Best Strategies for Effective Communication

Best Strategies for Effective Communication

In any team, members need to interact and communicate with one another from time to time. Good communication not only strengthens the bond among the team members but also facilitates the overall process of information-sharing. Additionally, as communication is a vital part of our life outside work, it’s better to level up your communication skills and make it one of your key strengths.

Here’s a popular quote by John Powell that will motivate you to put efforts for improving your communication skills:

 “Communication works for those who work at it.”

Now, let us take a look at the most effective communication strategy that you and your teammates should follow to make team interaction both fun and rewarding:

1. Encourage One-to-One Communication

One-to-one communication is important to develop a bond and understand your teammates in a better way. When you talk to others on a personal level, you get to know more about them. You can read their body language, know about the communication methods that they are most comfortable with; know about the visual cues that they use more, etc.

Additionally, when you need to share some confidential information with someone, you need to communicate one-on-one with someone who you trust. You can easily talk about matters in private, and get suggestions from a single person without involving other people of your team

2. Let Everyone Speak in Meetings

Yes, I also agree that team meetings are boring and seem more like a formality. But this usually happens when a limited number of participants have the privilege of sharing what’s on their mind. Meetings with defined agendas and involvement of only those who are directly related to the issues being discussed are not productive for everyone.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a team leader or a team member; you need to express your thoughts openly during a meeting. It‘s the responsibility of the manager or the meeting organizer to ensure that every participant gets an equal chance to express what’s on their mind. Moreover, participants need to listen carefully to what others have to say without interrupting them. This will not only make the meeting more open but also gives a fair chance to everyone to hone their speaking and listening skills.

3. Make Use of Multiple Modes of Communication

Some people prefer talking face-to-face while others find it more effective to send text messages to convey information. You may want to stick with your favorite communication channels but this isn’t going to make communication with others easy for you in the long run.

Just like you, everyone has their own set of preferred modes of communication. However, to convey your messages with everyone on your team without any friction, you need to make yourself comfortable with different modes of communication. You can get yourself one step closer to become a communication expert by making use of different channels for communicating with your team.

4. Bring in Some Humour: Why So Serious?

Too serious conversations can put you and other participants in a negative state of mind. And this will affect how you perceive information and draw conclusions. Moreover, when a communication session becomes too serious, everyone wants to leave it at the earliest and the flow of information gets hindered significantly.

Sometimes, you need to put across information that is intense and it is not possible to avoid a stressful communication session. In such a case, you should know how to lighten the mood of yourself as well as others. A good joke can do the trick and help everyone to relax and retain their interest in the matter being discussed.

5. Prepare Yourself Beforehand

Don’t take things too lightly and always ready yourself beforehand when you have to share some important information with your teammates. You definitely don’t want any piece of information from getting skipped while communicating the message with your team.

It’s always a good idea to note down all the important points that you want to communicate with your team. Also, you need to focus on presenting information in an interesting and engaging manner. It’s a good practice to customize the information that you want to share with a particular audience.

6. Promote Feedback During Communication Sessions

Communication is a two-way process and information cannot be exchanged effectively if the flow of information is unidirectional. From unidirectional what I mean here is that the information is only flowing in a single direction. For instance, you shared some information with your team and no one asked or discussed the information with you.

Feedback plays a vital role in improving the overall effectiveness of communication by enabling the flow of information in the backward direction also. The most common example of feedback is the questions that you ask at the end of a presentation. Feedback can be in the form of doubts, suggestions, or thoughts that you will get after you communicate your message.

7. Be Ready to Involve Yourself in Difficult Conversations

Sometimes, you may find yourself in a conversation with someone whose thoughts, opinions, and feelings are completely different than yours. The two most obvious choices that you have in such a circumstance is to either avoid the conversation or get yourself involved in an argument.

But neither of the ways is going to do the trick, which is to make the communication happen effectively while keeping the personal differences aside. So, what you need to do for tackling a difficult conversation is to stay relaxed and try to understand what the other person wants to say before responding. Also, you can practice how you respond when you get into tricky conversations that can happen with your manager or your team members.

8. Jot Down All the Key Points of a Discussion

While communicating with your team, especially during a discussion or a meeting, you witness the flow of a significant amount of information and ideas. However, it’s difficult to retain all the useful information that is shared verbally with one another. As a result, it is likely to lose most part of the conversation that may come handy.

To ensure that discussion brings productive results and information does not get lost, you need to note down every piece of information that seems valuable. This way, you can secure many ideas that otherwise would have been lost.

9. Make use of Communication Tools

Today, several tools have emerged that make it easy for the team to communicate and share their thoughts and ideas conveniently. You can use online team collaboration tools for instant messaging, video conferencing, brainstorming, note-taking, etc.

You can also use project management software like ProofHub, which comes with an integrated chat tool and various other team collaboration features. You will be able to stay connected with your team and at the same time, manage all your projects using a single application. By using advanced communication or collaboration tools, it will be both easy and effective to communicate with your team.

Most Common Communication Mistakes That You Must Avoid

Before you start implementing the communication strategies that I’ve discussed, just make sure that you are not making any common communication mistakes.

Here are some of the most common communication blunders that can lead to ineffective conversations:

1. Assuming Everyone to Understand Things the Same Way

When you communicate with several people at a time, it is normal that some of them will get it easily while others are unable to understand your point. It happens because of the difference in the understanding level and preferred learning style. Moreover, you can never assume that all the people interpret your message in a similar way. Thus, it’s better to observe and develop a communication strategy that can work for all the members of the group whom you want to address. The one-size-fits-all approach never works when it comes to team communication.

2. Bad at Listening

Communication is not only about speaking and transmitting information but is also about listening and receiving information. In any conversation, one person shares the information by speaking while the other person listens and interprets the information. So, what you need to understand here is that listening skills matter as much as speaking skills. By listening carefully to others, you will be able to understand things easily and learning becomes easier for you. Individuals, who are bad at listening, are less likely to extract the correct information from the conversations.

3. Ignoring the Tone of Your Voice

When you are communicating verbally, the tone of your voice matters a lot. Voice creates a major impact on your listeners and also acts as a key factor that decides how good your listeners get connected with you. Communicating in a harsh and annoying tone is likely to put a negative impact on your listener and in worst-case scenarios, results in conflicts. You need to make sure that the tone of your voice is gentle, confident, educating, and should imply that you are also willing to listen.

4. Emotions Overpowering Logic

Conversations influenced by your emotions are ineffective and are likely to bring in undesired outcomes, especially in the office environment. You need to think and communicate logically while keeping your emotions aside. Most decisions that are guided by emotions are likely to be the ones that you regret later. It’s quite difficult but you need to resist your emotions from taking over your logical thinking.

5. Hold Back Your Thoughts and Ideas

Not expressing your thoughts while communicating can bring conversations to a dead end. It’s very important to share what’s on your mind with others to get your issues and requests noticed. You need to communicate your opinions with confidence to make sure that others don’t take them too lightly.

6. Reacting More and Responding Less

Reacting and responding are two different things. When you react, you take actions without giving a proper thought on the consequences and the impact that they are going to make. Generally, reactions are aggressive and tense in nature. On the other hand, responding means that you take time to think about the issue or the situation and then take action accordingly. Reactions are not good, especially when you are communicating with people on a professional level. A single reaction during a conversation can induce multiple reactions that will create a hateful environment and kill productivity.

7. Getting Distracted Easily

While exchanging information with others, you always need to pay attention to ensure that you don’t miss anything that is important. Distractions can put you in a situation where you are physically present in a conversation but mentally you become absent. There can be many reasons for getting distracted while communicating with your team like a bad attitude, the use of mobile phones, etc. For making any conversation successful, you need to keep distractions at bay and engage yourself with a positive attitude.

Wrapping it up

Good communication skills are imperative for becoming successful in the workplace. Whether you are communicating with your team or with your boss, you should practice effective communication strategies to take your conversations to the next level. I also suggest that you should try to avoid the common mistakes that affect the overall communication process and disrupt the flow of information.

Before you go, I want to share a quote with you that emphasizes the importance of communication:

“Communication – the human connection – is the key to personal and career success.” – Paul J. Meyer