Key techniques of effective employee communication

Published: 26-07-2022
Don't know how to communicate with staff members? Read our article!

Relationships between employer and staff members are the basis of forming a microclimate in any organization. Many CEOs fail to learn the principles of effective employee communication and believe that they innately possess effective communication skills. Let's not forget that we live in ever-changing and dynamic times. The modern job market is full of confident and competitive representatives of various occupations. In the past employees were expected to silently take unprovoked aggression, bias, penalties and call downs. Nowadays even not the most qualified workers carry themselves with respect and change jobs on a whim without the fear of being unwanted on the job market. Many experienced employers know just how hard it is to find qualified, honest and loyal employees. That is why fine-tuned organizational communication plays an important role in any company. In order to make a business run like a clock both employees and employers have to compromise and weight every uttered and heard word while retaining a level of courtesy. Let’s try to figure out the proper ways of communicating with staff members and the measures that should be put in place in order to make your team the most effective workforce you ever had the pleasure to manage.

Most commonly utilized internal communication techniques

Being the head of a company is not the easiest thing to do. Financial liability and employees themselves are the areas of your responsibility. A top company manager has to be wise, flexible, constantly weigh their decisions and know the proper ways of delegating power. There is a vast number of team management seminars, webinars, and training, where you can get the required knowledge and necessary skills. Any self-respecting employer has to attend at least one of these seminars to keep with the newest trends of hiring and managing staff. You must also work on your own style of employee management.

As a rule, there are several internal communication techniques that are discussed during various professional training seminars:

In addition to this, employers can use joint creativity in employee management. The core of this style lies in achieving positive results, set goals and tasks by combined efforts of employees and employer.

Each of these methods is good in its own way and appropriate under certain circumstances. The authoritarian approach gives somewhat decent results due to constant control, but it can be used only in critical situations. The democratic method can be implemented when the company lead is highly intelligent and good with managerial skill. Without this, it is practically impossible to get a good result out of the democratic internal communication technique.

An experienced company owner must have a certain degree of foresight. Most and foremost, he has to analyze the behavior and character traits of all team members, determine the potential of all employees, foresee the possibility of various situations emerging. All these factors must be taken into account when looking for the right style of organizational communication.

Feedback is a valuable skill in communicating with employees

The ability to set-up proper feedback is considered to be one of the most important communication skills necessary for effective employee communication among company leads for quite some time. Even the young and experienced CEO’s have to be able to talk to employees, sort out any inaccuracies, praise or point out things that could be improved, properly delegate authority, give advice on various tasks. Communicating with staff members should be of no problem for СEO. A head of the company has to be able to contact with any workers, even the most unruly and capricious ones, as proper feedback is the cornerstone of mutually beneficial communication. At first, it seems that calling in a worker to discuss things you have issues with is the easiest thing to do. Turns out it's not easy at all. The majority of psychological and sociological research conducted by hundreds of companies around the world shown that feedback is the most problematic part of employee-employer relationships. Many workers are stressed during a poorly handled eye to eye conversations with their higher-ups and due to the absence of a properly established feedback process. They are too scared to speak their mind, feel underappreciated, worthless and humiliated. A non-existent or a poorly set-up feedback system disorients workers in the organization and decreases their desire to strive for the common goal. A talented and a wise CEO has to understand that feedback is a good tool that allows to:

Now let's take a look at some of the internal communication techniques that will help you set up a proper feedback system. Following them, you will be able to easily communicate with your employees.

Rule N1: Be precise with goals

Before having a meeting with an employee, understand what goal you are pursuing and write it down on a piece of paper. Ask yourself: “What do I want to achieve during this meeting”? You will make a conversation much easier this way.

Rule N2: Have a time and a place for talks

It is vital that you discuss only the recent events when talking to the worker. The best practice is to contact an employee and discuss an event that recently happened to him. There is no point in bringing up the time when he was late for work 3 years ago if he was coming in late during last week. When you saw that some employees experience problems with the project yesterday or a couple of days ago, its time to discuss this issue and provide some advice.

Rule N3: Involve employees into discussions

All employees across all companies wish to be needed, important and heard. Let your employees speak their mind. First, it's a good way to foster worker independence and responsibility for decisions you will make during the discussion. Second, by denying staff the right to voice their opinion, you can deny yourself useful information and even get yourself in an awkward position. You can also learn of the true potential a particular employee has, get a couple of good ideas and even gain new experience.

Rule N4: Praise in public, criticize in private

This is a very important rule! There are plenty of reasons to do so. Public critique humiliates and deeply demotivates employees. There can be no proper communication if the head of the company allows himself to publicly criticize employees with a pinch of mockery. Understand, that If you do this to some employees, you will do it to other workers, which will instantly get you on their bad side. Praise should be dished out sincerely, whether publicly or privately.

Rule N5: Discuss events and actions

It’s not ok to get personal and put labels on people under any circumstances. When talking to your employees both privately and collectively only discuss events and actions, not workers. It’s really easy to label or offend people, but it may take months or years to re-establish team communication.

The way you communicate with your employees and which communication style you use entirely depends on you.  You can ignore our advice and fail to establish feedback with workers, but that way your career will be very short lived. As CEO you should understand one simple thing: Both you and your employees have to be oriented on achieving common goals and tasks as well as making the team atmosphere as pleasant as possible. Good luck, dear employers. Don’t give up on improving your skills and you will achieve everything!