Communication skills

Communication skills range from written, verbal, and non-verbal communication to listening skills. People who communicate effectively work well with others.

Here are our top 10 tips for how to improve your communication skills:

Tip 1: Speak up
To communicate well, you first need to communicate, so it’s important to be confident in sharing your instructions, expectations, requirements, ideas, thoughts, and feedback in an open and honest way. Clearly establishing things with your employees such as your expectations and requirements of them can help them to perform their tasks more efficiently and effectively.

Tip 2: Be respectful
Whether you’re communicating a message to someone or they are communicating to you, it’s important to always be respectful in your interactions with others. If you’re giving instructions, feedback, or telling your employees something, they will tend to respond better if they’re treated with respect, and if you’re listening to someone, recognise and respect their unique perspective, even if you disagree with them or need to not go along with their suggestions.

Tip 3: Be an active listener
Part of communicating well involves listening to others. If someone tells you something, take the time to genuinely listen to the person who is speaking to you and consider their opinion or the information they are telling you. You don’t have to agree with them, but as long as you’ve listened, this can ensure a better working relationship between you and your team.

Tip 4: Pay attention to non-verbal cues
Non-verbal cues such as body language can give you clues and information about a person and/or the information they are communicating to you. You can also use forms of non-verbal communication in your own communications with others.

Tip 5: Think about your audience
To communicate well, it’s important to think about who you’re communicating with. Each audience you communicate with is different and it’s best to adapt the way you speak, write, and communicate non-verbally to the kind of person you are interacting with.

Tip 6: Consider the best form of communication
In situations where you have options, think about whether it would be better to communicate with someone in-person, over the phone, over email or a letter, over a video call, or in some other way.

For example, if you need to ask someone a simple question it might be easier to call them over the phone. If you have a lot of information to give someone, then putting it in an email might ensure your information is not missed or misinterpreted. Also consider other factors like how quickly you need a response, in which case a phone call could be quicker than an email.

Tip 7: Be brief, but specific
To communicate clearly and directly with others, give them enough information so that they understand what you’re saying, but don’t tell them so much that they get confused and stop listening to or engaging with your message. When you’re writing an email, think about the key points you want to make and do your best to get these across in as few sentences as possible. You can use dot points to help clarify your key points.

If you’re talking to someone and they only have a limited amount of time, try to keep your conversation brief and to the point.

Tip 8: Be positive (in most situations)
Being friendly and having a positive attitude can help you seem more approachable and encourage others to communicate more honestly and openly with you.

However, there are some situations that call for different emotions. For example, if someone is going through a rough time, it could be more appropriate to be more empathetic and sensitive to that person’s needs.

Tip 9: Respond in a timely manner
When someone tries to contact you via email, text, or leaves a voicemail message, do your best to respond to them in a timely manner. Try to respond the same day. If you are at work, your workplace may have a specific policy on the length of time you need to respond to emails or messages in.

If you realise you won’t be able to respond to someone properly in a reasonable amount of time, send them a quick response to apologise and let them know when you’ll aim to respond to them by.

Tip 10: Think before you speak or hit send
In many situations it’s good to pause before you speak and not just say the first thing that comes to your mind. Taking a moment will give you time to think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. It also gives you time to stop yourself if you were about to say anything offensive or inappropriate.

The same principle applies with digital communication. Read over your emails and messages to check that there are no errors before pressing send. Also make sure your message clearly communicates your intended meaning and that you aren’t being offensive or breaking any rules of your workplace or the messaging platform.