Upward Communication Flows From Employees to Management

Upward communication flows from lower-level employees to higher-level management — from the people doing the work to the people making decisions about it. It carries progress reports, problems, suggestions, grievances and financial figures up through the hierarchy, in the opposite direction to the instructions coming down. That is the whole answer, and it fits in a sentence.

What the sentence leaves out is everything that makes the topic worth understanding: which kinds of information actually travel up, why so much of what starts the journey never finishes it, and who exactly is standing at the bottom of that arrow. On an organizational chart the answer is “employees.” In your own working life, it’s you.

Where upward communication flows from — and where it goes

Organizational communication is usually described as moving in three formal directions. Downward communication runs from management to employees: instructions, policies, goals, feedback. Horizontal or lateral communication runs between peers at the same level. Upward communication runs the other way — staff to supervisor, supervisor to middle manager, middle manager to senior leadership.

As Lumen Learning’s organizational behavior materials put it, the direction is the definition. Nothing about the content marks a message as one type or the other. The same status report is upward communication when you send it to your manager and downward communication when she forwards a summary to her own team. Only the position of the sender relative to the receiver decides which it is.

One detail is easy to miss, and it changes how the flow behaves. Much of what travels upward was requested from above first: a manager asks for information, an opinion, or a decision, and the answer climbs back. That makes the upward channel reactive by default. What moves up because someone asked for it is the bulk of the traffic. What moves up because someone chose to send it — an unrequested warning, an idea nobody solicited — is rarer, and worth more precisely because it is.

The five types of information that flow upward

Upward communication isn’t one kind of message. The most durable taxonomy comes from Fred C. Lunenburg’s 2010 analysis of formal communication channels, published in FOCUS on Colleges, Universities, and Schools, which sorts what travels upward into five types. They differ in more than subject matter. Each carries a different level of personal risk, moves through a different natural channel, and fails for a different reason.

Problems and expectations

What is going wrong or about to go wrong — obstacles, delays, risks, resource shortfalls — together with what you expect to happen next. This is the only type whose value depends almost entirely on speed. A risk reported while there is still room to act is useful; the same risk reported afterward is a post-mortem. It is also the type most easily suppressed, because raising a problem often means naming something that happened on your watch. The cost of the delay lands on the organization, but the discomfort lands on you.

Suggestions for improvement

Ideas for doing the work better — a process change, an efficiency, a different approach — coming from the people closest to the work. This is the only genuinely optional type. Nothing obliges you to send it and nothing obliges your manager to act on it, so it survives on two things: your willingness to speak, and how well the idea is framed for the person receiving it. It also has the widest information advantage behind it, since front-line staff routinely see things that are invisible two levels up.

Performance reports

Progress updates, status reports, completed deliverables, schedule positions — the routine account of what has been done. This is the highest-volume type by a wide margin and the only one that runs on a schedule rather than on an event. Because it is expected, it carries the least personal risk. Because it is expected, it also gets the least thought. A report that leads with what changed and what needs a decision is far more usable than one that narrates everything that happened.

Grievances and disputes

Complaints and unresolved conflicts raised for redress — about treatment, working conditions, a decision, or a colleague. This is the only type with a formal escalation path built around it, and organizations build one for a reason: this is the type most exposed to fear of reprisal. Grievance procedures, confidential counseling and anonymous reporting tools all exist to lower the cost of sending a message the sender has real reason to worry about.

Financial and accounting information

Budget positions, cost figures, forecasts and spending reports moving from operating units up to the people who allocate resources. It is the most impersonal of the five and, for that reason, the least distorted on the way up. Numbers travel in a fixed format, which makes them much harder to quietly soften than a problem report is. The contrast is instructive: the same hierarchy that reliably delivers a budget variance can lose the warning about the project behind it.

Why so much of it never arrives

The upward flow gets drawn as a pipe. It behaves more like a filter.

The structural version of the problem has a name. As Chron’s analysis of barriers to upward communication describes it, a message climbing through complex hierarchies and rigid reporting lines can be delayed, diluted, or blocked outright by a middle manager along the route — gatekeeping. An instruction from the top gets repeated and reinforced at every level on the way down; a concern from the bottom gets edited at every level on the way up.

The human version is, if anything, better documented than the benefits are. A review of barriers to upward communication and employee voice published in the Global Scientific Journal points to two mechanisms that recur across organizations: power distance and psychological safety. Where the distance between management and staff is wide, employees may simply conclude their input isn’t wanted. Where psychological safety is low, they fear it will be used against them later. Both produce the same visible outcome — silence — and silence is the one signal a manager will almost always read as “no problems here.”

What is lost is real, though harder to measure than you might expect. A working upward channel is consistently linked to earlier detection of problems, better-informed decisions, and higher job satisfaction among employees who feel heard. Those claims are rarely tied to a named, dated study, so they are best treated as well-reasoned rather than measured.

The flow starts with a person, and usually that person is you

Almost everything written about upward communication is written from the organization’s side of the arrow, which is why the channels most often listed are the ones a company installs: engagement surveys, anonymous suggestion boxes, town hall forums, grievance procedures, management office hours, open-door policies. Those are genuine channels, and they are somebody else’s to build.

The other set belongs to you. The recurring one-on-one, the progress report you write, the review you prepare for, the email in which you escalate something — these are the channels an individual employee actually controls, and between them they carry most of what ever reaches your manager. Which means that at the only point of the flow you can affect, its health comes down to a handful of ordinary habits: whether you meet on a regular rhythm, whether you turn up prepared, whether you say the uncomfortable thing while it is still cheap to say. Habits are learnable, and it costs little to find out where your own habits stand before the flow gets tested by something that matters.

The skills behind a message that makes it up the chain

Read back over what separates a message that arrives from one that gets filtered out, and remarkably little of it is about the channel. What varies is how those channels get used — and that rests on a few things that can be built.

Working with Your Manager is where the abstract arrow becomes a specific relationship. On a chart, upward communication runs from a level to a level; in practice it runs from you to one named person, and how well it runs depends on what has already been built there. A regular one-on-one you actually prepare for, results made visible rather than assumed to be noticed, a clear agreement about what you can decide on your own, and enough honesty that bad news reaches your manager from you first — that is the partnership version of the relationship, and it is what makes the channel usable when you finally need it for something hard.

Communication decides whether the message survives the trip. Leading with the main point, staying clear and brief, and choosing the medium deliberately — a live conversation for anything sensitive or complicated, writing when it needs a record or when your manager needs time with it — is what stops a message being softened into something nobody acts on. It also covers the versions of upward communication that are genuinely difficult to construct: disagreeing with a decision, delivering news the receiver won’t welcome, saying the thing instead of hoping someone notices it.

Influence is the difference between being read and being acted on. Nothing obliges a senior person to do anything with what you send up, so whatever weight your message carries is mostly weight you built earlier: a reputation for delivering, a habit of taking initiative, and enough grasp of what matters to the receiver that you can put the point in their terms rather than yours. Presenting the drawbacks alongside the case, taking a small win when a full yes isn’t available, and following up afterward are the ordinary mechanics of getting and applying influence — earned credibility, not maneuvering.

Which of the three is your actual bottleneck is hard to see from the inside, and it changes what is worth working on: the relationship, the construction of the message, or the credibility standing behind it. A free assessment maps all twelve of the work skills this framework treats as buildable, which makes it a quick way to see which one to build first.

What this looks like from where you sit

Some of this probably describes things you already do — the update you rewrote because the first draft buried the point, the concern you raised early even though staying quiet would have been easier. Same behaviors, just without the labels attached to them.

None of it asks you to become a more outspoken version of yourself. Upward communication is a set of specific moves — what you lead with, when you raise it, whose trust you build first — and moves can be added to a working style without replacing it. A gap here is a part you haven’t learned yet, which is a different thing from a limit. It also weighs more as you go: the further your reports have to travel and the more consequential what they carry, the more the way you send them decides how far they get. The one-sentence definition only names which way the arrow points; the more useful thing to understand is how the flow behaves.

See where your own skills stand

Which leaves one useful question: which part of your own upward flow is currently the weakest. The free Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills — about seven minutes — that shows you where you stand across all twelve of them, the three behind everything above included, and points to the one or two that would do the most for how your messages land when they travel upward. It turns a vague sense that you could handle this better into a specific place to start.