# How to Increase Communication Skills at Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/increase-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/increase-communication-skills.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 Eight specific habits that increase communication skills at work - what to practice first, how to tell whether it's working, and where to start this week. ## Key facts - Title: How to Increase Communication Skills at Work - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: increase communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/increase-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Eight specific habits that increase communication skills at work - what to practice first, how to tell whether it's working, and where to start this week. - Practical guidance for increase communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation There is a particular kind of quiet moment at work: rehearsing a sentence in your head while the meeting moves on without it, or rereading an email an hour after you sent it. You increase communication skills by practicing a small number of specific, observable behaviors one at a time — paraphrasing what you heard before you reply, leading with your main point, matching the channel to the message — rather than by absorbing general advice about listening more and being clearer. The behaviors are the skill. That distinction is the reason most advice on this subject slides straight off. ## Eight habits that increase communication skills Search this topic and you get a wall of numbered lists that largely agree with each other — Harvard's Division of Continuing Education runs eight ways, ManpowerGroup ten, BetterUp eighteen. The trouble is twofold. A lot of the most prominent advice is quietly written for managers: it assumes you can convene a team check-in or set the tone for how safe people feel speaking up, which is not the position of someone three months into a first job. And every item arrives at the same weight, so you finish the list knowing eight things and doing none of them. The eight below are ordered on purpose. Take the first one this week, and only add the next when the first has stopped taking effort. ### 1. Close the laptop and put the phone out of reach The single most repeated line across guides on this topic is that you cannot communicate well while multitasking, and it is the only item here that asks nothing new of you — just a decision made before the conversation starts. Harvard's Division of Continuing Education and ManpowerGroup both place it near the top of their lists. What makes it worth doing first is not that divided attention makes you miss information. It is that people can tell. A colleague who watches your eyes flick toward a notification learns something about how much their question matters to you, and no amount of careful phrasing afterward undoes it. ### 2. Paraphrase what you heard before you reply Active listening has a far more specific definition than the phrase suggests. StatPearls, the clinical reference published through the National Institutes of Health, describes it as a technique in which the listener feeds back what they have heard by restating or paraphrasing it, and the speaker then confirms or corrects. The mechanism is verification, not attentiveness. Nodding produces nothing checkable. "So you need the draft by Thursday, and the blocker is the pricing sign-off — have I got that right?" produces something the other person can correct on the spot. It also scores itself. If they correct you, you have caught a misunderstanding for free. If they confirm, you have their agreement on record. The same move works in the other direction: Harvard's guidance is that after you brief someone, you ask them to say back in their own words what they are going to do. It feels slightly strange the first two times and then stops feeling like anything at all. ### 3. Ask the clarifying question you would rather not ask "Soon," "quick," "just a rough version" — the vague words inside a request are the ones that generate rework. Naming them costs one sentence. Does soon mean this week? Is a rough version a bulleted outline, or something you would be comfortable forwarding? Early in a career, people reliably overestimate what it costs to look uninformed and underestimate what it costs to hand over the wrong thing on Friday afternoon. Asking for clarification also reads as engagement rather than as a gap in it: it shows you were listening closely enough to notice the ambiguity in the first place. ### 4. Choose the channel before you choose the words Channel selection is a decision rule, not a matter of preference. The workplace communication text from Kwantlen Polytechnic University sets it out plainly: face-to-face or video for anything complex, emotional, or high-stakes, because tone and expression give you real-time feedback on whether the message is landing; writing for detail, formality, and anything that needs a record. The mistake runs almost entirely in one direction — sending an email because it is cheaper to send than a conversation is to have, then spending three follow-up threads repairing what five minutes of talking would have settled. Before you start composing, decide which of those two things the message actually is. ### 5. Put the point in the first sentence This one has a name. BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front — came out of U.S. military communication practice and has since spread widely through professional writing. The rule is that your conclusion and your ask go in the opening line, with the reasoning underneath for whoever wants it. What makes it unusually easy to practice is that it comes with a pass/fail test you can run on your own draft: read only your first sentence, and ask whether someone who stopped there would know what you want from them. Most first drafts fail that test. Fixing it is a fifteen-second reordering, not a rewrite. ### 6. Cut it in half before you send it Brevity is an editing pass, not a personality trait — which matters, because it means you do not have to be a naturally concise person to send concise messages. Write the thing, then delete every sentence that is context rather than content. Being brief and being clear are the two qualities essentially every guide on this topic agrees on, and they are the only ones you can apply after the fact. Give spelling and grammar the same pass while you are in there. Harvard's guidance and Southern New Hampshire University both treat errors as a credibility problem rather than a cosmetic one, because they pull attention away from the message and can quietly distort what it says. For anyone junior, written work is usually the most widely seen thing you produce, read by people who will never watch you work. ### 7. Adjust the register to the room Updating a deskmate and updating a director are two different jobs, and running them as one is among the first things senior people notice about a junior colleague. The recruitment firm Hays and an early-career piece in EDUCAUSE Review both single out adapting your tone, length, and formality to the audience as a discrete thing you practice, rather than an instinct you either have or lack. In practice it is mostly a question of compression and assumed context. The director needs the decision and the risk. The deskmate needs the detail. Same facts, different quantity of them. ### 8. Record yourself once — but decide first what you are looking for Almost every guide recommends recording yourself to establish a baseline, and there is genuine evidence behind it: studies of video self-review in presentation and clinical training report better reflection and, over time, less anxiety about presenting. Those studies share one feature the general advice leaves out, though — a rubric. Participants review the footage against named criteria, not against a general impression. Without that, what happens is entirely predictable: you watch ninety seconds, wince at your own voice, and never open the file again. So choose two things to watch for before you press record — how often you cut across people, how long it takes you to reach your point — and let everything else go. Which surfaces the awkward part of assessing yourself: the criteria have to come from somewhere. If you have no real idea what belongs on that short list, [a structured read of your work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) will hand you a sharper starting set than guessing at your own blind spots ever will. ## What makes these habits easier to keep going Read back over the eight and notice what they have in common. Almost none of them are difficult to understand. What separates people who actually run them from people who merely read them is quieter than technique: whether you can see how you currently come across, whether you will act before you feel ready, and whether you can name the specific behavior to reach for in the moment. **Communication** is the skill these eight habits are drawn from, and its real usefulness is that it has parts. Leading with the main point. Being brief. Adapting to the person in front of you. Knowing when a conversation beats an email. Taking part in a meeting properly. Handling the uncomfortable ones — disagreeing, apologizing, giving someone feedback. Once you can see the parts, "get better at communicating" stops being an ambition and becomes a short list of things you can rehearse separately. **Building Self-Awareness** is what turns that recording exercise into something useful. It is less about introspection than about getting an accurate read on how you currently land — which means asking for feedback that is specific and pointed at what you do next, rather than waiting for it to arrive on its own, and then taking it in properly: understand it first, add your own view of it second, reflect on it third. Without that read you practice at random. With it, you know which two habits are actually costing you something. **Building Confidence** decides whether any of this survives contact with a real Tuesday. For a lot of people the gap was never knowing what to say; it was staying quiet in the meeting, rewriting one message six times, or letting the vague request go unclarified rather than asking. Confidence here builds the same way the habits above do — by doing the thing at a size you can manage, accepting that the first few attempts feel uncomfortable, and letting each one count as evidence. Waiting until you feel ready has the order backwards. Those three interlock, which is why working on communication in isolation so often stalls. The Job Skills Test scores you across **twelve work skills** of exactly this kind, and if communication turns out not to be the one holding you back, [finding that out early](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) saves you a great deal of misdirected practice. Some of this probably already describes how you work. Most people are reliably good at two or three of these eight without ever having had them named, and the ones you are not yet good at are not a fixed feature of your character. They are behaviors, which means they respond to the same thing every other behavior responds to: repetition at a manageable size. Nothing on that list requires you to become a different sort of person — you keep your own manner and change what you do inside it. The weight on these tends to grow rather than shrink. The further into a career you get, the more of your work happens through other people, and the more the gap between a clear message and a nearly clear one starts showing up in outcomes. That is the argument for sorting it now, while the stakes are still forgiving. You have already done the part most people skip, which is reading past the list and asking which of these applies to you. The only thing missing is knowing which ones do. ## Start with the two that matter most for you The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your workplace skills. You answer a set of questions and get back a profile showing where you stand across all twelve — communication among them — and which of them would make the biggest difference to you right now. There is nothing to prepare, and no result you can get wrong. Start with whichever one it flags, and work the habits above into that. **Take the skills test** Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear the moment you finish. ## 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? Eight specific habits that increase communication skills at work - what to practice first, how to tell whether it's working, and where to start this week. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Building Confidence. ### 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/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/increase-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Eight specific habits that increase communication skills at work - what to practice first, how to tell whether it's working, and where to start this week." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.