Communicating effectively with your employees is essential to creating a happy, productive workplace. When you communicate well with your employees, you can build good relationships with them, and when you do that, you can:
- Improve employee morale
- Increase employee productivity
- Increase employee loyalty
- Turn employees into brand ambassadors
- Reduce mistakes that stem from poor communication
- Prevent angry employees from sabotaging your company
But how exactly do you go about improving communication with your employees? Here are 5 things you can start doing immediately.
- Talk to them face-to-face — Thanks to email, text messaging, and chat applications, face-to-face communication is dying a painful death in many workplaces. While these tools can come in handy for communicating certain things, it’s important that you still make time to interact with your employees in person. This helps strengthen working relationships, improve collaboration, increase trust and respect, and avoid miscommunication issues that can occur when going back and forth over email or text.
- Keep your employees in the loop — Your employees want to feel like they know what’s going on with your company. They want insight into the bigger picture. It makes them feel important, and it lets them know what they’re working for. Make sure you communicate with your team regularly to keep them in the loop so you’re all on the same page.
- Give them avenues for sounding off — Listening is an important part of communicating with your employees, and in order to listen, you need to give your employees ways to provide feedback. This can include using employee surveys (anonymous surveys allow employees to share things they might not feel comfortable putting their name to), holding regular staff meetings where everyone gets to participate, having an open-door policy with your team, or just using the old-fashioned suggestion box.
- Be approachable — There are always walls between employees and their superiors. These walls hinder good communication. It’s your job to break down these walls so your employees feel they can approach you comfortably. Sometimes, breaking down a wall can be as simple as taking an employee out to lunch.
- Act on what you hear — If you’re not going to take any action when your employees provide you with feedback, why even bother talking to them in the first place? If they know you’re not going to do anything with what they say, they’ll stop talking to you. You have to act on what you hear if you want to create a workplace where people communicate well.
What are some of your tips for improving communication with employees? We want to hear from you! Just leave a comment below.
This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases (https://www.ereleases.com), the online leader in press release writing and distribution. Download the free whitepaper LinkedIn for Business here: https://www.ereleases.com/insider/linkedin.html