Communication and Employee Development

Communication helps living being (human beings, animals, even birds) share their feelings with others. Information sharing takes place through effective communication.

Communication plays an important role in development of employees. Communication helps in the exchange of ideas, thoughts and information through speech, signals, writing and so on.

How would you feel if you are not allowed to express your feelings to your family, your friends and infact the whole world? You would feel demotivated, neglected and a sense of frustration would soon develop. The same thing happens with the employees as well. Everyone would agree that an employee actually spends his maximum part of the day, striving hard to accomplish the goals and objectives of the organization. No organization gives salary for free.

What would happen if employees who give their heart and soul to an organization do not have the liberty to speak and express their thoughts? Trust me there would be dissatisfaction all around, no one would work sincerely for the organization. eventually affecting its performance in the long run.

Employees should have the right to express their opinions in front of others if you really want them to develop and grow professionally. No amount of trainings or employee development activities would help, if employees have no choice but to accept whatever is imposed on them. Let them speak. They would infact come out with better ideas as to what all skills and activities would help them perform better.

Encourage healthy communication among employees. An individual should be aware of what his fellow workers are up to. Let him speak to his colleague. Let him find out what all skills his colleague knows and he still has to learn. An employee acquires new learnings while on job itself. Employees should be motivated to work in teams.

Remember a manager’s role is not just to sit in closed cabins, shout on employees’ and communicate with them only through emails. Emails are an important medium of communication, but nothing can beat verbal or face to face communication. Managers must sit with their teams twice or thrice to review their work, share feedbacks and whenever required address their grievances.

An employee should have the liberty to walk up to his manager’s cabin in case of queries. If you do not allow your employee to speak, how would you know in which all areas he is lacking and what kind of training would help him? Be there for your team. Do not force anything on your employees. Let them come out with their problems for you to suggest the solutions.

Introduce the concepts of morning meetings. Meetings can be conducted department wise, branch wise and so on. Each and every employee participating in the meeting should have the liberty to express his/her view points. Respect other’s opinions. An employee should have the freedom to express his/her thoughts and share information irrespective of his designation or level in the hierarchy.

There are some people who do not open up easily in front of others. Install a drop box in the reception area and ask employees to write their feedbacks, opinions or any other query on a piece of paper and put it in the dropbox. Do not ask them to write their names but yes do ensure they mention their departments or functional areas. This would at least help you understand what all new training programs or sessions you need to introduce in the organization.

After every training program, do take feedback of employees. The feedbacks must be carefully monitored and implemented. Try to make your trainings more effective in the future.

Two way communication makes an employee more confident and one starts believing in the organization.