The importance of good communication in the workplace

It is an accepted truth that good communication in the workplace is becoming more and more important in today’s world.

Communication in the workplace between management and employees, between individual employees, and even within the management team can easily be affected by a lack of good communication skills.

The need for management and employees to communicate

This article will focus on highlighting the need for proper workplace communication between members of the management team and company employees, although the same basic principles could easily be extended to most other areas of communication.

It is vitally important that managers employ good workplace communication when dealing with all company employees at any level. Mistrust of managers is very often the result of employees’ unwarranted suspicion of managers’ actions.

Rumors of layoffs, layoffs, pay freezes, and the like are never far below the surface in any workplace, and it only takes one incident to blow up the entire company.

A practical example

To take a real life example of how these things can happen so easily.

I know of a company that was having cash flow problems due to difficult business conditions. It was decided that it would not be possible to give employees a raise that year. Just a few weeks later, one of the company’s directors came to work on a new Jaguar car that the company had purchased from him.

The resulting antagonism and, in some cases, outright hostility shown toward that manager is easy to imagine.

The manager tried to use all his skills to explain the situation. He tried to brush it off, mentioning that the car had been fixed for him long before, when business conditions were much better for the company. He then went on to explain that although the car was an expensive Jaguar car, it was really just a Ford Mondeo with a fancy name.

These explanations of his failed to satisfy any of his employees, and that situation is still remembered today, several years later.

Your answer?

Now I want you to think about that situation. I am not going to try to provide all the answers in this article. I want to encourage you to think about your communication skills in the workplace and decide how you would have handled that situation, would you have used a different explanation?

The answer you decide on will depend on both your own personality and the employees you have to work with.

I hope that by encouraging you to focus on your workplace communication skills for a few minutes, this article can help you become a better manager and communicate better with employees in your company.