How to Improve Your Communication Skills?
Communication is one of the soft skills that improve the chances of building a strong career, success in any business, and helps in developing good relationships with people of different backgrounds and experts.
Having poor communication skills can create conflict in a number of ways: It can harm an organization, ruin a relationship, or even decrease the chance of being a leader.
In your daily life, it is important to know how to communicate effectively, which means Explain a topic very well, clearly and present it perfectly. This would be the magic tool that you can use very easily to persuade anyone to do anything for you.
Most of the common problems that take place in a workplace or our life are due to poor
communication, for example:
- Low employee morale
- Miscommunication in Emails
- Poor teamwork
- Poor customer service
- Bad interpersonal relationships
- Rework of task
- Performance Issue
- Bad leadership
- Employee turnover
8 Strategies to Improve Communication Skills
To communicate effectively, you need to consider the medium that you are using whether it is a normal face-to-face conversation, writing an email to your boss, having a conference call meeting with your client, or even broadcasting.
1. The Art of Speech
First of all, you always need to know what you want to say, and speak it powerfully to capture the attention of your audience. Use humor to show how much you are comfortable with yourself, give and receive compliments, recognize others’ difficulties.
If you are using oral communication, make sure to have a stable and clear voice tone, focus on your body language while making eye contact and listening to others. On written communication, Setting the write tone for a document is dependent upon an individual’s ability to understand the reader and fine-tune the communication accordingly.
2. Use the Appropriate Way When Conveying a Negative Message or Unpleasant Information
Bad news messages include rejections (in response to a job interview, salary adjustment request, job promotion request …etc.) that can be handled in two approaches either indirect and direct.
Indirect method: First the message is open with positive news, then you start introducing the bad news message. finally, you try to end the message with positive communication.
Direct method: the message opens up with the bad news, then an explanation, finally some positive communication.
(The Direct Approach works best if the receiver is expecting the bad news)
3. Be Assertive (and nice)
In Business Communication, you need to be able to ask for what you want firmly and fairly. There is a fine line between assertiveness and aggression, and people often confuse between the two.
In some situations.
You need to adjust your tone based on circumstances, it is not easy to be assertive without being rude, it needs some practice but once you master it, you would be a great manager and you will be able to negotiate a successful “win-win” Solution.
4. Be Influencer
Stories are the way to form a human connection, let some of your personality shine! You need to make a memorable and lasting impact on others, by sharing with them your own personal experiences or even tell a transformative story that happened to others – This would inspire people to be persuaded to take a desired course of action that you want.
This technique could be used in any type of communication (example: during a job
interview, in a conference meeting with your team, …etc.).
5. Consider Culture Difference During Communication
As the internet and modern technology have opened up new marketplaces, and it becomes easy to work with someone remotely in different geographic locations, good cross-cultural communication is a must.- Developing awareness and acceptance of different culture and time zone, public
holidays is essential.
– When you communicate, try to keep your language simple, clear, and unambiguous.
– Avoid humor, until you know the person you are communicating with will not get
offended, a lot of things can pass for humor in one culture and others will be seen as
offensive.
– Ground rule is to respect each and everyone’s culture.
– It is good practice to repeat communication message several times to become very
clear to the stakeholder group, you can use several communication channels – if the
the message is critical.
6. Plan a Budget for Enhancing Communication
Team building activities could help boost communication in the workplace. It contributes towards employee motivation, and provide a fun way to bond with your staff on their own and build trust in each other. Building good relationships with other people can reduce stress in your life. They will also help you to take care of your own needs while being respectful of their needs.
7. Provide Proper Feedback
Without feedback, people would lose the opportunity to improve their skills. Always start with positive feedback, people generally respond better to a positive direction, this encourages the action to be repeated in the future.
When providing negative feedback, perform the feedback as close to the occurrence of the event as possible. Be open, as the goal is to resolve an issue and change undesirable behavior.
8. Deal With Conflict Effectively
It is very important to have the ability to resolve conflicts successfully while remaining alert and calm. Always keep your emotions in control and treat people with respect. Resolving conflict is impossible if you are unable to forgive others, sometimes you just need to agree to disagree and move on.
