You sent a message that seemed perfectly clear. Then the reply showed that the other person had read something else into it entirely.
That happens to everyone, and it’s getting easier to do. Most of us now write more than we talk, juggle three or four channels at once, and squeeze conversations into the gaps between meetings. The upside is that workplace communication is a learnable skill, much like the broader social skills that make you more confident. Researchers have studied it closely, and much of what they’ve found is practical enough to use tomorrow morning.
Below are 20 ways to communicate better at work. Each one comes with the evidence behind it and something specific you can try. You don’t need all twenty. Choose two or three that fit the problems you actually have.
1. Know your point before you hit send
Most unclear messages begin with an unclear thought. When you’re still working out what you want, the message ends up doing that thinking in front of the reader, who has to search for the request somewhere in paragraph three.
It works like this. A reader has limited attention. If they can’t spot the point quickly, they either guess or put the message aside to deal with later, and a delayed reply often turns into no reply. Volume makes this worse. In June 2025, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index special report analysed anonymised Microsoft 365 activity and found that the average worker receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day. A vague message competing with 270 others isn’t likely to get read carefully.
So before you write anything, finish this sentence privately: “After reading this, I want them to…” If you can’t finish it, you’re not ready to send.
Your move: before your next three work messages, write that one sentence first. Then check that the message actually delivers it.
2. Put the point first, then cut
Once you know your point, put it at the top. After that, remove words.
Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink, the behavioural scientists behind Writing for Busy Readers (2023), tested this with 7,002 US school board members. Half were sent a 127-word email asking them to complete a survey. The other half got a 49-word version of the same request. The short email got a 4.8% response rate and the long one got 2.7%, so cutting the text almost doubled replies. The study is a few years old, but no more recent experiment on this question comes close in scale. The same researchers also asked 166 professionals which of two messages they would deal with first. 165 chose the concise one.
Trimming is harder than it sounds, because most people add words when they edit, which is the opposite of what’s needed. Read your draft looking for sentences that only warm up, repeat or hedge, and delete them.
Have a go with the next long email you write: reduce it by a third, put the request in the first line, and see whether the replies come back faster.
3. Watch your tone, because people remember it
Saying the right thing in a curt way still counts as poor communication. People hold on to how you made them feel long after the details of a request have gone.
SHRM’s Civility Index for Q3 2025 (fieldwork July 1–14, 2025, 1,478 US workers) shows how much civility shapes everyday communication. On civil teams, 87% of members said colleagues communicate effectively. On uncivil teams, only 47% said so. The gap was nearly identical for “people try to understand others’ thoughts and opinions” (83% versus 47%). These are survey correlations, not proof that politeness causes better communication. Even so, the pattern is hard to dismiss. Seventy-two percent of respondents also said their manager could have done more to prevent incivility.
Usually civility comes down to small things: a greeting before the request, a “thanks” at the end, and not replying in capitals.
Test it this week: before you send a message with any tension in it, read it as though it had been sent to you by someone you don’t know well.
4. Listen until the other person feels heard
Listening tends to be treated as the polite gap between your own turns to speak. The evidence suggests it does a lot more than that.
In April 2024, Avraham Kluger, Herman Aguinis, Guy Itzchakov and colleagues published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Business and Psychology that pooled 664 effect sizes and more than 400,000 observations. Feeling listened to was linked to better work outcomes, and the link was stronger for relationship quality (r = .51) than for performance (r = .36). One caveat is that about three-quarters of the studies used self-reports. When the authors excluded those, the listening–performance link shrank but stayed meaningful. The paper is now two and a half years old, and it’s still the largest synthesis on the topic.
What does good listening look like? You stop preparing your answer. You stay with what the person just said, rather than steering back to your own story. (If steering back is a habit of yours, these ways to stop talking about yourself in conversations are worth reading.)
Next time, do this: in your next one-on-one, summarise what the other person said before you give any opinion. Check whether they nod or correct you.
5. Make it safe for people to tell you things
You can’t respond to problems no one mentions to you. On many teams, the most important information never surfaces because staying quiet feels safer than speaking.
Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who developed the idea of psychological safety, put it plainly in her keynote at Workhuman Live London in March 2025. The rewards for speaking up are uncertain and come later. The rewards for staying quiet come straight away and rarely backfire. She also cautioned against confusing safety with niceness, because teams that are overly polite can end up withholding exactly the candid views they need. One question she suggests teams ask themselves is whether people are only saying the “safe” things.
This applies whether or not you manage anyone. Each time you respond to bad news with curiosity rather than irritation, you make the next piece of bad news a bit easier for someone to share. And if you’re the person who usually keeps quiet, these tips on becoming more talkative and less shy can help with the other side. Picture it: a teammate says a deadline will slip. If your first words are “What do you need?” rather than “Why?”, they’ll warn you earlier next time.
6. Ask the second question
Most people ask one question and then wait for their turn to talk. The follow-up question is the one that matters.
In 2017, Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks and colleagues published a series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. People who asked more questions, and especially follow-up questions, were better liked by the people they talked to, because those questions showed they had actually taken in the answer. Participants didn’t expect this effect, which is probably why most people ask too few questions. The team answered a critique of their analysis in the same journal in 2019, and the main finding held. I’m citing older work here because it is still the main evidence on follow-up questions.
Follow-up questions are easy to recognise. “How did it go?” is a first question. “What made the client change their mind?” is a follow-up.
A quick experiment: in your next meeting, ask at least one question that builds directly on what someone just said. For more ideas, here’s a guide on how to have a good conversation with anyone.
7. Give feedback little and often
The annual review is the worst possible place for feedback to arrive for the first time. By then it’s out of date, and it lands with far more force than it should.
Gallup’s analysis from October 2024 draws on its April 2024 Gallup–Workhuman survey of 4,439 US employees and a workforce study of 20,721 adults later that year. Employees who strongly agreed that they get valuable feedback were five times as likely to be engaged and 57% less likely to be burned out. Of those who got both feedback and recognition from their manager at least weekly, 61% were engaged, compared with 38% of those who got weekly feedback but less frequent recognition. Only one in four strongly agreed that they get valuable feedback from coworkers. This is correlational survey data, and it’s now just over two years old, so treat it as a strong pattern rather than a law.
Short, regular and specific works better than long, rare and vague. “The second slide lost me. Can you cut it to three bullets?” helps more than “Good work, maybe tighten it up.”
Start small: give one colleague one specific piece of feedback this week, about something they did in the last few days.
8. Choose the channel before you choose the words
Some messages work as text. Others go badly wrong in text. The most common mistake is putting something sensitive, ambiguous or emotional into a chat window.
A study from the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports in March 2026, tested this. Sarah Cunningham and William Fleming showed participants identically worded work messages from employees to their managers, either as an email or as a voice note. In two of the three scenarios, the voice notes were rated significantly less ambiguous than the same words in an email, and fewer people read them negatively. The third scenario didn’t follow the pattern, so voice isn’t automatically better.
Negotiation research from Singapore points the same way. In a June 2026 newspaper commentary, Dorcas Quek Anderson of Singapore Management University described an experiment with 400 participants. Pairs negotiating by text reached agreement less often and took far longer when they did (a mean of 53 minutes, compared with 29–32 minutes for audio, video or face-to-face). Text was also the only medium linked to anger. That summary comes from a commentary rather than a peer-reviewed paper, so treat the exact numbers with some caution.
Here’s a simple way in. Anything involving a “no”, a disagreement or a feeling should be a call or a voice note. Anything involving a date, a link or a number should be written down.
9. Hold fewer meetings, and make them count
Meetings are communication, but unnecessary ones crowd out the time people need to actually do anything with what was said.
Instagram tried a fairly drastic fix. In a memo reported in early December 2025, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri told staff the company would cancel redundant recurring meetings and encourage people to decline invites that got in the way of focused work. From February 2026, recurring meetings would be cancelled every six months and brought back only if they were absolutely necessary, and one-on-ones would default to every two weeks. Instagram hasn’t published results yet, so this is a policy to watch rather than a proven success. Commenting on the plan in Canadian HR Reporter in December 2025, Ivona Hideg, an organisational behaviour professor at York University, noted that some meetings build culture and belonging, and suggested letting employees help decide which ones to keep.
The cost of doing nothing is large. As reported in Fortune in February 2026, researcher Rebecca Hinds found that individual contributors spent an average of 3.7 hours a week in unproductive meetings in 2024, up 118% since 2019. Every extra meeting also adds another set of small choices, which feeds into decision fatigue.
Go through your recurring meetings and, for each one, ask whether an email could replace it. Cancel one for a month and see whether anyone notices.
10. Use AI as an editor, not a ghostwriter
AI writing tools are now part of everyday work, and they can make a message cleaner. They can also make it feel hollow, especially when the message is about people.
Anthony Coman of the University of Florida and Peter Cardon of the University of Southern California surveyed 1,100 professionals for a study in the International Journal of Business Communication, reported in August 2025. They looked at how people judge supervisors’ messages depending on how much AI help went into them. Messages with little AI help were rated sincere by 83% of respondents. With heavy AI help, sincerity ratings fell to between 40% and 52%. Perceived professionalism dropped too, from 95% to 69–73% when supervisors leaned heavily on AI. SHRM’s Q3 2025 Civility Index found a similar split: 31% of US workers said AI made workplace communication more civil, and 25% said it made things worse.
AI is useful for drafting, for fixing grammar and for spotting a harsh tone. Thank-yous, apologies, congratulations and difficult feedback should be in your own words.
Give it a go: draft your next routine update with AI if you like. Write the next personal note completely yourself.
11. Protect people’s focus and their evenings
Constant pinging creates noise and very little understanding. Being a good communicator includes knowing when not to send something.
The numbers in Microsoft’s June 2025 special report are hard to ignore. It combined Microsoft 365 data with a survey of 31,000 workers in 31 markets and found that the average employee is interrupted about 275 times a day by meetings, emails or chats, which is roughly once every two minutes. Meetings after 8 p.m. were up 16% year on year, and 57% of meetings were ad hoc calls with no calendar invite.
Late messages also cause more stress than senders realise. In 2021, Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns reported eight pre-registered experiments with 4,004 participants in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. People who received non-urgent work emails outside working hours overestimated how quickly a reply was expected, and they felt more stressed as a result. A short note saying that the email wasn’t urgent reduced that effect. The study predates the recency window, but it is still the key study on this question. Fewer interruptions also make it easier to get into a flow state at work.
Your move: schedule non-urgent messages for the next morning, or end them with “No rush, tomorrow is fine.”
12. Close the loop: check what they heard
Pilots don’t assume an instruction from air traffic control got through. They repeat it back, and the controller confirms it. That read-back closes the gap between what was said and what was heard.
The comparison has limits. Most office conversations aren’t safety-critical, and repeating everything back would make for tedious meetings. The underlying problem is real, though. In a classic 2005 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley and colleagues asked people to convey tones such as sarcasm or seriousness by email. Senders expected their partners to identify the tone about 78% of the time. Readers actually got it right about 56% of the time, not much better than chance. Over voice, listeners got it right about 75% of the time. The study is old, but it established the effect and is still widely cited, so it earns its place here.
At the end of any conversation where something important was agreed, ask, “Just so we’re aligned, what are you taking away from this?” It may sound slightly formal, but it can save a week of rework.
13. Write decisions down where people can find them
Plenty of workplace miscommunication isn’t about anything being said badly. Someone made a decision in a meeting, nobody wrote it down, and everyone else is left guessing.
Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 report surveyed 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 executives and found that leaders and teams spend about 25% of their time just searching for answers. That’s a quarter of the working week spent looking for information someone already has.
A brief written record fixes much of this: what was decided, who owns it and by when. Put it in a shared place rather than someone’s private notes. If your files and folders are already a mess, these tips for getting organised at work will help.
Do this today: after your next decision meeting, post a three-line summary in the team channel within an hour.
14. Make time for small talk, but keep it small
Chatting about someone’s weekend can feel like time wasted at work. One careful diary study says it pulls its weight, up to a point.
Jessica Methot, Emily Rosado-Solomon, Patrick Downes and Allison Gabriel tracked employees’ daily small talk over three weeks for a study published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2021. On days with more small talk, people felt more positive social emotions, which led to better well-being by the end of the day and more helpful behaviour toward colleagues. But small talk also made it harder to concentrate on work. The authors described it as “uplifting yet also distracting.” It’s a single study and older than my usual cut-off, but there is still little workplace research on this topic.
So keep it brief and well timed. Five minutes at the start of a call helps. Twenty minutes during someone’s focus block doesn’t. If small talk feels awkward for you, there’s a full guide on how to be good at small talk, and the simplest place to start is asking a colleague one personal (not private) question before you get into business.
15. Hold real check-ins, not status reports
Many communication problems come back to the relationship between a manager and the people on their team. At the moment, that relationship is under strain.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, based on 263,810 respondents surveyed during 2025, found that global employee engagement fell to 20%. Manager engagement dropped further, from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. Gallup estimates the cost of low engagement at about $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP. In organisations that Gallup counts as best practice, 79% of managers were engaged, which shows that low engagement isn’t inevitable.
Managers who are disengaged communicate less, and less well, and their teams notice. A good check-in covers how the person is doing and what’s getting in their way, not only what’s late. If you lead a team, these qualities of a great boss are worth comparing yourself against.
Next time, do this: open your next one-on-one with “What’s one thing slowing you down right now?” and don’t mention status updates until they’ve answered.
16. Own your mistakes out loud, and do it well
Everyone makes mistakes. What colleagues remember is how you dealt with it.
How an apology is phrased makes a difference. A study led by Beth Polin of Eastern Kentucky University, with Sijun Kim of Texas A&M’s Mays Business School, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and reported in October 2025, examined public apologies by celebrities along with several controlled experiments. Apologies that went against gender stereotypes were seen as more effective and trustworthy. Women came across as more competent when they used assertive, take-charge language. Men came across as more caring when they used warmer, more relational language. The study looked at public figures and lab scenarios, so its application to everyday office apologies is an inference.
The practical takeaway works for anyone: a good apology combines ownership (“I missed the deadline, and here’s how I’ll fix it”) with care (“I know that put you in a tough spot”). And if you feel like a fraud every time you make a mistake, read up on imposter syndrome.
A quick experiment: next time you get something wrong, write an apology with one sentence of ownership and one sentence of care. Leave out “if anyone was offended.”
17. Pause before you reply when you’re wound up
A sharp reply sent while you’re annoyed can undo weeks of goodwill. Taking a pause doesn’t mean avoiding the issue. It gives your judgement time to catch up with your reaction.
When you feel threatened, attention narrows and you start interpreting ambiguous signals as hostile. A neutral “Can we talk?” starts to sound like bad news, and a short reply reads as dismissive. You react to the version of the message in your head, the other person reacts to your reaction, and a misunderstanding grows into an argument. That spiral is a reasoned chain, not the result of one study. The Oxford voice-note study from March 2026 offers some direct support: participants who reported more stress were more likely to read ambiguous emails negatively, whatever their gender.
Managing that gap is a large part of emotional intelligence. When a message makes you angry, save your reply as a draft, go and do something else for twenty minutes, and then reread both messages before deciding whether to send.
18. Say thank you, and say what for
“Thanks!” is fine. “Thanks for catching that error in the budget before it went to the client” stays with people.
Gallup and Workhuman followed more than 3,400 employees from 2022 to 2024 and published their findings in September 2024. Employees who received high-quality recognition in 2022 were 45% less likely to have left their jobs two years later. Yet 55% of US employees said they get no recognition, or recognition that meets none of the five qualities Gallup associates with effective recognition. Recognition that met even one of those qualities was linked to 2.9 times the odds of being engaged. The data is correlational, and slightly older than two years, but it comes from one of the few studies to follow the same people over time.
Specific praise works because it shows you actually noticed what someone did. It also costs you nothing. If you want more on being warm at work without overdoing it, see this guide to being friendly and kind.
Test it this week: send three specific thank-you messages, each one naming exactly what the person did and what it made possible.
19. Disagree without starting a war
Work involves disagreement. You can’t stop it from happening, but you can affect how it goes.
Researchers call one helpful approach “conversational receptiveness”. In 2020, Michael Yeomans, Julia Minson and colleagues showed that government executives whose language was more receptive were seen by their partners as better teammates and advisers. They also found that Wikipedia editors who opened disagreements receptively drew fewer personal attacks later. A follow-up by Yeomans, Minson, Hanne Collins and Charles Dorison, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2024 with a combined sample of 17,184 participants, found that receptiveness spreads. When one person used it, the other person tended to respond the same way, and a single receptive exchange improved how each side judged the other.
In practice, receptive language usually means acknowledging the other view before stating your own, softening absolute claims and naming where you agree. (“I see why the faster launch appeals. My concern is QA time.”) That list of techniques is my summary of the research’s general direction rather than its exact coding scheme. For conversations that are already heated, these strategies for dealing with angry people can help.
Here’s a simple way in: before you disagree in your next meeting, begin with one sentence restating the other person’s view in a way they’d accept.
20. Treat communication as a skill you train
Many people treat communication as a fixed trait: you’re either a natural or you aren’t. Employers increasingly treat it as a skill they’re hiring for.
In its Future of Jobs Report 2025, the World Economic Forum surveyed employers worldwide about which skills they consider core for their workforce. Empathy and active listening made the top ten core skills. Leadership and social influence came third, a jump of 22 percentage points since the 2023 edition. Analytical thinking was first, chosen by about seven in ten employers. Read together, the list suggests that how you deal with people now matters about as much as technical ability. As a report, it reflects employer opinion rather than measured performance, so it describes what employers value rather than proving what works.
Skills improve with deliberate practice: one behaviour at a time, repeated until it becomes automatic, ideally with someone giving you honest feedback.
Give it a go: choose one item from this list, practise it every working day for the next month, and ask one trusted colleague to tell you whether they notice any difference.
What to do when you slip
You’ll fall back into old habits sometimes. One day you’ll fire off an irritated message, talk over someone in a meeting, or bury the request at the end of a long email. That’s normal, and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
Changing a habit takes longer than most people expect. A systematic review and meta-analysis by Balpreet Singh and colleagues, published in Healthcare in December 2024 and covering more than 2,600 participants, found that new health habits took a median of roughly 59 to 66 days to form, with individual times ranging from about 4 days to nearly a year. Doing the behaviour consistently was one of the strongest factors. The review covered health habits rather than workplace communication, so apply it loosely, but the basic point carries over: changing behaviour takes weeks, sometimes months.
When you slip, repair it quickly. A short “Sorry, I cut you off. Go ahead” takes ten seconds and earns you a lot of goodwill. Then return to your practice the next day without turning the mistake into a judgement about who you are. If you tend to replay awkward moments for hours afterwards, these techniques to stop ruminating thoughts can help.
The short version
Communicating well at work is mostly a collection of small, repeatable habits: decide your point, lead with it, listen for longer than feels natural, pick the right channel, and say thank you as if you mean it. None of these takes any special talent, just practice.
Choose one habit from this list today and stick with it for a month. For more practical, evidence-based advice on getting better at your job, have a look at the rest of the Work section.
