# The Use of Communication at Work: The Five Jobs It Does Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/use-of-communication/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/use-of-communication.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 Communication at work is used to inform, coordinate, persuade, motivate, and build relationships. What each use looks like, and how to choose the right one. ## Key facts - Title: The Use of Communication at Work: The Five Jobs It Does - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Working with Your Manager - Primary keyword: use of communication - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/use-of-communication/ ## What this page covers - Communication at work is used to inform, coordinate, persuade, motivate, and build relationships. What each use looks like, and how to choose the right one. - Practical guidance for use of communication - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The use of communication at work comes down to five jobs it does: informing people so they can do their work, coordinating activity so separate pieces fit together, persuading someone toward a decision, motivating action, and building the relationships that carry all the rest. Every other choice — the channel, the wording, the length — is in service of one of those five. Most people never separate them. Communication gets treated as one undifferentiated thing you are either good or bad at, which is exactly why so much of it misses: a message built to inform gets asked to persuade, and it fails at both. Once the five come apart, the choices stop being guesswork. ## The five uses of communication at work Sources that break the subject down by function — TechnoFunc's leadership-skills material, Study.com's lesson on the functions of communication, and Vevox's work on internal communication — arrive at roughly the same short list. The labels shift between them; the underlying five do not. What makes them worth separating is that each one succeeds or fails by a different test. ### Informing The purpose of informing is to put data in front of people so they can actually complete their job, and, as TechnoFunc frames it, so they know the rules and procedures they are working inside. Its distinguishing feature is direction: it travels one way, and it succeeds when the receiver could act on it without a follow-up question. TechnoFunc adds a point that is easy to skim past — informing eliminates job uncertainty. A good deal of what feels like anxiety in a new role is simply information nobody thought to pass on. Which means the test for this use is never whether you sent it. It is whether they can now do the thing. ### Coordinating Coordinating is informing's two-way cousin: aligning activity so that work done separately still fits together. One organizational-communication summary puts the whole function in a single line — communication should aim at coordinating the activities of the people at work to attain the organization's goals. Its distinguishing feature is that it is continuous rather than complete. Handoffs, status updates, who owns what by when, the quick check before you start rather than after you finish. It also fails the most quietly of the five. Nobody files a report about a coordination failure; you just find the duplicated work in week three. ### Persuading and influencing Here the message is trying to change a view or a decision — presenting an idea, making a case, [convincing someone of a position](/knowledge/influence/persuasion-skills/). The distinguishing feature is that the receiver holds a genuine choice and can say no. That single fact changes what the message has to carry. Informing only needs to be accurate; persuading has to be accurate *and* answer what is in it for the person hearing it. Most failed pitches at work are not badly argued. They are well-argued from the sender's side of the table only. ### Motivating Study.com and TechnoFunc both draw a line here that is worth holding onto: motivation is not persuasion. Persuasion changes an attitude or a belief. Motivation stimulates an action — and it runs mostly on [appreciation, recognition, and support](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/words-of-appreciation-for-coworkers/) rather than on argument. The distinguishing feature is that it is about energy, not information or agreement. You can be entirely convinced by a plan and still not move on it. This is the use most junior people assume is a manager's job. It is not: telling a colleague specifically what they did well is this use, and it is available to anyone. ### Building relationships The fifth use exists to strengthen collaboration, resolve conflict, and build a sense of belonging and engagement. Its distinguishing feature is that there is no payload. Nothing is being transferred, decided, or requested — the conversation itself is the point. It is also the one people cut first when the week gets tight, which is precisely why the other four get harder over time. Informing, coordinating, persuading, and motivating all run faster between people who already have some trust between them. Skip this use for a quarter and you pay for it in all four of the others. ## The forms these uses travel in Separate from *why* you are communicating is *how*. SEEK, Valamis, and Personio all sort workplace communication into the same four forms — verbal, non-verbal, written, and visual — and all three make the same point about them: the goal is not mastering one but combining them according to context. **Verbal** covers spoken words in conversations, meetings, calls, and [presentations](/knowledge/communication/presentation-skills/). **Written** covers email, messages, reports, and documentation. **Non-verbal** — [body language](/knowledge/communication/nonverbal-communication/), facial expression, eye contact, posture, tone of voice — rarely carries a message on its own but constantly modifies how the others are received. **Visual** — charts, diagrams, infographics, slides — carries structure and comparison far faster than a paragraph can. The sharpest version of the how-question is the choice between talking and writing, and it maps onto the five uses fairly cleanly. Choose conversation when you need trust, when the subject is sensitive or complex, when you are negotiating or solving a problem together — which is most persuading, most motivating, and nearly all relationship-building. Choose writing when the other person needs time with it, when it needs to exist as a record, or when it is genuinely one-way information — which covers most informing and a good share of coordinating. Get that one decision right and a surprising amount of the rest follows. Sensitive news delivered by email lands badly not because the wording was wrong but because the medium was. ## What poor use of communication actually costs The scale of the failure is well documented. According to the Niagara Institute's roundup of communication statistics, 28 percent of workers say poor communication kept them from finishing projects on time, and communication breakdowns produce increased stress for 52 percent, delayed or failed projects for 44 percent, low morale for 31 percent, missed performance goals for 25 percent, and lost sales for 18 percent. The same source puts the cost to US businesses at up to $1.2 trillion in lost revenue every year. That is the organizational read. The individual read is narrower and more useful. Almost none of those failures come from people who cannot speak or write. They come from people reaching for the wrong one of the five uses, or the wrong form, at the wrong moment — a judgment gap rather than a talent gap. Judgment gaps close with practice, and they close faster when you know which one is yours, so it is worth [checking where your own habits land](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you decide what to work on. ## The skills that make communication land Read back over the five uses and notice what actually separates the people who do them well. It is not vocabulary, and it is not confidence at a podium. It is a small number of ordinary behaviors, deployed on purpose — and behaviors, unlike temperament, can be built. **Communication** is the obvious one, and the operative parts of it are more specific than the word suggests: state the main point first, be clear and direct, be brief, adapt to how the receiver takes information in, and communicate as your job actually requires rather than as your comfort dictates. Underneath all five uses sits the choice covered above — conversation or writing — which is the single decision that most often determines whether a message does its job. **Teamwork** is where the coordinating and relationship-building uses actually live. Sharing what you know instead of holding it, giving credit to the team rather than to yourself, raising a disagreement when it needs raising and keeping it on the topic instead of the person, then committing loyally to what the team decides. This is what turns a status update from an obligation into something colleagues rely on. **Working with Your Manager** is the use most people under-serve. The regular one-on-one, making your results visible, agreeing on what you are actually authorized to decide, bringing a proposed solution alongside the problem — these are all applications of the five uses aimed upward. Good work that nobody hears about tends to stay invisible, and the fix is not self-promotion; it is treating the relationship as a working partnership with its own communication rhythm. Not one of these three is a fixed trait — they sit inside a set of twelve work skills the framework treats as learnable, all of them measured by the **free** Work Skills Test. Since communication difficulties usually trace back to one of the twelve rather than to communication in the abstract, it tends to be more informative to [find the one holding you back](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) than to practice broadly and hope. Some of this may already describe how you operate. Perhaps you are the one who picks up the phone when a thread has gone in circles, or who writes the update nobody has to reread. Those are the five uses being chosen well, whether or not you have ever named them that way. The parts that are not there yet are learnable in the ordinary way — one deliberate choice at a time, without asking you to become louder or more outgoing than you are. Which part you build first is worth deciding rather than discovering. The further into a career you go, the more of your day rests on messages you are not in the room to clarify, and the cheapest time to sort that out is while the stakes are still small. You already went looking for what communication is *for* instead of assuming it is just talking — that is the part most people skip. ## See which part of this is yours to build You now know what communication is used for. The open question is which of the five you already do well and which one is quietly costing you. The **free** Work Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your own work skills: it shows where you stand across all twelve, including the communication habits above, and points to the ones most likely to make a difference for you right now. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free to take, and seven minutes is all it needs.* ## 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? Communication at work is used to inform, coordinate, persuade, motivate, and build relationships. What each use looks like, and how to choose the right one. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Working with Your Manager. ### 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/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/use-of-communication/ Preferred summary: "Communication at work is used to inform, coordinate, persuade, motivate, and build relationships. What each use looks like, and how to choose the right one." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.