One of the leading reasons employees become disengaged is poor communication at the office. Most studies agree that managers carry most of the blame for employee disengagement. Almost 40% of “disengaged employees” in one study blamed managers who do not make their expectations clear, hold employees accountable, recognize good work, or provide direction. However, poor communication between coworkers can also lead to frustration, lost productivity, and disengagement.
If you need to reengage your team, there are few steps you can take. You can look into the issues you’re currently facing, learn more about voice enabled Microsoft Teams, and seek better training. For the training, business communications workshops are a good place to start. They improve your team’s writing, meeting, and presentation skills, making your employees more effective, confident, and productive. One training firm called Wavelength also offers its clients customized solutions that combine two or more workshops.
Email is one of the most common sources of interruption and frustration at the office. Many people do not know when email is appropriate, how to organize their inboxes, or how to use informative subject lines. Anyone who makes these mistakes contributes to employee disengagement by creating unnecessary headaches. That’s why writing workshop facilitators train participants to use a readable writing style, energize their writing by eliminating jargon, and get to the point.
Meeting facilitation workshops offer valuable skills to managers and team leaders. Ask anyone working in an office setting and you’ll hear how often they become frustrating and waste everyone’s time. The Facilitating High Impact Meetings workshop from Wavelength Training is designed for managers, team leaders, and anyone who organizes meetings. Managers learn a 5 step process for designing effective meetings and how to resolve conflict within their team. They learn how to create ground rules to prevent interruptions, how to encourage brainstorming, and how to effectively capture and record decisions and highlights. Managers who engage and hold accountable their employees during meetings see results.
Find facilitators who value learning by practice when you’re looking for workshops that will improve your office’s performance (or your own). Practice is one of the most effective ways to improve your communication skills in a workshop. That means bringing in real reports or presentations to evaluate and revise as you apply new skills. It also means participating in group projects, presenting before facilitators, and recording oral presentations for participants to assess later. Facilitators should also provide participants with resource materials they can use long after the workshop, such as checklists and best practices.
A Gallup poll on the subject determined that 70% of employees in the United States are not engaged, and that actively disengaged employees cost all companies in the country up to $550 billion. If you are a manager facing an engagement crisis, acommunication skills workshop can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. One study estimates that very large companies (with over 100,000 employees) lose $62 million per year each in downtime employees spent clarifying documents. Every business benefits from more engaged employees, and managers can reduce the frustrations that turn off employees with better training. Concise reports, clear emails, and better presentations can all help reduce downtime and improve engagement in the office.