For becoming a great leader, employer, manager, or collaborator you should —if not must— succeed at communication in the workplace. This knowledge requires both experience and insights that let individuals consciously manage situations where communications skills are tested, like feedback providing, monthly meetings, yearly performance reviews, team building activities, and basically any interaction that requires teamwork.
At HyperOffice, we want to help companies thrive in collaboration. This is why today we will share a curated list of recommended articles about communication in the workplace; a few hours of content that will surely help your team to become better.
Communication in the workplace suggested articles
1. “Poor Communication” Is Often a Symptom of a Different Problem
What is it about?
When employees are asked about key challenges in the workplace, they tend to say they are due to poor communication. However, the author suggests that, instead of the issue, it happens to be a symptom of another specific, not obvious problem (e.g. vague job descriptions). One of the main reasons is that people might find hard to report an actual problem; a survey, for instance, may tend to bias their responses by narrowing the possible options in a short list.
Art, the author, also warns that when managers take poor communication as the literal problem, they tend to assume that greater access to information is the solution: more emails, newsletters, and meetings, adding more job, but not solving the actual foundational problem.
Quotes:
“Ultimately, it is important to remember that criticisms of broad topics like communication are a symptom, not a diagnosis.”
Author: Art Markman
Source: HBR
2. The Gourmet Chef’s Guide to Giving Feedback
What is it about?
By using the metaphor of a cooking guide, the author introduces very simple, yet effective practices managers and employers can take on providing feedback.
Quotes:
- “Feedback is most useful when given as close as possible to the behavior that elicits it.”
- “The meal is prepared to best suit the needs of the diner, not the chef.”
- “You want to encourage diners to come back for more.”
Author: Francine Crystal
Source: MIT
3. How to Use Emotional Intelligence to Be an Effective Leader
What is it about?
While most organizations take IQ-related skills to promote employees, they ignore the fact that great leaders —people who manage a team— require EQ (i.e. emotional quotient). For helping professionals to upgrade their emotional intelligence skills the author invites them to follow a few good practices like intensifying attention on teams, not individuality, learn about others expectations, and build empathy.
Quotes:
- “Turning your attention to the emotions of your employees and showing that you care about their situations will result in increased trust and loyalty and improved performance among employees.”
Source: Everwise
4. 3 Unexpected Principles That Help LinkedIn’s Head of HR Be a Better Leader
What is it about?
a, LinkedIn’s CHRO, shares quick insights on how she manages and leads people in one of the global thought leaders in hiring & talent management. At first, the article highlights the importance of people management as a great source of business results and posits 3 aspects of success: Kindness, empathy, and assertiveness.
Quotes:
- “Talent is on average 80% of a company’s operational expense…the quality of the people you recruit and how you treat them can make or break a company.”
Source: Linkedin
5. Workplace Communication: It’s Time to Write Better on Mobile
What is it about?
Grammarly, a world-famous tool for improving online writing crafted a beautiful infographic that invites teams to tune up their writing skills, especially on mobile. Among other interesting facts, they highlight the adoption of collaboration apps for the workplace, and how bad communication practices can affect performance.
Source: Grammarly
6. The unintended consequences of a too-nice work culture
What is it about?
Many organizations wrongly address inclusion and communication by being “nice”, ending up, inadvertently, in shared information bias; individuals tend to just repeat what others have said to avoid friction, reducing the space for new ideas. However, with simple practices, this stealth challenge can be overcome with a culture of respect.
Quotes:
“…one of the best ways of making a group feel good and making your teammates see you as competent is to repeat and repackage information that everyone already knows”.
Source:Quartz
7. Importance of HRM Communication and Real-time Feedback in Workplace
What is it about?
The article highlights some benefits of real-time feedback and communication inside organizations you can use to convince leadership to implement better Internal communications practices like purpose, feedback, stress reduction, and team building.
Quotes:
“…So a good communication in the workplace held by the employees within the workplace provides better internal feedback and purpose of that company decreasing the company turnover rates increasing better engagement of employees.”
Source: WPERP
[TED Talk] HR lessons from the world of Silicon Valley startups
Patty Mccord questions us about how the corporate world addresses —true—employeee empowerment and compensation. She explains how we think of work culture and Silicon Valley and how these companies with eccentric offices are yet traditional and orthodox for pproachinging HR.
Helping remote employees feel connected
Let me guess…
You imagined remote working as the absolute freedom of doing your job wherever you want, however, besides that you might have found very hard to understand your company’s culture, priorities, mission, and team. Also, you have probably felt alone or isolated. This article suggests 3 good practices to help remote employees feel they are part of the organization as simple as frequent video conference meetings, taking different cultures in regard, and promoting the personal and professional development
13 ways to improve communication at work
OfficeBive is one of my favorite sources for those companies who want to improve their HR departments. In this article, they share 13 very practical ways companies can improve their communications. They even propose some messages templates managers can use in different scenarios for improving communications in different scenarios like giving feedback, conflict solving, and meetings.
40 hours a week during each month can easily provoke conflicts between colleagues—and companies should know how to react when facing these situations. Tinypulse, a leading HR software, suggests some guidelines to proceed, like determining if it is a professional or personal problem, ensuring privacy, and when it is the moment to react or let it pass.
Internal communications best practices (Lessons from Google & Moz)
Unveil the practical ways and tools Google and Moz use to thrive in communicating and inspiring their teams at the workplace. Among other topics, we review:
- The process Google™ goes through to diagnose and optimize teams performance
- How Moz™ leverages their core values to boost performance—and why they actually care about those values
- How Moz™ uses vulnerability and transparency to level-up internal communications
- The criteria both Google™ and Moz™ share for choosing people managers—and the team structure Moz™ proposes instead (technical skills are last in the list)
- Research-backed, punctual recommendations to communicate with your team
- The 5 strengths best performing teams share (hint: it is not experience or expertise)
Final thoughts
We looked at dozens of communication in the workplace articles and we narrowed this list to 11 we considered worth reading. Now, with some theoretical guidelines, we encourage you to build the channels to start applying them.
If your team is planning to improve their communication, then you should start looking at collaborative software; tools like Intranets, corporate email, document management, project management, and database apps builders, that will let you actually execute or your ideas and good practices.
Recommended links:
- 5 benefits of an intranet — back to basics
- 7 intranet examples
- Get your Intranet built for free
- Corporate Intranet solutions
