Your team is only as strong as its weakest communicator.
Everyone needs to understand expectations and feel comfortable and confident sharing their ideas. That way, you’re more productive and can bring your innovative, business-boosting ideas to the table.
But if you don’t know how to communicate your thoughts, give and receive feedback, and interpret important nonverbal cues, you might need to work on your interpersonal communication skills.
What’s interpersonal communication?
Interpersonal communication is the exchange of ideas and information between two or more people. You might do this via:
- Face-to-face interactions and conversations
- Phone calls
- Text messages
- Emails
- Video conferences
Communicating with others involves more than words. You must also pick up on nonverbal cues like gestures, facial expressions, and body language. And active listening plays just as important a role in positive interpersonal communication as the ability to express yourself successfully.
Not everyone feels comfortable with small talk, public speaking, and delivering presentations. And even those that feel comfortable likely have some interpersonal communication upskilling they could do. Developing these skills helps your entire team feel supported, listened to, and prepared to communicate effectively with others.
Worth noting is that interpersonal and intrapersonal communication differ in an important way: the latter regards how you communicate with yourself, not with others. It deals more with your unique perception of the world and how you fit in it. When intrapersonally communicating with yourself, you might think about how you should behave or have others treat you.
What are interpersonal communication skills?
Here are a few examples of the interpersonal communication skills you can cultivate to better communicate with your coworkers, family, and friends:
- Active listening means ensuring the listener feels understood and knows you’re paying attention by offering gestures like head nodding and eye contact and giving vocal cues like encouraging them to continue or asking probing questions.
- Conflict resolution involves noticing when someone is upset and offering support as well as de-escalating heated workplace conflicts.
- Presentation skills require understanding how to effectively share information with your listener so they retain key takeaways and enjoy your talk.
- Nonverbal communication skills involve understanding how you present yourself nonverbally — your tone, body language, and gestures — and correctly interpreting others’ nonverbal signals.
- Persuasion means effectively communicating what you want so that, in the end, the listener feels it’s something they want, too. This involves reading the room, adjusting your tone and body language to match theirs, and using information and words you feel they’ll respond well to.
- Asking good questions is a well-loved skill because it makes people feel you care about what they have to say. You also glean further information when you ask good, open-ended questions because the other person gives more detailed and thoughtful answers.
- Giving and receiving feedback is crucial to effective interpersonal communication because delivering constructive feedback poorly can result in a compromised workplace relationship. You also need to embrace a growth mindset and learn how to receive others’ feedback in a welcoming and improvement-minded manner.
- Expressing gratitude isn’t easy for everyone. If you didn’t grow up with parents who showed their appreciation you might feel uncomfortable thanking your team or coworkers. But this invaluable skill will improve all your interpersonal relationships because you’ll know how to show everyone how valuable they are.
Building strong interpersonal communication skills is essential to fostering good workplace relationships. Cultivating these skills means you show more interest in your coworkers’ lives, ask better questions to receive better information, and adjust your tone of voice or body language to ensure everyone feels comfortable.
Practicing these skills also sets an example for those around you. You might notice your coworkers asking you inquisitive and caring questions or your manager showing more appreciation than they did before.
And you’ll also understand the world better when you can predict and recognize social cues and messaging. The same message coming from a parent, teacher, or coworker may have very different meanings depending on the context.
Why is interpersonal communication important?
Effective interpersonal communication is important because it allows your team to waste less time resolving misunderstandings or conflicts. And you need to give and receive clear directions so everyone knows how to do their job.
Good workplace communication is also integral to the practical and emotional flow of the office — people feel better, interpersonal relationships develop, and the business has an easier time meeting its bottom line. Strong relationships make for strong businesses.
People also want to feel valued at work. They have thoughts to contribute, but sometimes speaking up and voicing their opinions about a project, the direction of the company, or an incident can cause anxiety. Building verbal and non-verbal communication skills helps alleviate some of this stress and teaches people to stand up for themselves and others.
From a managerial perspective, clear communication is key. Workers should expect a professional tone of voice from their superiors when receiving messaging in a healthy work environment.
It’s critical to the flow in an office environment that managers communicate ideas transparently. And making sure that people share their thoughts without judgment improves everyone's experience and helps the company promote diversity and inclusion.
6 tips for building interpersonal communication skills
Explore these six tips with different interpersonal communication examples to learn how to better your workplace communication:
- Know your goal: Maybe you keep butting heads with a coworker or feel shy sharing your ideas with your manager. Whatever the case, pinpoint your communication goal so you know what you’re working toward and can develop a strategic plan to achieve it.
- Practice active listening and empathy: People want to feel listened to when they talk. This shows you care about and understand what they say. And you also retain important information you might need later, like meeting or project details.
You can show your coworkers you care and understand by expressing your empathy toward their situation and actively listening — making eye contact, leaning in, nodding — when they speak.
- Be curious: While you’re the center of your internal world, showing interest in your neighbor's situation helps you learn more about them and makes them feel seen.
Be curious about your coworkers’ lives, projects, preferred workspaces, etc. Ask good questions and enjoy more thoughtful and interesting conversations as your coworkers reciprocate your inquisitiveness.
- Use clear language: Getting to the point plainly helps avoid confusion. Speaking briefly with deep meaning is a learned skill, but it’s worth the effort.
Vague language can lead to misunderstandings, mistakes, and even arguments. But everyone gets further ahead if a manager or coworker speaks clearly, uses appropriate language, and checks in for understanding throughout the conversation.
- Be open to feedback: When you open yourself up to constructive criticism, you foster collaboration and a growth mindset. You learn valuable lessons by trusting those around you, their expertise, and their feedback.
If you close yourself off to this input, you risk losing valuable learning opportunities. Stand up for your ideas, but welcome others’ honest opinions.
- Look for common interests: If something fascinates you, it probably intrigues someone else, too. Even if they aren’t, sharing your interests might encourage them to share something about themselves. You never know who you’ll bond with over a favorite productivity platform or weekend activity.
Interpersonal communication in remote teams
About 26% of American employees work remotely. And even in-person work has changed so much, with hybrid agreements and flexibility taking precedence. This means there’s a new focus on communication among remote and distributed teams to help avoid feelings of isolation, stress, and anxiety.
In remote work settings, promoting effective interpersonal communication between team members is increasingly important. This helps everyone feel seen in an isolated environment.
It’s also necessary to provide ample opportunity for light chats like breaks and “water cooler” moments during the day. Doing this builds trust and camaraderie and boosts morale.
Here are four more tips to improve interpersonal communication among remote teams:
- Choose a preferred communication method: Make it easy for remote teams to get together online by offering an easy-to-use internal communication method. Whether employees want to brainstorm, present, or just chat, you need to provide options to do so.
Poll for preferred methods to ensure you choose something most people like. Once chosen, stress that employees should use this platform for all communication. This ensures important information isn’t scattered across apps and employees know where to bring questions and comments.
- Have verbal conversations regularly: Because you’re not in a physical office, it’s harder for employees to quickly share an anecdote, idea, or question. Schedule regular meetings and check-ins so everyone communicates often and has a chance to voice any thoughts or concerns.
- Be aware of time differences: Ensure everyone respects time zones. No one wants to work more than their allotted hours, and it can be a pain for more tasks to pile up when wrapping up for the day. Recognizing time zones shows respect and thoughtfulness and ensures everyone can make meetings or other scheduled commitments.
- Leverage technology: New digital tools built expressly for working online are widely available. Slack is an excellent tool for creating and maintaining multiple conversations, sharing documents, and having fun. And Zoom is a fantastic platform for conference calls, group chats, and one-on-ones with team members.
Enjoy effective communication with your team
Poor communication leads to frustration and mistrust. You simply don't know what to do when things are unclear.
Everyone is responsible for communicating in a way others can understand, but leadership must provide an environment where this is possible and encouraged.
As a manager, you can create seminars and workshops to show your office you mean business regarding messaging, conflict resolution, and employee mental health. As an employee, you can practice your interpersonal communication skills to promote and preserve a supportive office culture where people feel seen, heard, and listened to.
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