Sep 11, 2018

6 STEPS TO COMMUNICATING ACROSS YOUR ORGANISATION

Communicating effectively is challenging. Communication within an organisation is the foundation for development and planning. It promotes the distribution of information and creates positive interactions with others. Without an established line of communication, your organisation can suffer from misunderstandings and non-responsiveness that penetrates every level of operation. Think about it, is there anything more frustrating than lack of communication? To prevent these communication gaps and misunderstandings, employees and employers must recognise the essential elements of effective communication.

Miscommunication is not only frustrating, it’s costly. We have put together a list of 6 steps to help you improve communications across your organisation during times of stress, change or everyday situations. 

1.    Understand the Elements of Communication
There’s a history to communication and a very good reason why we collectively decided that drawing on cave walls wasn’t cutting it anymore. We discovered that there are better ways to articulate our intentions and feelings. While we will not take things back to the stone age, employees and employers should understand the fundamentals of assertive communication, building a rapport, asking and answering questions and dealing with feedback. Understanding these skills can help to minimise frustrations caused by miscommunication and to increase productivity. 
Check out the Essential Communications Skills course if you want to explore this with your team more.

2.    Develop Self-Awareness
Achieving self-awareness allows you to explore your own strengths and weaknesses. This understanding encourages self-management, development of social skills, and improving overall empathy. An Emotional Intelligence course will allow you to master these strategies in order to effectively communicate, connect with and support others through healthy and productive interactions. 

 
3.    Be able to influence and persuade
To influence or persuade colleagues is a daily necessity in modern business. If managers rely on force or coercion to achieve their goals, employee moral can suffer, and team members can get into conflict. However, through persuasion and influencing, people can understand your perspective and agree on a plan of action. The best approach to understanding how to influence and persuade effectively is to get training from the best, have a look at our Effective Influencing and Persuasion Skills course.

4.    Build Your Interpersonal Skills
Working in a team takes more than just telling each other what to do. Proper interpersonal skills can further develop participants’ awareness of themselves and their roles inside the company. The ability to harnesses the power of active listening teaches participants how and when to speak. These skills integrate whole body communication and provide detailed interpretations of non-verbal communication. Check out the Advanced communication skills course here. With the proper skills you can successfully work with staff who may be passive aggressive, outright aggressive or just not great at communicating. A great way to learn how to manage difficult situations, or difficult people is to participate in our 1-day course How to Handle Difficult People. 

5.    Communicate with Facilitation
Most people can recognise a problem. But what are YOU going to do to fix it? Facilitation focuses on getting things done! That means that next month when your company holds a “group meeting”, you don’t just show up, you participate. This type of skill is often found in leaders and is a perfect example of cross-organisational communication. A Managerial Leadership course can help you discover your leadership voice – one that builds trust, fosters enthusiasm for change, engages colleagues, strengthens relationships, and achieves results. Through practicing your leadership skills you learn how to better define your visions, strengthen employee roles and overcome resistance in these processes. More importantly, you should practice succeeding through failure and handling stress and mistakes.

6.    Execute Communication Strategies
This final step focuses on the effectiveness of communication and how it will impact different areas of your life, such as your stress levels, productivity, and relationships with others. The biggest obstacles you’ll face in communication are barriers such as language, distance, and culture. It can be hard to explain yourself over a skype meeting, conference call or an email when you lack the ability to properly express yourself, especially when language and cultural differences factor in. Communication strategies are all about finding the most effective ways to overcome these obstacles. For example, a simple solution is to use pictures and interpretations during a presentation. However, no matter how practiced you are there will always be people that will challenge everything you have learnt. Dealing with these situations is the final key point to communicating effectively.

Learn how to manage your stress levels in this one day Stress Management course. And while you’re at it, have a look at the Effective presentations in this course and see what you can do to improve the way you get your message across.

These 6 steps to improve communication across your Organisation offer more than a unique learning experience – it offers an opportunity for you to invest in yourself and see a return on that investment. Once mastered, you will be able to identify the essential elements of effective communication within your organisation and much more. New Horizons Personal & Professional Development courses focus on the practical expertise and competencies that you need to further develop yourself and your organization, enhancing your proficiency in key areas.