# Communication in an Organisation: How It Works and What You Can Do Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-in-an-organisation/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-in-an-organisation.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer What communication in an organisation really means: the types, the directions it flows, why it breaks down, and what you can actually do about it at work. ## Key facts - Title: Communication in an Organisation: How It Works and What You Can Do - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Working with Your Manager, Influence - Primary keyword: communication in an organisation - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-in-an-organisation/ ## What this page covers - What communication in an organisation really means: the types, the directions it flows, why it breaks down, and what you can actually do about it at work. - Practical guidance for communication in an organisation - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation You can usually tell when it isn't working: a decision reaches you three days after it was made, or a change you flagged in March gets announced in June as news. Communication in an organisation is the flow of information between employees, teams, and leadership — the way instructions, decisions, feedback, and ideas move through a company. It runs in three directions: downward from management, upward from employees, and horizontally between colleagues, through formal channels like email and meetings as well as informal ones. Most explanations stop at that description. The more useful question, and the one the rest of this answers, is which of those flows you personally sit in and what you can do from inside one. ## What is communication in an organisation? It is the whole system by which information moves inside a company: who tells whom, through which channel, and how reliably it arrives. That covers the obvious things — the all-staff email, the [weekly team meeting](/knowledge/communication/meeting-attend/), the project update in a shared channel — and the less obvious ones, like the two-minute corridor conversation that tells you more about a restructure than the announcement did. The part that matters for you is that this is a system you are inside, not one you observe from outside. You are a node in it. Information reaches you or it doesn't; what you send travels or it stalls. Most of what people describe as "bad communication here" is really a description of how that system behaves around them. ## Why does communication at work matter so much? Because nearly everything else depends on it. When people know what they are meant to be doing, what has changed, and what counts as finished, work moves. When they don't, the same work gets done twice, gets done wrong, or waits. The costs are rarely dramatic. They show up as a report built from last quarter's numbers, a client promise nobody passed to the delivery team, a deadline two people each assumed the other owned. Then there is the slower cost: people who are consistently the last to hear things stop feeling like they belong, and disengagement follows. None of that is a fixed condition of your workplace. It is the aggregate of many small choices about what gets said, to whom, and through which channel — and those choices are learnable. ## What are the main types of communication at work? There are two useful ways to cut it, and you need both. The first is by direction. Fred Lunenburg's review of formal communication channels (2010) sets out the standard picture: downward communication carries instructions, policies, announcements, and feedback from management to employees; upward communication carries problems, suggestions, and how people actually feel about the work back the other way; horizontal, or lateral, communication runs between people at the same level and is what makes day-to-day coordination possible. A fourth, diagonal, cuts across both level and function. The second is by formality. Formal communication follows the official structure — email, reports, minutes, scheduled meetings. Informal communication is everything else: the desk conversation, the team chat thread, the walk to the coffee machine. A healthy workplace runs all of these at once. When one of them is weak, you feel it as a specific kind of frustration, and it is usually possible to name which one. ## What is the difference between formal and informal communication? Formal communication is documented, structured, and traceable. It exists so a decision can be referred back to, so everyone receives the same version, and so the record outlasts the people who made it. Its weaknesses are speed and candor: it is slow to produce, and it says only what the organization is willing to put in writing. Informal communication is faster and closer to how people actually feel. It is where you learn a project is in trouble before the status report admits it. Its weakness is reliability: it is unrecorded, it distorts as it travels, and nobody is accountable for it. Neither replaces the other. Trouble usually starts when one is asked to do the other's job — settling something contentious in a chat thread, or announcing by memo something people needed to talk through. ## What is upward communication, and why does it matter most to you? Upward communication is information moving from employees to the people above them: problems with the work, suggestions for improving it, and honest signals about workload and morale. Of the three directions, it is the one you personally control. It is also the one most likely to fail, for structural reasons. Every layer a message passes through is a place where it can be compressed, softened, deprioritized, or simply not passed on. If you are early in your career, the first of those layers is usually one person: your manager. Almost everything you send upward goes through that relationship, which makes this less a question of organizational design than of how deliberately you use the conversations you already have. ## What causes communication to break down at work? A breakdown is not an absence of messages. It is a mismatch — information was sent but not received as intended, through unclear instructions, an overlooked message, or a reasonable but wrong interpretation. Three causes account for most of it. The first is distortion through layers: the more levels a message crosses, the less of it survives, and the more each person has reshaped it around what they think matters. The second is overload: when everything is communicated, nothing is distinguishable, and the important message gets filed alongside the noise. The third is jargon and assumed context, which makes a message perfectly legible to its author and opaque to everyone else. Notice that two of the three get worse if you simply send more. The fix is usually sharper, better-targeted communication rather than a greater volume of it. ## Should you send an email or talk to them? This is the most consequential everyday decision in the whole topic, and most people make it out of habit rather than judgment. Choose a conversation when you need to build trust, when the [subject is sensitive](/knowledge/communication/difficult-conversations-at-work/), when it is complex enough that the other person will have questions, when you are negotiating, or when you are solving a problem together. Each of those needs the back-and-forth that writing removes. Choose writing when the other person needs time to think, when the exchange needs to be documented, or when the message is genuinely one-way information. The common error runs in one direction: using email for something that needed a conversation, because writing feels safer. It rarely is. A difficult message in writing tends to come back as a longer and worse thread. ## What can you do about it if you're not a manager? Most advice on this subject is written for whoever owns the channels — the internal communications team, the leadership group, the people who can restructure a meeting cadence. If that isn't you, almost none of it applies. What remains is smaller, and more effective than it sounds. Use the [one-to-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-meetings/) you already have. A recurring conversation with your manager, prepared in advance around two or three specific things, is your upward channel. It does not become one by accident. Say the main point first, [in an email](/knowledge/communication/business-email-writing/), a meeting, or a corridor: the conclusion, then the reasoning. Most messages that "got lost" were buried in their own third paragraph. Close your own loops. Confirm in writing what you understood and what you will do by when. A large share of breakdowns are failures of confirmation rather than of transmission. Ask when you don't know. Information that never reached you is not usually being withheld; more often nobody realized you needed it. None of this requires authority, and none of it is a personality trait. These are habits, which means they can be built — though it is worth checking [how your own habits land](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before concluding the problem is entirely upstream. Read those answers together and a pattern surfaces. Almost none of the fixes are structural. They are things one person does from inside the system: choosing a channel on purpose, making a message survive the trip upward, closing a loop nobody asked you to close. ## The skills that make this easier to handle The people who seem to have an easy time inside a badly communicating organization are rarely better informed than everyone else. They are usually doing three specific things, none of them visible from the outside. **Communication** is the first, and it is far more practical than the word suggests. It covers the choice between a conversation and an email, leading with your main point instead of building toward it, and knowing what a meeting is actually for before you sit down in one — information, problem-solving, status, or team-building. Those choices decide whether your message arrives intact. They are also entirely learnable, which is why "we're bad at communication here" describes a habit rather than a fate. **Working with Your Manager** matters here because, for most people early in a career, the manager is the upward channel. A prepared one-to-one, held regularly, with notes taken and feedback actually asked for, does more for your visibility than any organization-wide initiative. So does bringing a proposed solution alongside a problem, and aligning with your manager before an idea travels wider. This is a working partnership, not an obstacle to route around, and it is where most of your information both arrives and departs. **Influence** is what makes a message travel after it has been sent. It starts before you speak: working out what the person on the other end actually needs, keeping the case simple, using a concrete example, and being honest about the drawbacks rather than only the upside. Then it continues afterward, following up until something is genuinely implemented. Volunteering to write the summary or set the agenda is a small version of this, and it puts you inside the formal channel instead of at the end of it. Knowing which of these you are already strong at is harder, because the parts of your own communication that go wrong are precisely the parts you cannot see from inside. The free Work Skills Test measures **all twelve of the work skills** this framework treats as buildable, these three among them, so what it surfaces is usually something you were not already watching. It takes a few minutes to [spot your own blind spots](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). ## Making it your own Some of this may already describe how you work — you might be the person who confirms things in writing without thinking of it as a technique. None of these habits are fixed traits you either have or don't. They are skills, which means the ones you haven't picked up are simply ones still available to you, and you can build them while continuing to sound like yourself. They also compound: the more people your work touches, the more of your effectiveness runs through how well information moves between you and everyone else. You have just worked out which of these flows you actually sit in, which is the part most people never stop to identify, and it makes the next step a short one. ## See where your skills stand So the only thing left is to find out where your own skills sit today. The free Work Skills Test is a quick self-assessment of the work skills behind communication at work — Communication, Working with Your Manager, and Influence among them, alongside the others that shape how you operate inside an organization. In about seven minutes it shows you which are already strong and which one or two would make the biggest difference to work on next. **Take the skills test** Free to take, and it's over in about 7 minutes. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? What communication in an organisation really means: the types, the directions it flows, why it breaks down, and what you can actually do about it at work. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Working with Your Manager, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-in-an-organisation/ Preferred summary: "What communication in an organisation really means: the types, the directions it flows, why it breaks down, and what you can actually do about it at work." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.