What is workplace communication?
Workplace communication is any method that you use to communicate with the rest of your team. This could take place face-to-face in the office, over email, or over video conferencing applications and may involve two-way communication, as you receive feedback from employees. Regardless of how you keep in touch with your employees, good workplace communication is essential to making sure that your team meets targets and stays engaged. Communicating objectives and how to reach them regularly is a good way to help ensure employees understand the role that they play in your company, both on a macro and micro level. Workplace communication is a soft skill and good communication builds trust within your business, contributing to your success in many ways. This is regardless of whether you are communicating with your employees over the telephone, online or in person. Good workplace communication is a sign of a manager who is also an excellent leader. A manager who leads should have the ability to tap into what drives their employees and give them the best support to do their job well. Furthermore, employees who communicate well with each other will also maintain a more harmonious workplace. Their managers may be able to use a more diplomatic conflict management approach with this type of team, as they will be able to reason through issues with their employees.
Digital workplace communication
With more and more businesses moving over to remote digital working, it is useful to have a re-think about how you communicate objectives and feedback to your employees. It is a good time to start taking advantage of new video conferencing applications, or other communication channel tools in order to make sure that your workplace communication approach is up-to-date with the latest technology. It is also a good idea to train your employees in any new communication applications, as it will help ensure ease of use and help stop miscommunication from arising. During video conferencing, you may need to impose rules for a discussion as you would do for a general meeting with your team. Benefits of digital workplace communication include:
- Increasing employee engagement;
- Streamlining workflows so that employees can achieve targets faster;
- Helping maintain an organisational structure when your team is working remotely;
- Helping you to adapt to more of your employees opting for remote or flexible working.
Why is constructive feedback useful in the workplace?
Your business’s communication networks will help your employees to understand how your overall business strategy is implemented. When your employees know how to reach your organisational objectives with the right training and supervision from senior staff, then they are more likely to feel confident and engaged on a day-to-day basis.
Different ways of communicating feedback to your employees in the workplace
The ways that you communicate with your employees will depend on whether your employees work remotely, or work within an office. Remote working poses new challenges for employers looking to offer constructive feedback to their employees, as it means there are fewer ongoing opportunities to communicate with them face-to-face regarding their performance. If you are working in a closely-knit office environment, however, you may find it easier to hold coffee afternoons with employees to discuss their strengths and weaknesses confidentially. This can be one-on-one, yet still in a relaxed environment.
If you are communicating with your employees remotely, you may choose to do so via video conference calls on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. This will depend on the independence of your employees, and the amount of supervision they require to complete tasks and meet deadlines. Other ways to communicate employee feedback include:
- Opening the discussion up to include your whole team during meetings;
- Ensuring that you check in with employees on a weekly basis;
- Learning new communication and leadership techniques via leadership coaching courses;
- Being open and honest with your colleagues about new developments or changes within the business;
- Making sure that any criticism provided is fair and constructive.
You might be familiar with performance reviews as a means to assess your employee’s contributions. However, it is much more useful to think about how your feedback contributes to your employees’ professional development.
How to communicate work results
You may ideally aim to communicate feedback to employees in a way that is clear and easy for them to understand. After all, you need your employees to be able to use the feedback they get from you to help them achieve better results in the short and long term. There are three main different kinds of feedback that you can give your employees:
- Evaluation;
- Appreciation;
- Coaching.
Appreciative feedback involves complimenting an employee on their achievements, providing them with positive reinforcement for a job well done. This is a key part of encouraging intrinsic motivation in your employees. It is a great way to reinforce behaviour or standards that you think are positive in the workplace and shows your employees what they are getting right. Evaluation feedback is a fair and balanced assessment of an employee’s strengths and weaknesses measured against your company standards. It helps your employees to stay aware of your company’s objectives and your business’s ethical standards. Evaluation feedback gives you a chance to show employees whether they should be doing something differently, as well as point out the ways that they are getting it right. Coaching feedback is an opportunity to help develop your employee’s skill set, through discussions or training schemes. This can be ongoing as part of a course, or as a one-off session. Offering coaching feedback can help improve staff retention, as it helps to create a career trajectory for your employees that they can follow.
You may want to make sure that when you present feedback to your employees, it is ideally recorded in a place that is easy for them to find and can be accessed via an HR database. Formats for providing employee feedback include:
- Surveys;
- Performance reviews;
- One-on-one meetings or appraisals;
- 360-degree feedback.
You may decide to use several different kinds of employee feedback together, such as 360-degree feedback alongside a performance review. This gives your employee a much broader picture of their performance and means that not all feedback comes from you as their manager. 360-degree feedback involves gaining feedback on an employee from their peers and customers, which may be useful in helping you to assess how well they fit into your company culture. The more varied and frequent your feedback, the more likely it is that your employees will stay confident and motivated with their tasks.
Examples of providing constructive feedback
When providing feedback, it is important to do so in a way that is personal and not intimidating to your employees. They are more likely to take on board and utilise your feedback if they receive some positive reinforcement as well. Consider these examples for starting a feedback conversation:
- “Your work on this project so far has been excellent”
- “I would like to see you continuing to do x”
- “I would like to see you doing more of y and less of x”
- “Your ability to do x to this level already is really impressive”
- “You are excellent at handling these sorts of problems”
- “We would appreciate more of your thoughts on x”
- “I think you are a great team contributor and/or leader”
Constructive feedback involves giving employees a deep insight into their performance so far while remaining approachable and open. This also helps to keep a continuous dialogue with your employee, giving them the opportunity to respond with their own thoughts and feedback on their experiences in the role. It also gives them opportunities for personal growth, as it enables them to recognise their own abilities and achievements. This is especially crucial to employees who perhaps do not always recognise when they are contributing well to discussions, or conversely areas in which they need to improve. Read more:
