Climbing the corporate ladder: Preferred ways to communicate effectively at work

Are you communicating effectively at work?  Based on our research, it’s become more critical than ever to choose your communication medium wisely. In 2021, Duarte surveyed 294 professionals about power skills focusing particularly on people’s communication preferences in today’s work environments.

Our research found that communication is the number one power skill all employees need to have now. And a recent LinkedIn survey supports our findings too.

Whether you work in an in-office, hybrid, or remote environment, understanding how to communicate effectively at work is a huge skill to learn and master. With the shift to more remote and hybrid, learning to communicate well online and in remote settings was also rated as the number one communication challenge for organizations in our survey. So let’s dive into our findings.

Choosing the right channel to communicate can be a challenge

Have you ever played a game of telephone? The concept is simple. Somehow “tiger” can turn into “elephant” and “happy birthday” can turn into “goodnight.” It’s an intriguing phenomenon.

We would argue, however, that it’s an exercise that reveals how difficult it can be to communicate effectively with others. If people cannot even accurately pass a simple, single word down a line, how can we expect company values, visions, or strategic initiatives to spread through an organization with clarity?

One idea: An internal walking deck. It can hold your company values, strategy, and mission in a branded and scalable template system. A walking deck that an entire department or organization uses, prepped already with icons and slides for every scenario under the sun, is a powerful way to disseminate standardized tone, language, and branded assets to large organizations. (Check out this example at Zappos.)

Another idea: Use data to inform your department’s preferred methods of communication. We asked professionals to rank their preferred modes of communication at work, across 20 different workplace situations.

We found that 6 communication channels emerged as the most preferred means of communication:

• Email
• In-person
• Webpages
• Instant messaging / chat
• Social media
• And online collaborative applications

Take a look at the infographic below:

Email is the most preferred communication medium

We found that email was ranked as the most effective way to communicate at work, across a variety of work tasks and contexts. This might come as a surprise, considering some of the previous studies and commentary on email usage, cited below:

• Some research has reported checking emails can be associated with stress
• Others have found that emailing isn’t always the most effective medium when communicating requests
• And some even question if Gen Z might “free the world from email”

Nevertheless, email is a preferred mode of communication in certain contexts — such as sending information to external and internal stakeholders, communicating up the row to executives, sending messages company-wide, and communicating an agenda or task.

While email is seen as preferred in many situations, it is also one of people’s least favorite channels to use when communicating large amounts of information or data.

To maximize the use of email, and to share information to others in a short and concise manner, a quick tip is to include a Slidedoc™ to better organize and deliver detailed information that supports the message you’re sending. In fact, we saw strong preferences for Slidedocs®, and other readable documents like PDFs, when sharing data insights with internal stakeholders and the public.

How to pick the right communication medium

1. When communication is urgent, use instant messaging

When communication is more urgent, or when employees want to communicate in real-time, email is clearly not the best go-to. Instant messaging (IM) and chat apps are far better. In fact, we found IM was even preferred in these situations over phone or video conferencing. Given IMs are often very short, it is critical to be thoughtful about your phrasing to avoid miscommunication and a reduction in productivity. (Remember our game of telephone?)

2. When stakes are high, face-to-face communication is best

When communicating in high-stakes scenarios — such as difficult conversations, providing feedback, and making a pitch to investors — skip the email and initiate a conversation. While face-to-face communication may not always be feasible, what’s important is seeing someone’s facial expressions and cues. This can be done in real life or with video conferencing software. If you need to present over video conference software, you might be interested in our Presenting Virtually™ course.

Face-to-face is also the best form of communication for resolving workplace conflict, either when it’s escalating or before it even starts. Our Adaptive Listening™ training was designed for this and really complements face-to-face meetings of all kinds, such as one-on-ones, department standups, and even larger group meetings.

3. When collaborating, meetings are most effective

Remote and hybrid work have implications for how we collaborate with our colleagues. As Salesforce says, “We aren’t just changing where we work, but how we work. Just like maintaining long-distance relationships with friends through technology, new hybrid working models are challenging workers to collaborate with their colleagues in new and different ways.”

Duarte’s research found that when it comes to real-time collaborating or brainstorming, meetings are preferred (in-person followed by online). This makes sense because brainstorming and collaborating tend to be most effective when we are synchronously working together. Given the nature of our flexible work today, however, that’s not always feasible. That’s when online asynchronous tools can help fill the gaps.

Empathy is the North Star, regardless of the communication channel

At the end of the day, regardless of the channel or message, the underlying principle at the heart of great communication still holds true. And that is understanding your audience and communicating with them through a lens of empathy.

So, before you fire off that quick email, stop and ask yourself: Is this the best format to share this message? Or would a short meeting be better? As we can see from our research, the delivery matters, a lot. The higher the stakes, the more important that communication channel becomes, especially if your message could get misconstrued.

Because if you’ve played that game of telephone, you know how embarrassing or confusing it can be to hear one thing and the intent was something entirely different. Succeeding in this world of hybrid and remote work means being more intentional and purposeful in how we communicate, every day.

If you’d like to take your communication skills up a notch, learn about the four S.A.I.D. Listening Goals™ (Support, Advance, Immerse, and Discern). Much like a DiSC profile or Enneagram, you can learn about your colleagues preferred method of communication, and then deliver it in real-time, after taking our Adaptive Listening™ training. It’s great for resolving workplace conflict before it ever starts, and igniting trust and a higher morale workplace quickly and efficiently.

This article was originally published on May 10, 2022. It has been updated in September 2024 for relevancy.