The 3 Principles of Effective Communication Keeping Employee Engagement High

And this is not even that hard to do.

When the Grossman Group founder, David Grossman, interviewed 400 companies searching for the drain that leaked the company’s money, he found that companies with over 100,000 employees lose $62.4 million a year.

On account of poor communication.

Medium and small companies suffer, too. An 100-employee business loses $420,000 a year.

Attributable, of course, to poor communication.

I looked a bit into it, and I can say—believe me, I read quite a bunch—that strong, effective, concise—like, to the point—way of delivering information, for small and big corporations altogether, is to avoid at all costs—even when you feel like you can’t stop yourself—in any circumstances, rambling like I just did.

You couldn’t follow that sentence, could you?

And if that’s what your employees have to go through every day, take a breather. To keep your money where they should be & increase employee engagement, learn to live by these principles of effective communication.

Principle No. 1: Keep It Light

When you go to bed with an empty inbox and wake up with hundreds of verbal looseness emails, you don’t care about another company-related long-form message.

When you’re neck-deep in requests, reports, client calls, scheduling and what-not, internal newsletters are the last thing your eyes want to see. God forbid, 3.000 words worth an article!

Employees have quite a bunch on their plate.

Human attention span has shortened in the last years to adapt to short-form content. And it turns out your employees are human too.

Now, you see, effective communication is more like a straight line that connects point A with point B. That makes it easier for your audience to follow you.

On the flip side, ineffective communication = a pretty tangled discourse.

It is more like a doodle you would unheedingly do in high school while the teacher rattled on some ho-hum subject.

What can you do about it?

Keep it short.

Like, really, really short.

Think tweets.

And cut down on paragraphs. Say what you have to say without embellishments and verbal gymnastics.

Principle No. 2: Keep It Clear

Lack of clarity—the one thing that might stop your employees from receiving your internal messages.

Ambiguity bums out anyone you talk to—employee or not.

Therefore, one of the prerogatives of amazing communication is humility.

A humble communicator recognizes that communication is useless, provided their message doesn’t get delivered. So you have to remove all the factors that burden your message.

Think: ‘what does this word/sentence mean to the receiver.’ If it means nothing because, say, they don’t know the specific language, find a better way to say it.

In short, what can you do about it?

Think of the audience when producing the message.

Principle No. 3: Keep It Insightful

If you feel like saying or writing things like this:

Don’t.

One of the barriers to effective communication is saying many words—and many meaningless words at that.

If you don’t want to be the Michael Scott of your company…

… don’t waste their time.

It might sound rough, but your employees don’t need to read another text that tells them nothing of real importance.

So what can you do about it?

Think of how your message benefits your audience.

-Do they gain knowledge after engaging with my message?- -What new things can they learn from this?- -Will it inspire or motivate them?- -Will it solve an issue they’re struggling with?-

Effective Communication Skills. Something You Can Grow Starting Today

You might already know some of these principles. That’s awesome. You have it easier.

But if you don’t, keep in mind—it will take time to get used to communicating like this. Each time you try to do a little better, one employee out there considers opening your emails more often.