Communication at Work – Page 2

How To Work With A Motormouth

October 24, 2023 by Sasha Rezvina

You walk into your office on a Monday morning and are instantly overwhelmed with the amount of work you have that week.

Just as you’ve figured out how to cram all your meetings and projects into your schedule, you look up from your desk and are instantly full of dread. Your chatty coworker is headed right toward you and has chosen you as his next victim. Well, there goes the better part of the morning.

Of course, having a great social relationship can boost company culture. Once in a while, some water cooler talk can be a nice break from your hard work, but some people take this way too far.

Some will come by your desk every few hours, and even remote workers might incessantly ping you on Slack. According to a survey conducted by talent mobility company Lee Hecht Harrison, talkative coworkers are the #1 disruption at work.

Even though having a chatty worker in your office is different than difficult coworkers, you must know how to deal with them.

Here are the different kinds of chatty coworkers, and how to keep them from disrupting your day.

Managing a Remote Team – A Leader’s 7-Step To-Do List

October 24, 2023 by Jonas Fischer

Managing a remote team is about employee empowerment, not oversight.

Remote employees that excel are self-motivated, reliable and results-driven. As a manager, your job is to create a supportive environment that encourages employees to manage their own projects so you can focus on building a culture of trust and communication.

Here are seven things a remote leader must have to set their team up for success:

Why Bad Listening is One of the Worst Decisions Managers Can Make

October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

Powerful leaders are often mythologized as stubborn and bull-headed, and that ignoring the advice of others is a virtue.

But researchers at NYU’s Stern School of Business conducted a study on the influence of power in decision-making and they confirmed what many employees already know: people with more power listen less, take less advice, and are ultimately less accurate in final judgments.

The researchers gathered survey data from hundreds of working professionals, and they conducted controlled laboratory experiments where they primed participants to experience varying levels of power and then presented them with advice from others.

They found that greater power meant a reduced tendency to take advice from others. The reason was that the powerful had an elevated confidence in their snap judgments, and that meant that they didn’t listen to valuable advice of others that could’ve changed their mind.

That’s why to successful tech entrepreneurs Andy Grove and Jeff Bezos, bad listening is one of the worst decisions you can make as a manager—because it makes the quality of all of your manager decision making worse.

A Scientific Guide to Summoning Your Creative Juices

January 2, 2024February 22, 2021 by Blake Thorne

Does this happen to you?

It’s Friday, and you’re sitting in an all-hands-on-deck staff meeting. The boss needs creative ideas for next quarter.
“Concentrate!” you’re told. “Be creative!”

You concentrate with all your might, but you’ve got nothing.

The next day, you’re outside cutting the grass. There’s the steady hum of the lawn mower and the rhythmic predictability of the mowing pattern. Your mind slows down. Wanders. Drifts off. But suddenly . . . light bulb.

Some creative idea nearly knocks you over. It’s brilliant. Where was that kind of thinking when you needed it in yesterday’s meeting?

The answer has to do with our creative juices and the science behind them. And although “creative juices” isn’t exactly a scientific term, there’s plenty of science behind what we understand to be creative juices.

Writing is Power: Supercharge Your Writing Process

September 18, 2023August 31, 2020 by I Done This Support

We’re writing more than ever these days. Every day, you’re texting, emailing, and chatting. As many of us sit at our computers at work all day and our phones everywhere else in between, we’re writing.

Successful leaders believe writing is a crucial ingredient of great work. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for example, insists that writing replace other forms of communication to make the most of meetings. Instead of jumping straight into a conversation, or snoozing through bullet-pointed sentence fragments in a slideshow presentation, he requires his senior executives to write six-page narrative memos.

He explains in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, “When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.” In this age of knowledge work, we’re hiring people to think and communicate those thoughts — which means people who can write have a leg up.

Like most things worth doing, writing can be a chore. But the more fluent and practiced you become at the writing process, the more you’ll be able to own your success.

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

June 30, 2020 by Blake Thorne

Whether you fear its impersonal nature or thinks its the best thing since streaming television, asynchronous communication is here to stay

Remote work is rising and online education is becoming more accepted and commonplace, both due to changing attitudes and the pandemic. These factors are only going to increase the use of asynchronous communication to keep business, schools, and other organizations running smoothly when they no longer share the same space 100% of the time

But what is asynchronous communication, and is it really better than synchronous communication?

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

December 20, 2019 by Blake Thorne

The workplace is for work. You’re here to get things done, grow the business, improve the world and get better at whatever it is that you do.

It’s not a place for squabbling with coworkers, managers and subordinates. But that’s what seems to happen. Workplace conflict is everywhere, eating up productivity and taking precious time away from the things that really matter.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The causes of workplace conflict are recognizable. In separate articles on workplace conflict, psychologists Art Bell and Brett Hart identified eight common causes of conflict in the workplace. Think about the conflicts you’ve had in the workplace. You’d be hard-pressed to find on you can’t trace back to one of these root causes.
It’s important to see workplace conflict this way, as a symptom of a great structural problem.

That argument with the boss over coming in on Saturday isn’t really about coming in on Saturday. It’s about the misaligned expectations, structural problems, and poor communication that led you to have to come in on Saturday. In other words, the problem is bigger than the problem.

At best, it’s a symptom of a greater failure.

Thankfully, smart and innovative companies are changing the way we work — and eradicating the causes of workplace conflict at the source. Here’s a look at the eight causes and what great companies are doing about them.

Written Communication Channels at Work – Where Your Intranet Fits

December 19, 2019 by I Done This Support

This is a guest post from Lisa Banks, an expert in workplace communication and writer at content marketing agency Animalz.

Good communication is vital to a productive, healthy workplace. But where that communication takes place — the channel or medium used to convey the message — can make a big difference in how successful it is.

Written communication channels have risen to the forefront in recent years. Many people now prefer written communication over phone calls and would rather read an email than have a meeting. And thanks to technology, there are more tools available now than ever before that let you tap out a message to your co-worker without having to get together in person or on the phone.

But the plethora of tools have also complicated the choices we must make when choosing the right communication channel. With teams moving to instant messaging, social intranets, and even texting as a way to communicate, the written communication channel alone brings a multitude of decisions: Should I text Sharon about this? Should I try her on Slack first? Do I need to also follow up with email? What happened to that document where we discussed this same topic last week…?

It’s as important as ever to match the message to the medium. So, how does your team know which written channel to use when they have something to say? And how does your intranet fit into the mix?

Scaling Your Business Without Losing Your Culture

November 2, 2018 by Walker Donohue

Aside from “innovation,” few buzzwords carry as little real meaning in Silicon Valley and the broader tech sector than “culture.” While countless startups and established companies alike have seized upon the idea of corporate culture as a vehicle of employee attraction and a way to differentiate themselves in crowded markets, culture remains one of the … Read more

Great Customer Support Starts with Great Teamwork

October 18, 2018 by Walker Donohue

Not so long ago, customer support was seen as a luxury rather than a necessity. Many companies mistakenly saw customer support as an expense to be managed rather than as an asset to be leveraged. As flawed as this position may be, it’s understandable. After all, it’s a lot easier to quantify the value of … Read more