Social and Communication Skills: What They Are and How to Build Them

If you have ever replayed a meeting afterward, thinking of the sentence you should have said, or stood at the edge of a group conversation waiting for a gap that never came, you already know the feeling that sends people looking for this. Social and communication skills are the learnable behaviors you use to exchange information and get along with people at work: speaking clearly, listening properly, reading what a room is doing, writing so people understand you, and building relationships over time. They are practiced, not inherited. What makes the phrase confusing is that it bundles several different abilities under one label, and they are not built in the same way.

What social and communication skills actually cover

The career sources that rank for this term converge on a shared map. Indeed and the University of the People both organize communication into the same five types — verbal, nonverbal, written, visual, and listening — and workplace lists of social skills from Smowl and Monster add a second cluster: empathy, social awareness, assertiveness, negotiation, persuasion, and self-awareness. Read together, the category has two halves. One is about getting a message across accurately. The other is about handling the people the message is going to. Most people are noticeably stronger in one half than the other, and knowing which is which changes where you should put your effort.

Speaking and verbal communication

This is the half people picture first: explaining an idea, answering a question, giving an update. According to Indeed’s breakdown of communication types, tone and pace do as much work as the words themselves — the same sentence lands differently depending on how fast and how firmly you say it. The practical move is not to speak more, but to lead with your main point instead of building up to it, and to say less around it. Most workplace speaking fails from being long and unstructured, not from being too plain.

Listening

Listening is classified as a type of communication in its own right, not the absence of one. Sources like ERC describe it as active rather than passive: attention to words, feelings, and body movement together, with active listening treated as what establishes rapport and forms the foundation of solid working relationships. In practice that means keeping your attention on the person rather than on your reply, asking a clarifying question when something does not fit, and letting them finish. If you find groups hard, this is the most useful place to start — it is the one part of a conversation you can do well while barely speaking.

Nonverbal communication

The nonverbal channel is broader than most people assume. It includes facial expressions, body movement, gestures, eye contact, posture, physical distance, and the pitch and tone of your voice. Two things follow from that. First, you are communicating continuously, including in the moments you think you are just sitting there. Second, reading other people’s nonverbal signals is a skill on the same list — noticing that a colleague has gone quiet, or that a question landed badly, is information you can act on before a small misunderstanding hardens.

Written communication

Written communication covers email, messages, documents, and reports, and it carries a specific load: it is what you use for information too complex or too detailed to survive being spoken once. Anything with numbers, sequences, or commitments in it belongs in writing, where the reader can go back over it. The same principle applies as in speaking — main message first, then the detail. Charts and simple visuals fall into this half too; they exist to make something complicated easier to take in, not to decorate it.

Social awareness and building relationships

This is the half the word “social” is doing. It covers empathy, noticing social cues, saying what you actually think without turning it into a confrontation, and the ordinary work of getting to know the people you work with. It matters even when your role is not customer-facing: as Indeed points out, you still communicate with teammates, supervisors, and other staff in order to do your job at all. The relationships are not decoration around the work. They are what makes the work go smoothly or badly.

How these skills are actually built

The reassuring part of the research is also the most consistent. HeretoHelp, a resource from the BC Partners for Mental Health and Substance Use Information, states it plainly: people are not born with good communication skills — like any other skill, they are learned through trial and error and repeated practice. That is worth sitting with if you have quietly concluded that other people got something you did not.

What the evidence points to is not more exposure but the right kind. A study of communication skills training for student social workers, published in PMC, found that improvement came from practicing in a safe and supportive environment — role-play or simulation, followed by feedback and reflection. The mechanism matters: unstructured practice in high-stakes situations mostly teaches avoidance, because the cost of getting it wrong is too high to learn from. Structured practice with feedback is where the change happens.

The everyday versions of that are small. Indeed suggests starting with a teammate in a similar role — shared responsibilities give you something to talk about, which removes the hardest part of a first conversation — and then widening to people in other parts of the business once that feels ordinary. Harvard’s professional development program points to structured settings like Toastmasters for speaking practice, precisely because feedback is built in. The common feature is low stakes and repetition, not intensity.

The one thing worth doing before you pick a starting point is working out which part is actually weak. People often practice the half they are already better at, because it is more comfortable, and it is genuinely difficult to judge your own listening or your own nonverbal habits from the inside. A short, structured look at where your skills stand now will usually point somewhere you would not have chosen yourself.

What gets easier when you work on this

Look back over those five areas and notice how few of them are about talking. Most of the difficulty in social and communication skills sits in decisions — what to say first, when to write instead of speak, when to stop and let someone finish, whether to raise something now or later. Those decisions rest on a few underlying habits that show up far beyond conversation.

Communication is the most direct of them, and it is broader than the word suggests. It covers the principles that make a message land — adapting to how the other person takes in information, being clear and brief, stating the main point first — along with choosing the right medium for what you are doing, participating usefully in meetings, and handling the situations most people dread: disagreeing, apologizing, giving feedback, dealing with someone who is angry. Those last ones are learnable procedures, not nerve.

Professional Behaviors covers the social half more closely than any label suggests. Showing genuine interest in people, socializing in a way that fits the setting, humility, appropriate humor, speaking about colleagues as though they were in the room — these are the behaviors that make someone easy to be around at work. It also names the patterns that quietly cost you: withdrawing and never contributing, communicating indirectly rather than saying the thing, and steady complaining.

Building Confidence is what makes the other two usable, because knowing what to do and doing it are separated by discomfort. The approach is confidence by doing: start with a situation slightly outside what feels comfortable, but not far outside, and accept the anxiety rather than waiting for it to disappear first. Getting comfortable being uncomfortable is the actual skill, and it is why small repeated attempts beat one big push.

The free Job Skills Test walks through those three alongside nine others that shape how work goes day to day. Seeing all twelve together tends to be the useful part — the area that turns out to be holding you back is often not the one you would have guessed, so it is worth finding your real gap before you decide what to practice. Whatever it turns out to be, it is a habit to build rather than something fixed about you.

Where this goes from here

Some of this probably already describes you. You may listen carefully without ever calling it a skill, or write clearly and find groups hard, or the reverse. Wherever there is a gap, it is something not yet learned rather than a fact about the kind of person you are — and people build these without becoming louder, more outgoing, or anyone other than themselves.

These skills also compound. The more people your work depends on, the more the ordinary exchanges between you carry, which means the effort spent now returns more later rather than less. You have already done the part most people skip: you noticed a pattern in how conversations at work were going and went looking for what sits underneath it, instead of deciding you were simply not a people person. What is left is knowing which part to start with.

See which part to work on first

You know what the category contains now. The more useful thing to know is which piece of it is actually costing you.

The free Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills. You answer questions about how you handle ordinary situations at work, and it shows you where you stand across all twelve — the communication and social habits covered here among them — and which ones will make the biggest difference to you right now. Nothing to prepare, no one to perform for, and no wrong answers.

Take the skills test

Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear the moment you finish.