3 Communication Skills Your Team Can’t Afford to Miss

Be honest—when was the last time you really thought about your team’s communication skills? Not just how relying too heavily on emojis negates real human connection or scheduling another meeting that could’ve been an email chews up time. But how your organization relays, digests, and applies real-time information for organizational success.  

In this increasingly tech-enabled world, it’s tempting to assume effective communication comes standard with the right software subscriptions. The attention economy doesn’t just operate on social media: it’s baked into the cultural fabric, often at the expense of catching critical details. And with AI assistants taking notes, transcribing meetings, and even writing internal emails, misalignment is an ever-present threat.  

The hard truth is that solid business communication skills don’t magically develop with tenure or team building. They require practice, focus, and commitment to set standards and show up for team interactions. To this end, if you’re serious about developing communication skills across your organization, it’s time to go deeper than “paying attention” or “writing better emails.”  

Let’s dig into three commonly underestimated but wildly valuable skills your team can’t afford to overlook: listening, design, and virtual presentation. 

Adaptive Listening™: A Swiss-Army Knife of Workplace Communication

Everyone fancies themselves a good listener. And yet, poor communication is costing businesses as much as “18% of the total salaries paid each year.” That’s a steep fee for a skill that begins its life in kindergarten. It seems for affected companies, a 4-day work week has arrived, just not in the way many had hoped. To help slow this drain on talent and resources, a groundswell around active listening was sold as the cure-all for curbing misalignment. However, this sea change revealed that listening takes more than just paying attention. Because listening varies from person to person, organizations need something more than a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s where Duarte’s Adaptive Listening™ methodology can help. 

Why Adaptive Listening™ Matters at Work 

For too long, listening has been a low priority. Viewed as little more than hearing and nodding along, it’s no wonder the above statistics were able to take root. It was with the hopes of challenging these notions that Duarte experts embarked on years of careful research and writing to arrive at a better approach. Adaptive Listening: How to Cultivate Trust and Traction at Work was the fruit of that labor. Their study helped reorient the role of listening toward understanding intent, reading between the lines, and identifying unspoken cues to meet a variety of speaker needs. From this vantage point, listening is the bedrock of interpersonal communication skills training, just how reading or writing enables a host of abilities downstream.  

When encouraged at an organizational level, Adaptive Listening™ empowers workplace alignment, stronger camaraderie, and can even mean the difference between closing deals and watching customers walk into the arms of a competitor. Here’s just some of what Adaptive Listening™ has to offer. 

Tools and Training to Get Your Team Listening the Right Way

For teams that need more than a book club to connect, Duarte’s educational ecosystem has plenty to build skills around Adaptive Listening™. Ultimately, finding success with an innovative approach requires a shared vocabulary and an applicable framework. The S.A.I.D Listening Style Finder™ is an ideal launchpad for determining how your team members listen. Like a DISC profile, once participants become attuned to their predisposition for Support, Advance, Immerse, or Discern listening, it’s possible to address the strengths and weaknesses that accompany each unique style. From there, diving into the Adaptive Listening™ workshop overview can help provide additional context on what your team stands to gain with proper facilitated training. 

Investing in communication skills training that prioritizes empathy and emotional intelligence can help your team rebuild listening from the ground up. Not only will your team be better positioned to avoid costly miscommunications, but they will become more thorough and collaborative. Not to mention, clients and customers will enjoy the Adaptive Listening™ goal-focused approach by receiving greater care and attention to their needs and pain points. Because let’s be real—every team could benefit from greater alignment and more actual connection. 

Developing a greater understanding of and appreciation for listening will reveal how gifting one’s undivided (and receptive) attention creates a deeper bond. To a similar degree, the right images can help achieve equal levels of harmony for teams and customers who prefer to “speak” visually. 

Design: A Visual Language for Visual Learners 

After listening, design is another potent tool for ensuring messages and selling points are conveyed properly in a host of settings. But design isn’t just about making things pretty. It’s about making ideas clear and memorable. Whether it’s a pitch deck, proposal, or quarterly report, effective design translates complex information into visuals your audience can grasp quickly and make decisions from effectively. Simple, carefully crafted visuals should spur viewers to act. Whether you’re nudging customers to beta test a new solution, communicating change internally, or initiating a brand reorientation, design can help with the heavy lifting. 

The Business Case for Design Literacy 

When companies are shopping around for corporate communication skills training, design is rarely considered for non-designers. But encouraging a baseline understanding of design for all in-house roles can open new vectors of communication. In fact, “thinking like a designer” can provide another powerful tool for sales, L&D, HR, marketing, and product teams to share ideas internally and across departments. That’s because so much of how people interact with social media and smart phones is inherently visual. Increasingly, a keen eye for design can make or break how messages are perceived, understood, and acted upon. 

Think about it: would you rather sit through 20 minutes of bullet points on a white background, or a presentation that uses compelling visuals to tell a story? At Duarte, our golden rule remains to “never deliver a presentation you wouldn’t want to sit through.” A working knowledge of design best practices is the most surefire way to avoid subjecting audiences (and especially customers) to a clunker. That’s why so many of our training workshops emphasize the power of design to elevate and drive home any message with targeted, visual precision. And if the shift toward a service economy has prompted anything, it’s that actionable communication (i.e. presenting) is a make-or-break skill for an increasing cross-section of the workforce. 

Integrating Design for Better Team Alignment

More communication skills training courses are beginning to incorporate visual storytelling as a critical component. That’s partially due to Duarte paving the way with Nancy’s publication of Slide:ology in 2008. Along with making an impassioned case for the merits of PowerPoint®, it helped lay the foundation for pushing a design-minded approach to the forefront of corporate communication. Companies who evolve to empower their teams and non-design departments to communicate ideas with greater visual clarity augment the capabilities of their entire organization. And as with listening, it starts with developing shared language to sustain the transformation. 

Here’s a few free resources to start centering design with your team: 

• Diagrammer: Download thousands of simple, PowerPoint®-ready diagrams to boost your presentations and streamline your team’s messaging. 

• The Glance Test™: Are your slides legible in three seconds or less? This free tool can help prioritize design features that place information and action at the center of every visual. 

• Slidedocs®: Learn how to create elegant, skimmable hand-outs, leave-behinds, and optimized PDFs for internal and client-facing communication in this free eBook. 

Along with consistent branding around colors, fonts, and formatting, enrolling in one of our on-demand, virtual, or in-person training workshops can help drive these points home for teams of all sizes. When paired with strong delivery, visual communication can take your team’s messaging from mediocre to memorable to meet every moment. And with the rise of remote-first and hybrid work, this increasingly means knowing how to present and share information virtually. 

Virtual Presentation: Connect with Audiences Over Zoom and in the Room

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “35.5 million people teleworked or worked at home for pay” which accounts for “22.9% of people at work in Q1 2024.” This means that teams have a greater than 1 in 5 chance of having a remote or hybrid teammate. With data points like these, it should be no surprise that virtual presentations are a new normal. However, many organizations are still catching up to what it means to accommodate and thrive under these changing conditions. From having contingency plans for Wi-Fi and power outages to curating the perfect backgorund, there’s plenty to consider to perfect your virtual presentation skills. 

Combining Skills for Virtual Presentation 

Where an audience’s body language and eye contact used to lend confidence to a speaker’s success, virtual presenting can feel isolating by comparison. Sure, screen-sharing while not having to leave the house is convenient for some, but being at the mercy of poor connections and frozen faces can take its toll. With distractions everywhere and attention spans diminishing as a result, the risks of missed or misaligned communication can quickly escalate. That’s why it’s important to consider how presentation skills need to catch up with the times. Thankfully, better listening and crisp design can also go a long way toward closing the virtual communication gap. 

With non-verbal cues less readily visible in remote settings, other Adaptive Listening tools and clear visual choices can help pick up the slack. Remember, speakers and listeners still have a symbiotic relationship even when connecting virtually, and maintaining this balance remotely requires paying closer attention to what is (and isn’t) being said or implied. Like identifying your individual S.A.I.D. Listening Style™, knowing what challenges lay ahead with virtual settings is essential to finding the proper path forward. That’s why pairing your virtual talks with crisp visual aids and leaving plenty of time for Q&As can help quash miscommunications. For additional assistance making the most of remote and hybrid teams, Duarte’s Presenting Virtually™ business communication skills training offers on-demand solutions to build rapport and optimize reach from any home office. 

Learning Effective Virtual Presentation Skills

Like any talk, virtual presentations are a kind of performance. They require proper energy, pacing, structure, and clear design—plus a nimble mind to improvise when the inevitable technical difficulty arises. However, keeping all these balls in the air is easier when other “soft skills” are firmly in place. While there are plenty of freely available resources to boost your team’s productivity and alignment featured above, tangible results often require the gentle guidance of a trusted facilitator. To see if Presenting Virtually™ is right for your team, download the course overview for better sense of what’s on the menu. It’s combination of speaker coaching, tech considerations around camera angles and lighting, and on-demand accessibility can help upskill your remote and hybrid workforce. 

While there’s plenty to consider before overhauling your organization’s training regimen, the good news is that all these areas can be learned and maintained with the proper approach. You may not be turning your team into TED Talkers overnight, but a shift in mindset around listening, design, and virtual presentation can help avoid costly miscommunications and sow stronger bonds that nurture workplace talent. 

Ready to Upgrade Your Team’s Communication Game?

When companies invest in interpersonal communication skills training that includes listening, design, and virtual presenting, they start to see a culture shift. Meetings become more efficient. Presentations become more persuasive. And team members become more connected, even when they’re miles apart. Whether you’re revamping your onboarding program or looking to mandate new communication skills training workshops, don’t overlook the skills hiding in plain sight. By weaving listening, design-minded visuals, and virtual presenting into your approach to workplace communication, you’ll equip your team with the tools they need to thrive in today’s hybrid, fast-paced, highly visual business world. 

Because at the end of the day, communication isn’t just a skill—it’s the competitive advantage your team didn’t know they were missing. Incorporating these into your business communication skills training framework helps: 

• Increase clarity across departments. 

• Improve client relationships. 

• Empower leaders at every level to communicate with influence and impact. 

The future of work isn’t just remote or hybrid—it’s communicative. Teams that learn to listen deeply, design clearly, and present effectively from anywhere will outpace the ones still stumbling through status updates. If you’re exploring communication skills training, make sure they include more than just the basics. Go beyond the surface. Look for programs that address communication skills in business management, design thinking, and remote delivery techniques. And there’s no better place to start (or end!) your search than booking a call with a Duarte training concierge. 

After all, your team deserves communication training that’s as dynamic and multifaceted as the world they’re working in.