The Importance of good WorkPlace Communication
It is an accepted truth that good workplace communication is of increasing importance in today’s world.
Workplace communication between management and employees, between individual employees, and even within the management team can easily come under strain through a lack of good communication skills.
The Need for Management and Employees to Communicate
This article will concentrate on highlighting the need of proper workplace communication between members of the management team and the companies employees, although the same basic principles could easily be extended to most other areas of communication.
It is of critical importance that managers employ good workplace communication when dealing with all company employees of whatever level. Distrust of managers is very often the result of an employees unwarranted suspicion of a managers actions.
Rumours concerning dismissals, redundancies, wage freezes, and similar occurrences are never very far below the surface in any workplace, and it can only take one incident for the entire company to erupt.
A Practical Example
To take a real life example of how these things can so easily occur.
I know of one company that was having cash flow problems due to difficult trading conditions. It was decided that it was not going to be possible to give the employees a pay rise that year. It was only a few weeks later that one of the company directors arrived for work in a brand new Jaguar motor car purchased for him by the company.
The resulting antagonism, and in some cases outright hostility displayed towards that manager are easy to imagine.
The manager attempted to use all of his skills to explain the situation. He attempted to play it down and mentioned that the car had been arranged for him long before, when the trading 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 only a Ford Mondeo with a fancy name.
These explanations of his were not able to satisfy any of his employees, and that situation is still remembered today, several years later.
Your Response?
Now I want you to think about that situation. I am not going to attempt to provide all the answers in this article. I want to encourage you to think about your workplace communication skills, and decide how you would have handled that situation, would you have used a different explanation?
The answer you decide on will depend both on your own personality, and on the employees that you have to work with.
I hope that by encouraging you to focus on your workplace communication skills for a few minutes, this article may help you to become a better manager, and one who communicates better with your company employees.