle, we now want to think about and making sure that all employees have a voice. So, it’s important to create a positive environment. Employees must feel listened too. And of course, they must not be afraid to speak up. This is critical when you think about workplace culture as well. By creating a positive environment, your employees will have the freedom to share what is on their minds with regards to how they feel about the organization, about management, about their job role, about colleagues. And with this information, you are able to change things, make impact in a positive way. I remember speaking to an organization, a practice director, actually, a few days ago and she was talking about the wonderful environment that they’ve created over the years for their employees to feel that they can be their best at work. But one of the issues that they had was that it was not being able to gather the data in a systematic way. And it’s really important that you are able to do so because the data is what you’re gonna use to make change. So, the three-step framework that’s in front of you here is to ask, analyze and act. But when you’re asking and collecting and acting on information, you need to be certainly be collecting the data in a systematic way. So, if we look at asking your employees, you wanna be, quite often, companies have an annual survey, 50, 60 questions, and, of course, all the employees need to complete it. And usually, there’s a certain amount of reluctance for them to do so. In my view, annual surveys, you need to rethink that. I believe that it’s better to gather data on a more regular, shorter questions, even spending more time listening to what people are doing and saying to one another. And it’s through gathering the information and then analyzing it that you’ll begin to uncover common themes, or maybe things that have surprised you. But it’s through the analysis that you’re then gonna be able to give feedback to the team as to what you have discovered. And taking action is something that a lot of companies tend not to do as swiftly as they should. I was reading in a survey recently that over 90% of employees expect to receive feedback after any kind of survey. So, failing to do so means that you’re setting the wrong tone amongst the team. So, there you have it. That is my guidance on how an organization can improve its communication, the effective communication, in the workplace.
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