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Why Your Team's Communication Skills Are Probably Worse Than You Think (And What Actually Works)
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The other day I watched a perfectly intelligent project manager stand in front of twelve equally intelligent people and somehow turn a five-minute update into a twenty-three-minute verbal maze that left everyone more confused than when we started. It wasn't her fault, really. She'd never been taught how to communicate effectively in a workplace setting.
And that's the thing about communication training in Australia right now - everyone assumes people just know how to do it. Like some mystical workplace skill that downloads automatically when you get your first business card.
I've been running communication workshops for over sixteen years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that 73% of workplace communication problems stem from one simple issue: people think talking is the same as communicating. It's not.
The Problem Everyone's Ignoring
Here's what drives me mental about most workplace communication training programs - they focus on the wrong bloody things. PowerPoint presentations about "active listening techniques" and role-playing exercises where everyone feels awkward and fake.
You want to know what actually improves workplace communication? Getting people to understand that communication isn't about being heard. It's about being understood.
Last month I worked with a mining company in Perth where the site supervisor was convinced his team didn't listen to safety briefings. Turns out, he was giving those briefings using technical jargon that half his crew didn't understand, while standing twenty metres away in high-vis gear that made him look like every other authority figure they'd learned to tune out.
We changed two things: he started using plain English and moved closer to his team. Safety incidents dropped by 40% in six weeks.
What Actually Works (Spoiler: It's Not What You'd Expect)
The best communication training I've ever delivered focused on three unsexy fundamentals that nobody wants to hear about:
Clarity over cleverness. Stop trying to sound smart. Start trying to be understood. I once worked with a finance director who insisted on using phrases like "optimise our operational expenditure trajectory" when he meant "spend less money." His team spent more time decoding his messages than implementing them.
Timing beats content every time. You can have the most perfectly crafted message in the world, but if you deliver it when someone's distracted, stressed, or already mentally checked out, it's worthless. The best communicators I know spend more time thinking about when to communicate than what to communicate.
Context is everything. And I mean everything. The same message delivered in a corridor versus a meeting room versus an email hits completely differently.
The Australian Workplace Communication Reality Check
Let me tell you something that might ruffle a few feathers: Australian workplace culture has some brilliant communication strengths that we completely take for granted, and some blind spots that are killing our productivity.
The good? We're direct. We don't dance around issues like some cultures do. When something's not working, most Aussies will tell you. That's gold for workplace efficiency.
The challenge? We've somehow convinced ourselves that being direct means being brief. And brief often means incomplete.
I've lost count of how many times I've watched excellent Australian managers give feedback that sounds like: "Yeah, that report needs work." Full stop. No explanation of what kind of work. No specific examples. No timeline. Just... needs work.
That's not direct communication. That's lazy communication dressed up as directness.
The Email Epidemic Nobody Talks About
Right, let's address the elephant in every office building: email communication has become absolutely shocking. And before you roll your eyes and assume this is another "kids these days don't know how to write" rant, it's not.
The problem isn't generational. I've seen 58-year-old executives send emails that would make a Year 10 English teacher weep, and 23-year-old graduates who write with more clarity than most business school textbooks.
The real issue? We've stopped treating email as communication and started treating it as documentation. Every email becomes a CYA exercise instead of an actual attempt to share information or move projects forward.
Here's a radical idea: what if we treated emails like conversations instead of legal documents? What if we focused on helping the recipient instead of protecting ourselves?
Try this experiment for one week: before sending any email, ask yourself "What does this person need to know, and what do they need to do about it?" Then write that. Nothing else.
Your recipients will love you. Your productivity will improve. Your stress levels will drop.
The Meeting Communication Disaster
Let's talk about meetings. Specifically, let's talk about how we've collectively forgotten that meetings are supposed to be communication tools, not endurance tests.
I worked with a tech startup in Melbourne where the founder was frustrated that his weekly team meetings felt "unproductive." When I sat in on one, I understood why. Forty-seven minutes of people talking at each other, not with each other. No clear agenda. No defined outcomes. No follow-up actions.
It wasn't a meeting. It was a group monologue session.
The meeting management training we implemented there changed everything. Not because we taught them fancy facilitation techniques, but because we helped them understand that every meeting needs a communication purpose beyond "we meet on Thursdays."
Some meetings are for information sharing. Some are for decision making. Some are for problem solving. But you can't do all three effectively in the same session, and you definitely can't do any of them well without being intentional about it.
The Feedback Communication Gap
Here's something that's going to sound controversial: most Australian workplaces are terrible at feedback because we've confused "being nice" with "being helpful."
I regularly work with managers who tell me they "don't want to upset" team members by giving constructive feedback. Meanwhile, those same team members are frustrated because they don't know how they're performing or what they need to improve.
That's not kindness. That's conflict avoidance disguised as consideration.
Effective feedback communication isn't about being harsh or gentle. It's about being useful. And useful feedback is specific, actionable, and timely.
Instead of "Your presentations could be better," try "When you use bullet points with more than fifteen words, people lose track of your main message. Can we work on making those more concise?"
See the difference? One leaves someone guessing. The other gives them something concrete to work on.
The Technology Communication Trap
We need to have an honest conversation about how technology is both helping and hindering workplace communication. And I'm not talking about "social media bad, face-to-face good" oversimplifications.
Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom - these tools are brilliant when used correctly. The problem is that most workplaces implement new communication technology without training people how to communicate effectively using those tools.
You wouldn't hand someone a power drill without showing them how to use it safely and effectively. But we give people access to instant messaging platforms and assume they'll figure out the communication etiquette on their own.
Spoiler alert: they don't.
I've seen Slack channels that are more chaotic than a Friday night pub conversation, and Zoom meetings where people spend fifteen minutes trying to figure out who's supposed to be talking.
The technology isn't the problem. The lack of communication protocols around the technology is the problem.
What Professional Development Training Should Actually Address
If I was designing the perfect workplace communication training program from scratch (and I've done this more times than I care to count), here's what I'd focus on:
Listening for understanding, not response. Most people listen just long enough to formulate their reply. Real communication happens when you listen long enough to actually understand what someone needs.
Adapting your communication style to your audience. The way you explain a budget variance to your CEO should be different from how you explain it to your front-line team. Not because one group is smarter than the other, but because they need different information for different purposes.
Managing difficult conversations without avoiding them. Conflict isn't the enemy of good communication. Unresolved conflict is.
Using the right channel for the right message. Some things need face-to-face conversation. Some things are perfect for email. Some things work best in a phone call. Learning which is which will save you hours of frustration every week.
But here's the thing that most training programs miss: you can't teach communication skills in isolation from real workplace situations. Those generic role-playing exercises where everyone pretends to be having a difficult conversation? Useless.
The best communication training happens when you take real workplace scenarios - actual emails that caused confusion, actual meetings that went nowhere, actual feedback conversations that didn't land - and work through them with better communication strategies.
The Cultural Shift Nobody Wants to Make
I'm going to say something that might make some people uncomfortable: improving workplace communication requires admitting that the way we've always done things isn't working.
And in Australian workplaces, where "she'll be right" is practically a cultural motto, that admission can be challenging.
But here's the reality check we all need: communication problems don't solve themselves. They compound. That unclear email leads to a confused meeting, which leads to missed deadlines, which leads to frustrated customers, which leads to lost business.
The companies that are thriving right now - the ones that are attracting and retaining top talent, the ones that are adapting quickly to market changes, the ones that are building genuine customer loyalty - they're the ones that have invested in communication as a core business skill.
Not because they hired better people (although good communication skills do attract good people). Because they developed better communication systems, protocols, and cultures.
Where to Start (Because Someone Has to Go First)
If you're reading this thinking "yeah, our workplace communication could be better, but where do we even start," here's my completely biased but thoroughly tested recommendation:
Start with clarity. Pick one communication challenge that's affecting your team right now - unclear project updates, confusing meeting outcomes, ineffective email chains, whatever - and focus on making that one thing clearer.
Don't try to fix everything at once. Don't implement seventeen new communication protocols. Don't send everyone to a three-day intensive workshop.
Just pick one thing and make it clearer. Then build from there.
Because here's what I've learned after nearly two decades of helping Australian workplaces communicate better: perfect communication doesn't exist. But clearer communication always improves everything else.
And in today's business environment, where remote work is permanent, where teams are more diverse than ever, where change happens faster than most people can process it, clear communication isn't just nice to have.
It's the competitive advantage you can't afford to ignore.
Looking to improve your team's communication skills? The conversation starts with recognising that communication is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. And like any skill, it gets better with the right training and consistent practice.