To improve workplace performance and your employability skills in general you will need to understand how to evaluate interpersonal and written communications techniques. Understanding your level of performance using interpersonal and written communication skills will enable you to pick out specific areas to improve on and you may be able to identify training needs in specific areas based on the evaluation of your own skills. In this article we will look at how to evaluation both interpersonal and written communications techniques skills so that you can improve your performance in the workplace. Doing this may lead to promotion opportunities and improved communication with colleagues and customers.
Evaluating interpersonal skills
When evaluating your interpersonal skills you could make a list of interpersonal skills and identify the strengths and weakness that you feel you have for each skill. Interpersonal skills can broken down in to different sections and you can have a look at out article on: demonstrating a range of interpersonal skills to gain a better insight into what they are.
To evaluate interpersonal and written communications techniques you could review the areas listed below, listing strengths and weaknesses and then provide a commentary on how you believe that you can improve each skill.
- Verbal communication: When evaluating how you can improve your verbal communication skills you can look at your performance of recent verbal exchanges with colleagues and clients and identify what you have done well and what you can improve on. You should also look at how you perform in face to face communication and use signing and lip reading to help you communicate from both a speaking and listening perspective.
- Techniques and cues: Building on looking at how you communicate on a face to face basis you can evaluate how you use body language to communicate in a strong and confident manner. One way to evaluate this is to get feedback from colleagues and even friends to identify how you can communicate in a more confident manner. You can also look at how you use intonation in your speech to make specific parts of a conversation stand out to aid communicate. If you feel that you are quite monotone and can improve on this then perhaps a public speaking course would help you improve on this.
- Use of language: When you evaluate interpersonal communication techniques another area that you can look at is your use of language. Do you use mainly positive language to project a positive persona or is using too much negative language effecting your communication with other either in face to face or telephone exchanges? To identify and evaluate the type of language that you use you could record telephone conversations with customers and site down with your line manager to look at how the language you use could be improved to improve customer relations.
- Engaging an audience: You need to look at how engaging you are when communicating with a specific audience. You can evaluate what you do well in terms of use of body language and questioning to keep other parties interested throughout a conversation or presentation. Do you keep them involved by nodding as approval of their ideas and can you effectively summarise and paraphrase their input to show that you understand their point of view when communicating? Being able to identify what you do well is important and also looking at what can be improved should help you look at different developmental activities that can help you engage an audience. This can be looked at in relation to your specific job role and may you would be able to undertake an internal training course that will help you with a specific function within your job.
- Ability to overcome barriers to communication: In any busy work environment you will need to deal with barriers to communication such as distractions, background noise and your own lack of concentration. Evaluating what effects you most is important as sometimes we do not always readily identify what is distracting us and it can unknowingly irritate us. Actually taking the time to evaluate what we do to overcome barriers to communication allows us to make small changes that could dramatically improve our interpersonal communication skills. As an example of this, switching from a normal phone to one that uses a headset could make a massive difference in terms of drowning out background noise that might be limiting out note taking ability when talking to customers. Making this small change could dramatically improve communication and results so taking the time to evaluate interpersonal and written communications techniques in this instance is very important.
- Questioning techniques: Use of effective questioning techniques is a very important interpersonal skill. Understanding and evaluating how you use different types of question such as open, closed or probing questions can help you develop skills to get the most out of face to face or telephone communications with clients and colleagues alike. Again gaining an understanding of what you do well and what you need to improve can really help your performance and communication in the workplace. Taking a short time to do this and identifying further training needs can have massive implications in terms of developing your own career.
These improvement that you identify could then be included in a personal development plan with targets set to improve in specific areas. The personal development plan can then include developmental activities and training courses that could be used to improve on the interpersonal skills that you have identified as a priority.
Evaluating written communication techniques
As well as looking at your interpersonal skills you will need to look at how you can improve your written communication skills. There are so many different types and contexts of written communication that we need to use in the workplace so being able to evaluate your own performance is essential in terms of improving. There are a number of key areas that you can look at when evaluating your own written communication technique and these are explored below:
- Understanding internal written communication guidelines: Most companies will have internal standards for written communication. It could be email, in which case you will need to use a professional tone and standard company signature when communicating with customers. Memos, faxes and letters may need to use a standard template format with the company logo in the header. You can evaluate where you stand in terms of understanding how you business operates when using written communication. You can review your understand and have regular checkpoints in terms of what you do well and what requires improvement. The same can be said for online communication such as blogging. Your company may have a standard format such as using a related image for each post and have a maximum and minimum word count limit for posts. You should also review your understanding of this and make sure that you are aware of new standards that are introduced to comply with them.
- Evaluating recent written communication: Regular check points on your own written communication is a valuable way to see what has worked well and what needs to be improved. If you sent a letter out to customers with a new deal of the week and the response is poor you will need to compare this with a similar letter that went well and see how this is better. As with any form of communication regularly reviewing what when well is all part of improving your communications skills. You will also need to look at the structure of written communication before it is sent out and make sure that the content is relevant and that everything is proof read and spell checked before the final version is sent. Even with basic internal communication is is always worth getting a colleague to give your written communication the once over to make sure it is error free and makes sense to the reader.
- Looking at performance of written communication using key metrics: In today’s digital world is is becoming more and more important to track the performance of everything in the workplace. Looking at key metrics such as how many sales there have been in response to a new promotional campaign is important to identify if it was worth putting the time and effort into producing it and if it has been cost effective. When you send out emails, it is worth tracking the open rate and click through to any information that you have linked to within the email to see if your written communication has a clear call to action for the end user.
Conclusion
As we can see it is very important to evaluate interpersonal and written communications techniques on a regular basis. There are many ways to track your own performance and identify ways that you can improve. A focus on self-improvement and identifying opportunities to take up training courses will boost your own curriculum vitae and improve your chances of promotion and further employment opportunities in the future. Make self-evaluation of your interpersonal and written communications techniques part of your working routine and you will guarantee to see an improvement in workplace performance. This is something that you should be open and honest about and you should encourage others to do the same and share what works well for them. Putting communication at the forefront of your own development is the key to succeeding and you will see a noted improvement when you evaluate your own skill set on a regular basis.