How to improve communication skills in the workplace

Communication skills in the workplace are one of the few things that are always worth improving upon, no matter who you are. Whether it’s writing, speaking, listening, or simply your body language, communication touches every aspect of how well people work (or don’t). And a lot more goes into developing one’s communication abilities than we may realize, which is why it’s worth every penny to bring on top experts in the field—so your people can perform at the top of their game.

The Stats Behind Communication Skills

According to LinkedIn’s Most In-Demand Skills for 2024 report, communication takes first place. In 2023, it was the number two skill. So, just on its own, communication skills are obviously critical.

But there’s more to it. If you read further down the LinkedIn list, the runners-up skills include customer service, leadership, and project management. Of course, there are other abilities connected to these, like empathy and organization. Yet how do you truly connect with somebody as a customer service rep or as a leader? Communication strikes again! 

As human beings, communication is the foundation of our connection, and that’s likely never going to change. That’s why every business should be thinking about the future effects of technology and artificial intelligence on the workplace. This Business.com article illustrates how the many upsides of technology also come with a downside. To mention just a few, technology allows you to:

• Communicate effectively electronically – but misunderstandings can result if your message isn’t clear
• Meet virtually – but waste time due to an overload of post-meeting questions that would have been easier to deal with face-to-face
• Connect with multiple stakeholder groups simultaneously – but lose valuable interpersonal relationships

Even in the future, choosing the right communication style and medium will always remain an essential skill. 

Why Are Workplace Communication Skills Such a Challenge?

Let’s take the example of writing a blog, which of course, relies primarily on written communication. But if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll discover myriad additional talents that contribute to producing one simple article. For example, skills such as:  

• Leadership – A brilliant marketing manager decided to start a blog about topics related to learning and development, which meant creating a strategy that could be explained to others on the team.
• Written and verbal communication – This strategy was explained to other stakeholders, probably by using a mix of emails and meetings.
• Active listening – Stakeholders needed to understand what was expected of them, and in case of confusion or disagreement, used emotional intelligence to effectively communicate their concerns.
• Feedback – Once another talented marketing employee concluded the blog’s first (and hopefully only) draft, feedback was exchanged regarding improvements (or maybe just a thumbs up and permission to publish).

That’s quite a skill salad – and only for one blog! Now think about all the other communication needs that are common to any business. Emails, presentations, executive meetings, and teamwork sessions are but a few examples of common workplace activities that all depend on communication. Chances are that various people in your organization could stand some improvement in one of these many areas. 

The Problem of Skill Identification

But where, precisely? Perhaps the most unique aspect of communication skills is that nobody is ever a perfect communicator. Somebody who is great at presentations might be terrible at writing emails. Or, two people who watch the same presentation can have very different opinions about how informative or clear it was. “Good communication” is a highly subjective concept, and building skills in this area is a job that is never really done. 

Connected to this is the challenge of L&D. Any upskilling process must identify where exactly a particular employee should improve. Considering the variety of communication skills, this is a tall order – but not impossible.  

Learning and Development Programs for Building Communication Skills

An L&D initiative is the best means of upskilling the communication abilities of your organization at every level of the hierarchy. As discussed, however, this important goal is not always easy to achieve. Behind an effective communication development program is an essential set of steps to ensure that:

• Employees and companies obtain the skills they need
• HR can measure success rates to determine the value of the program and upgrade the employee’s profile
• Training takes place in the right setting and with the best expert for the skill

Career Plans and Skill Gaps

There are two major stakeholders in any learning and development program. But remember that the employee is the one putting forth most of the effort. That’s because upskilling often requires training outside of regular working hours, as the employee still needs to handle their regular responsibilities (unless HR and management can find a temporary replacement). In addition, employees invest energy while learning complex workplace abilities; they could also choose to take the easy way out, leaving the challenge of sourcing important skills to the organization. 

Employee Buy-In

For these reasons, a starting point for building communication skills is a career development plan. This is an aspect of career management where the employee, in cooperation with HR, considers different career options and gets advice about which one is their best choice. At the same time, HR checks performance reviews to see areas where the employee should increase their skill level if they plan to move up. HR must explain in detail what the consequences are of the employee’s choice, including the underlying commitment to learning and development. A key goal is to receive the worker’s “buy-in” so that they are prepared to take the necessary communication courses.     

Organizational Needs

On the other hand, your company must maintain (and hopefully build) a certain set of workplace skills, regardless of what employees want. A skills gap analysis is a powerful tool to help you figure out what skills need improvement, or which are totally missing. This process should be repeated every year or so, and it’s a good idea to become familiar with it. A skills gap analysis covers 3 P’s:

• Positions – Is your company succeeding with its current number of positions? Are there hiring plans due to expansion, strategy, or turnover? This will allow you to build a map of roles within the company, to which you add associated skills. 
• Processes – Now you should determine if employees actually have the skills connected to these roles. A review of feedback sessions, performance reviews, and managerial input should tell you about which skills are totally missing and where employees could use improvement.
• Programs – With a list of skill gaps in hand, it’s time to look at your options for filling them, such as external recruiting, internal mobility, and L&D programs.  

Once you have obtained employee buy-in and finished the skills gap analysis, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what needs to be improved. Now it’s time to see how to improve! 

Experts

In the Growthspace lexicon, there are three kinds of “experts”:

1. Trainers who specialize in technical/hard skills, for example, programming or creating presentations
2. Coaches who focus on specific workplace soft skills and who have a professional background in learning and development processes   
3. Mentors who use their own work experience in an industry to help an employee improve their general approach to a role

For communication skills, any or all of the above types of experts can be used. It often depends on what role the employee has and how much improvement they require. Let’s take presentation skills as an example. 

If an employee has barely any knowledge regarding how to create a PowerPoint file, insert text, and compose the verbal portion of a presentation, trainers are the best way to teach the employee these basic skills.

When an employee is having trouble with specific aspects of a presentation, consider a coach. One classic example of difficulty in this area is public speaking. A coach will work with the employee to overcome this barrier, including, for instance, a workshop where each trainee makes a presentation.

Despite these steps, an employee’s presentation skills might not be hitting home with some or all in the audience. Maybe it’s the corporate culture, or maybe some essential data is missing. A mentor will likely have the inside information about how to get beyond this final barrier.  

Taxonomies

A coach is the mainstream choice for L&D programs. Many coaches use the “clean coaching” technique, in which they approach an engagement with no knowledge of the client’s industry. Instead, the coach focuses on the individual’s challenge with a certain skill. This is also true for specialist communications coaches. 

For HR, and for the sake of the employee’s abilities, you’ll want to hire the best coach for the exact communications challenge that the worker is facing. To this end, it is essential to define exactly what area of skill needs to be improved.

The best tool for this process is the taxonomy. In short, taxonomy is the way in which L&D professionals categorize areas of skill. (Obviously, taxonomy can help with trainers and mentors. But, because coaches tend to focus on certain areas, using the correct terminology is critical here.) For communication, the list of related abilities is extensive. Here is just one example that describes essential dimensions of communications for leaders, developed by Growthspace to match the BANI framework:

• Confidence and assertiveness
• Clarity
• Active listening
• Building rapport

So, instead of looking for a coach who is a general communications specialist, you can use taxonomy to boil down your request into precise areas, and then find a coach with experience in that area. 

Settings

Once you’ve defined exactly what communication skills an employee needs, and which kind of expert will help them out–the next step is to decide on the optimal settings for building the skill.

By settings, we mean a number of things, for example:

• Physical setting – classroom, distance learning, external institution, WFH
• Learning mode – formal in-person instruction, self-paced online lessons, gamification, microlessons
• Cohort – 1:1 instruction, workshops, departmental groups, organization-wide

The expert you have chosen will likely have his/her preferred settings. But, in many cases, training continues even after the official L&D course has ended. A primary reason for this is the time it takes to absorb and apply the lessons you have learned. People who are new to a skill can easily forget what they have been taught, or not really know how to translate instruction into real-life action. Also, for the sake of evaluation (see below), the success of an L&D program can only be determined over the passage of time. 

To avoid the forgetting curve, it’s smart to let the employee practice using their new skill soon after they learn it. You might arrange this through job rotation and related programs such as job shadowing; by ensuring that the employee’s direct manager pays close attention to improved performance in the related area of skill; through HR’s direct evaluation; or by speaking with stakeholders, like peers and customers, to find out if they have noticed an improvement. 

These options are not meant to exercise only the communication skill. Rather, they are an opportunity to evaluate the communication skill as it is combined with other types of upskilling and performance evaluations. 

Metrics

Many of the above points beg the question: how do you know if a skill has improved? Let’s go back to our “experts” framework for examples:

• Because they usually provide instruction in hard skills, trainers often use objective tests to examine improvement.
• Coaches tend to be contracted from outside the organization, and for internal purposes, you’ll need your own testing process. This is a particular challenge when it comes to evaluating soft skills, because they are by nature subjective. However, there are many ways to set measurable employee performance goals. 
• Internal mentors work closely with HR and employees. Their views on an employee’s upskilling progress can be reported directly to the HR team.  

One factor to consider, regardless of expert type, is knowledge retention. Over time, an employee will most likely lose some of their skill due to neglect or the fact that nobody is pointing out the mistakes they are making. HR can prevent this by setting knowledge retention KPIs and evaluating employees periodically.  

The importance of evaluation cannot be overstated. Ensuring that an employee’s skill level has gone up as the result of a communications course allows you to:

• Determine if the course and the expert have been worth the expense. This will help you to figure out if you should sign that expert up for another engagement, or whether it’s time to look for somebody new. In addition, if the evaluation results don’t give a clear picture, then you can look into what aspects of the course could be improved.   
• Record the achievement (or lack thereof) as part of, for example, a performance review. If an employee has taken a course seriously and done well on an evaluation, this shows that they are a good candidate for further training. On the other hand, if their performance was not up to par, then you can think about sending them for more L&D, or changing their career path to something less challenging. 

Platform

As any HR professional knows, communication is but one area of workplace skill. There are countless others, and you’ll most likely need to set up training courses for at least some of them. And find experts to teach these skills. And create a consistent evaluation mechanism for stakeholders to use. 

This is challenging enough even in a small company. For large organizations, the demands of running an effective L&D program can be overwhelming. That’s why it is critical to use the right skill development tool. Through a single platform, L&D practitioners can:

• Define areas of communication skill through a complete taxonomy
• Locate highly-rated experts to teach those skills and coordinate schedules
• Determine the optimal setting for training
• Access an intuitive and consistent evaluation method to apply to employees, experts, and courses

For large companies, the use of a single high-quality platform makes it easier to scale L&D efforts and train the entire staff in its application. 

Precision Skill Development with Growthspace

Soft skills training for communication is only a single area (albeit a complex one) of learning and development. But, no matter which skills your people need, you’ll still face the same problem of identifying and then fixing areas of weakness. 

Growthspace’s precision skill development platform offers the solution. Through its extensive skills taxonomy, Growthspace works with you to figure out exactly what skills your employees should gain; helps you to source the best corporate training professionals in any particular industry; and evaluates the entire program through a single method. Growthspace is the answer for companies that are serious about skills.