Eliminate the Barriers to Effective Communication at Work  

A supervisor once told me to keep all emotion out of email. Emotion in email is a huge waste of time. I wrote to a director the other day, and the response was filled with emotion. The person was “busy, overwhelmed, and doing my best.” The emotion put a bad spin on the email, so it’s best to remember to stick to the facts. When I see emotion-laden emails, I always wonder, “Why”? Perhaps people do not realize what they are doing. The director could have responded in two sentences (rather than four paragraphs). Few people have the time or the energy to read four paragraphs.

While most people are empathetic and do care, they may not have time or energy to give when they are overloaded with data daily. To be more effective with your daily communication, try these tips for eliminating barriers to effective and efficient communication:

• Take the emotion out of your communications.
• Acknowledge, clarify, and confirm your understanding.
• Set good rules to minimize back and forth meaningless communication.
• Ask the listener to repeat what you have said to validate that your meaning is understood.
• Be open and transparent.
• Practice active listening.
• Remember that email is not the only option. Pick up the phone for spontaneous communication.
• Make your communication into an action. Be direct and focused.
• Motivating by effective communication will provide encouragement and inspire people.
• Speak collaboratively. Summarize and reiterate key points.

What you say sends a powerful signal. Communicate the idea, and then show everyone how the idea is valuable. This clarifies the role others might play and inspires them to do the work. Find a way to simplify the idea. Not only does this help you, but it will give vision to the goal. Compare the goal with the mission. Are they aligned? Take assumptions out of the way by having informal conversations outside your group to discuss ideas and coordinate your communications.

If we stop and think by asking questions about what we need, we have a better idea of who should be included, what decisions will be required and what needs to be done. Giving someone the power to make some decisions and some authority will enable execution. Clarify your preferred communications channels (“only email,” etc.) to make sure your communication preference is stated and stick with it.

Every field develops its own jargon to facilitate communication among specialists and make the language more colorful, but it can also be very difficult for outsiders or newcomers to understand. Effective communication should accommodate diverse people with different backgrounds and different levels of expertise, and it will ultimately play a deciding role in the outcomes as people proceed based on their perceived understandings. If you set the tone early and express preferred communication methods, everything will go more smoothly. To do so, make sure you provide the right format to the correct people at the appropriate time for the best impact and provide only the information needed.

Most of us have experienced the outcomes of miscommunications with others. Learning from these failures is critical. Most disagreements over communications come from debating different things or including too much emotion. To mitigate this risk, determine the information needed and consider narrowing the scope of your communication to critical issues. You should only be writing and expending energy on communicating information that contributes to the success of what you are trying to achieve. Giving too much information (or too little) could lead to failure. If some people want an answer right away, consider how urgent it really is because more often than not, it can wait a day.

Technology has helped us define our needs and facilitate communications, but it can also overload us with useless data. Determine what you must address immediately and what can wait. Have a time limit, so things are not forgotten.