Video: The Dos and Don’ts of Communicating in Today’s Workplace
Transcript:
No matter what your field, a strong communication skill, background, and skills are really critical to success. And in particular, they’re so important guiding principles on how to best communicate in the workplace. Once you get there, in terms of being seen as a reliable, accountable, professional measured, calm solution oriented individual, who’s really good to work with. And I think that’s very important and communication is really the glue that ties all those things together.
Communication should reflect a responsible professional and team oriented work ethic. And accountability is very important. Responding to email in a timely fashion. I personally like the 24 hour rule, regardless of how busy you are. You just say, I’m really busy this week. I’ll get back to you on Friday. The person knows what’s happening with that request or that initiative. Also making sure that if something is a trigger point for you, if you get an email or a communication, it somehow gets you emotionally charged up, give it some time to respond to it and try not to respond right away, very critical to reread all your emails, even if you read it quickly once, and you don’t think you saw any typos, I definitely encourage reading it a second time, particularly to somebody who is more senior to you or in a different department or somebody that you’re trying to forge a relationship with.
Crosschecking, your communication, your written communication is very, very important. Definitely begin with, Hello, Laura, how are you doing today? Or let’s talk further about the project that you brought to my attention last week and go on from there. Definitely. If there’s any action steps that you’re asking for the person to take, I really enjoy using bullets in that situation instead of a really long paragraph, heavy copy laden email people don’t have a lot of time to read emails. So if you keep them short to the a point, what are you writing about what are you looking for them to do? And when would you like a response? Very easy, simple to follow beginning, middle and end of why are you writing?
So another thing that I think is very important in workplace communication is to re remain really positive. You, even if you’re in the middle of a crisis, and be really hesitant to lay blame, or as people like to say, throw anybody under the bus, because again, if you remain solutions oriented and a problem solver, people are going to come to you again and again, to solve problems. If you’re good at it, if you do it calmly, if you do it with of intention, and also giving credit where credit is due is very important, particularly if you’re managing other people to not take the credit for work that the team did, but to really make sure that the team knows the person who did the work is mentioned, in public that they did the work, they did a great job. And if you do that via email or in a, you know, public statement, it’s very important to give credit where credit is due.
So virtual community has really infused all workplaces, since the start of COVID. And I think it will be here forever. We are working with multiple different platforms, whether it be zoom, whether it be teams, chat and teams, just activity and teams, it seems to be a very, very actively used vehicle. So I think it’s very important to be, accountable or attentive to who is in the space and in the room. If you have 10 people in the room, you know, what’s happening in their workspace, what’s happening on their projects. And again, paying attention to how much time you’re speaking in a zoom call, uh, risk expecting other people’s time, not monopolizing the conversation, finding ways to draw people out. If you’re running a meeting, particularly in zoom, did you notice that people, have their cameras off, you know, again, you know, possibly check in with them privately on chat, is everything okay?
Are you doing okay today? You know, kind of trying to find why are their cameras off? Are they, are they, you know, something happening that you should know about, particularly as a manager, you always want to keep the tone professional, even in the chat feature on, on zoom. So I think it’s important to remember the digital communication last forever, and it can be forwarded and saved. So if you’re having a side conversation, bear in mind that the organizer of the, of the zoom room will in fact have that chat available to them if they so choose.
So I think you want to also remember that, communication is not a static skill. You know, we are always learning. Communication is not a skill is naturally to everybody. It is a skill that you can learn. I think the school of continuing education is a great place to come to develop your communication skills. The students in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College are very well supported and very well nurtured in their individual pursuits. And I think I’ve seen students whose confidence grows tremendously over the course of two or three courses at Providence college in the school of continuing ed because of that attention to detail. And because they do feel seen and heard and nurtured, there’s a public speaking class, there’s Organizational Communication. I know that there are other writing classes that stress, you know, speech writing and, and that’s a really good way to practice writing and delivering a speech. There are also resources in the center for career education, which are available on their website. Communication is a skill that is essential to almost every job in every industry and that it’s really worthwhile to spend time perfecting, practicing and honing your communication skills.
