How to Improve Your Communication Skills at Work

Why the future of communication is designed - not trained.

How to improve communication skills at work is one of the most searched questions in leadership and people management -  and for good reason.

Strong communication skills in the workplace underpin everything from trust and inclusion to productivity and performance. Yet despite the endless advice available on effective communication at work, many leaders and employees still experience misunderstandings, friction, and disengagement.

That’s because most guidance on workplace communication skills still treats communication as an individual soft skill - something employees must personally improve - rather than as a ‘shared system’ that teams and organisations should intentionally design.

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In this article, we’re going to move beyond generic tips and look at what very current research is now revealing about communication at work — and what leaders can do instead.

What we’re not going to cover (and why it’s no longer enough)

If you search for “how to improve communication skills at work,” you’ll find the same advice repeated endlessly:

• Be clear and concise
• Listen actively
• Match your tone and body language
• Give better feedback
• Choose the right channel (email vs Slack vs meetings)

Look, none of this is actually wrong.
But none of it is sufficient anymore.

Why?

Because this advice assumes:

• Teams already have shared cultural norms
• They have similar cognitive & learning styles
• There is equal distribution of ‘psychological safety’
• And a common understanding of what “good communication” even looks like

However the reality is, today’s workplaces are more diverse, more global, more hybrid, more neurodiverse - than ever before.  So those assumptions, and this approach to enhancing one of the most binding skill-sets of high performing teams, no longer is enough. 

While lists of communication skills for employees and communication skills for managers can be useful starting points, they rarely address the deeper problem - that teams are operating without shared rules for clarity, safety, and meaning

When leaders rely on - or resort to - giving generic communication advice, they are simply shifting the interpretation burden onto individuals to decode, manage the ambiguity, and figure out how to adapt their style to a myriad of others - often that they don’t fully understand, and often at a high personal cost.

The result:
Misunderstandings, frustration, disengagement, and teams that look aligned on the surface but are misfiring underneath.

Sound familiar?

So instead of repeating things people already know doesn’t work, let’s take a deeper look at what the research actually shows.

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What the research tells us (three themes, one message)

Theme 1: Neurodiversity exposes hidden “neurotypical” communication norms

Research on neurodiversity at work has surfaced something important:

Many workplace communication ‘rules’ in the workplace are implicit, not explicit - and they tend to favour neuro-typical styles.  Meaning - people are expected to understand how ‘we communicate here’ - without being explicitly explained how, or why.

These rules might include:

• ‘We are comfortable with ambiguity’
• ‘It’s good to - read between the lines’
• ‘Be sure to interpreting tone, timing, and context’’
• ‘Know when to speak, interrupt, or push back’
• ‘Understand what being “professional” means in our culture’

As a recent Harvard Business Review notes in its work on neuroinclusive organisations, communication breakdowns are often framed as individual capability issues, rather than mismatches between people and systems.

Researchers also describe the “double empathy problem” -  the idea that misunderstandings are mutual, not deficits belonging to one person alone.  In other words - it may not be one person in the dialogue that is not sensing how other people feel - both might have no empathy for the other, escalating the miscommunication.

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The key insight for leaders is this:

Communication isn’t just about expression.
It’s about accessibility and shared interpretation.

When expectations live only in people’s heads - generally leaders - those who don’t or can’t naturally decode them are disadvantaged -  even when they are highly capable.

Theme 2: “Generational communication” is a trap - personalisation works better

It’s become so commonplace now to talk about communication differences between generations generically:
“Gen Z wants constant feedback,” “Boomers prefer email,” “Millennials want purpose.” etc.  

But a 2024 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found little evidence of meaningful, consistent generational differences across most work-related attitudes and behaviours.
What generational labels do well is create shortcuts - and stereotypes.  Arguably, making us lazier in our thinking about how we communicate with people outside our generation. 

What they don’t do well is help managers understand:

• Individual communication preferences
• Impact of power dynamics
• Cultural context bias
• Neurodiversity as it relates to communication
• Life stage pressures heightening emotions.

The research we’ve reviewed points to a different conclusion:

Stop guessing how people communicate based on age.
Start asking, agreeing, and making preferences explicit.

Personalisation -  without stereotyping -  is far more effective than generational assumptions.

Theme 3: Cultural intelligence and psychological safety are the infrastructure

Across studies on cultural intelligence and inclusive leadership, one pattern is clear:
people do not communicate well when they don’t feel safe.

Psychological safety is not new, but is rarely integrated into cultural norms.  It’s the belief that you won’t be punished or embarrassed for speaking up - and it directly affects whether people:

• Ask clarifying questions
• Admit confusion or that you’re wrong
• Challenge assumptions across status levels
• Offer dissenting views
• Repair misunderstandings genuinely

Google’s Project Aristotle famously identified psychological safety as the strongest predictor of high-performing teams.  Called Project Aristotle due to to Aristotle’s famous line, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, the project recognised that people can achieve greater results working together than alone.

Other research on cultural intelligence shows similar effects: when leaders acknowledge differences in communication styles and make norms explicit, inclusion and performance both improve.

The leadership takeaway is simple but confronting:

Communication quality is a lag indicator of psychological safety.

You can’t train or expect people to “speak up” and communicate openly and confdiently, in environments that punish clarity.

What these three themes add up to:

Across neurodiversity research, generational studies, and cultural intelligence, the message is consistent:

Communication breaks down not because people lack skill —
but because teams lack shared rules for meaning, clarity, and repair.

In other words, professional communication skills today are less about polished delivery and more about designing environments where diverse people can understand each other without guesswork.

Which brings us to a more effective approach.

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A new solution: Design a Team Communication Contract

Instead of telling people to “communicate better,” high-performing teams actually take the time to design how communication works, for them.

A Team Communication Contract is a simple, explicit, co-authored agreement that answers questions people usually have to guess:

• Where should this conversation happen?
• How quickly is a response expected?
• What does “clear” mean here?
• How direct is too direct?
• What happens when we misunderstand each other?

This isn’t bureaucracy.
It’s cognitive load reduction.

And it’s one of the fastest ways to improve communication across diverse teams.

How it works

Rather than relying on:

• Personality
• Seniority
• Cultural assumptions
• Or unspoken norms

Teams agree on a small number of communication principles together.

The goal isn’t sameness -  it’s predictability.  And this is the singular idea, that enables safety. 

When people know what to expect, they spend less energy interpreting signals and more energy communicating easily and doing meaningful work.

What a Communication Contract typically covers

Most effective contracts include agreement across five or six areas:

1. Channels
   What belongs in Slack, email, meetings, in person  - and what doesn’t.
2. Response expectations
   What’s urgent vs important, and what reasonable response times look like.
3. Meetings
   Purpose, preparation, structure, decision-making rules, and follow-up expectations.
4. Feedback
   How direct feedback should be given, when it happens, and whether it’s public or private.
5. Clarity and repair
   How to ask for clarification, safely.
   How misunderstandings are corrected without blame.
6. Accessibility
   Written summaries, camera norms, inclusive pacing, and cognitive load awareness.

Treat these as core guidelines, but work together as a team to build out anything else that removes ambiguity and confusion for anyone in the team.  And Importantly, ensure this is done with all  the team involved - and not imposed on them.

Aligning communication to business goals

For managers, communication design isn’t a “nice to have.”  It directly supports outcomes such as:

• Faster decision-making
• Reduced rework
• Lower emotional friction
• Stronger inclusion and retention
• More effective hybrid and remote work
• Clearer accountability

When communication is explicit, energy goes into execution -  not interpretation.

Why this matters now

The working world has never been more complex, diverse, and under pressure.  So naturally - communication - one of the oldes skills in human history, is back under the spotlight.   What worked in the past, won’t cut it in today's  high thrust environments.  We all,  need  a brush up on our skills.

When it comes to improving communication skills, the most effective leaders no longer focus solely on individual behaviour - they design systems that make effective communication easier for everyone.

Our supposition - communication maturity -  is inclusion maturity.

The most effective leaders and managers don’t just communicate well themselves.
They design environments where clarity, safety, and shared understanding are normal. 

So everyone, can communicate well together.  

Because in modern work, communication isn’t about saying more.

It’s about making meaning easier to share.

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