Good Communication Leads to Team Wellness

Shawnee Love   •  
July 27, 2017

The 10th part in our blog series on creating well workplaces is all about communication.  Good communication at work is a major factor in fostering a healthy workplace and wellness in your team because when present, employees feel:

  • Prepared for changes,
  • More involved,
  • Able to disagree, share ideas for improvements, and/or ask questions to understand,
  • A measure of control over their situation, and
  • Respected and valued.

Those feelings not only contribute to wellness, but engagement, employee retention, reduced conflict and many other desirable circumstances.

If you buy in to the case for good communication, it’s important to know how to be a good communicator.

To that end, my first piece of advice to leaders is:

You are responsible for good communication in your workplace.Hand holding megaphone with bubble speech

Initiating it, fostering it, modelling what “good” looks like, ensuring people understand what is communicated, and so on.

If you don’t take responsibility for communicating, you can’t be sure communication will happen, so you might as well do it to ensure it gets done right.

Being a good communicator, means you:

  1. Lead with “why”.  If your people understand why, they are more likely to embrace what and how.
  2. Tell your people what you will do…. before you do it.  Give them time to prepare and wrap their heads around the upcoming change.
  3. After you have done something, remind them of what you said you would do and why, and then confirm what you have actually done.  It  helps to explain any variations with why they were needed as well.
  4. Use a variety of communication methods: one on one, group meetings, email, bulletin boards, newsletters, blog posts, video chats…. Try to get in front of everyone.
  5. Ask for feedback and questions.  Make it easy for your people to follow up and give feedback.
  6. Practice the 4 C’s of Communication.  Ensure your communications are clear, concise, consistent, and continual.  Communicate so often your people tell you you are annoying them with your constant messaging.  When you hear that, you have done well.

Any other tips for good communication you’d like to share?  Please comment!