How to Use Smartwatches for Improved Employee Communication

By Isabella Storyclaire

last updated September 17, 2024

Contributions sourced from

Important Communication Skills and How to Improve Them

Communication involves conveying and receiving information through a range of verbal and non-verbal means. When you deliver a presentation at work, brainstorm with your coworkers, address a problem with your boss, or confirm details with a client about their project, you use communication skills.They're an essential part of developing positive professional relationships.

While it might seem like communication is mostly talking and listening, theres more to it than that. Everything from your facial expression to your tone of voice feeds into communication. In this article, we'll go over what communication skills at work look like and discuss ways you can improve your skills to become a more effective communicator.

4 types of communication

Your communication skills will fall under four categories of communication. Let's take a closer look at each area.

1. Written communication

Writing is one of the more traditional aspects of communication. We often write as part of our job, communicating via email and messenger apps like Slack, as well as in more formal documents, like project reports and white papers.

Conveying information clearly, concisely, and with an accurate tone of voice are all important parts of written communication.

2. Verbal communication

Communicating verbally is how many of us share information in the workplace. This can be informal, such as chatting with coworkers about an upcoming deliverable, or more formal, such as meeting with your manager to discuss your performance.

Taking time to actively listen when someone else is talking is also an important part of verbal communication.

3. Non-verbal communication

The messages you communicate to others can also take place non-verballythrough your body language, eye contact, and overall demeanor. You can cultivate strong non-verbal communication by using appropriate facial expressions, nodding, and making good eye contact. Really, verbal communication and body language must be in sync to convey a message clearly.

4. Visual communication

Lastly, visual communication means using images, graphs, charts, and other non-written means to share information. Often, visuals may accompany a piece of writing or stand alone. In either case, it's a good idea to make sure your visuals are clear and strengthen what you're sharing.

Why are communication skills important?

We use our communication skills in a variety of ways in our professional lives: in conversations, emails and written documents, presentations, and visuals like graphics or charts.Communication skills are essential, especially in the workplace, because they can:

Improve your relationships with your manager and coworkers
Build connections with customers
Help you convey your point quickly and clearly
Enhance your professional image
Encourage active listening and open-mindedness
Help advance your career

17 ways to improve your communications skills in the workplace

Communicating effectively in the workplace is a practiced skill. That means, there are steps you can take to strengthen your abilities. We've gathered 17 tips to provide actionable steps you can take to improve all areas of workplace communication.

1. Put away distractions.

Improving your overall communication abilities means being fully present. Put away anything that can distract you, like your phone. It shows others that youre respectfully listening and helps you respond thoughtfully to the conversation.

2. Be respectful.

Be aware of others' time and space when communicating with them. Thank them for their time, keep presentations to within their set time limits, and deliver written communications, like email, during reasonable hours.

3. Be receptive to feedback.

As youre working to improve your communication skills, ask your colleagues for feedback about areas you can further develop. Try incorporating their feedback into your next chat, brainstorming session, or video conference.

4. Prioritize interpersonal skills.

Improving interpersonal skillsor your ability to work with otherswill feed into the way you communicate with your colleagues, managers, and more. Interpersonal skills have to do with teamwork, collaboration, emotional intelligence, and conflict resolution, and often go hand-in-hand with communicating.

Written and visual communication tips

Writing and imagery share a lot in common in that you're using external mediums to share information with an audience. Use the tips below to help improve both of these communication types.

5. Be concise and specific.

Staying on message is key. Use the acronym BRIEF (background, reason, information, end, follow-up) to help guide your written or visual communication. It's important to keep your message clear and concise so your audience understands your point, and doesn't get lost in unnecessary details.

6. Tailor your message to your audience.

Your communication should change based on your audience, similar to how you personalize an email based on who you're addressing it to. In that way, your writing or visuals should reflect your intended audience. Think about what they need to know and the best way to present the information.

7. Tell a story.

When you can, include stories in your written or visual materials. A story helps keep your audience engaged and makes it easier for people to relate to and grasp the topic.

8. Simplify and stay on message.

Proofread and eliminate anything that strays from your message. One of the best ways to improve communication is to work on creating concise and clear conversations, emails, and presentations that are error-free.

Verbal communication tips

Remember that verbal communication goes beyond just what you say to someone else. Use the tips below to improve your speaking and listening abilities.

9. Prepare what youre going to say.

If youre presenting an idea or having a meaningful talk with your supervisor, take some time to prepare what youll say. By organizing your thoughts, your conversation should be clearer and lead to a more productive interaction.

10. Get rid of conversation fillers.

To aid in your conversational improvement, work to eliminate fillers like um, and ah. Start listening for these fillers so you can use them less and convey more confidence when you speak. Often these phrases are used to fill the silence, which is a natural part of conversation, so try to embrace the silence rather than fill it.

11. Record yourself communicating.

If you need to deliver a presentation, practice it in advance and record yourself. Review the recording and look for places to improve, such as catching the conversational fillers we mentioned above or making better eye contact with your audience.

12. Ask questions and summarize the other person's main points.

Part of being an active listener is asking relevant questions and repeating pieces of the conversation to show that you understand a point. Listening makes communication a two-way street, and asking questions is a big part of that.

13. Be ready for different answers.

Listen without judgment. Thats the goal of every conversation, but especially if you hear responses that are unexpected or different than you anticipate. Listen to the person openly, be mindful of your body language, and dont interrupt.

14. Make sure you understand.

Before ending a conversation, take a moment to ask a few follow-up questions and then recap the conversation. You can finish by repeating what you've heard them say and confirming that you understand the next actionable steps.

Non-verbal communication

Lastly, your body communicates a lot. Use the tips below to become more mindful about your body language and other important aspects of non-verbal communication.

15. Work on your body language.

Body language comes up in a range of scenarios. When you're listening, try to avoid slouching, nod to show you hear the person, and think about your facial expressions. If you're speaking, make eye contact and use natural hand gestures.

16. Be aware of your emotions.

How you're feeling can arise non-verbally. During a conversation, meeting, or presentation, stay present with your emotions and reflect on whether your body languageand even the loudness of your voiceare conveying what you want them to.

17. Use empathy.

Consider the feelings of others as you communicate with them. Part of having a meaningful conversation or developing a meaningful presentation is being aware of othersbein empathetic, in other words. If you try to put yourself in their shoes, you can better understand what they need and communicate more effectively.

Read more: What Are Job Skills and Why Do They Matter?

Next steps

Further enhance your communication skills with Improving Communication Skills, part of the Achieving Personal and Professional Success Specialization from the University of Pennsylvania, or the Dynamic Public Speaking Specialization from the University of Washington.

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Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

One of the most essential workplace skills that a manager looks for when promoting from within is communication. Communication, coupled with problem-solving skills and time management, are the top three qualities hiring managers look for, according to TopResume [2].

Every conversation that you have can serve as practice. You can also ask to take on more communicative roles at work, like offering to lead a meeting or presenting the teams findings.

People listen and respond to coworkers or supervisors who have a fair, positive attitude. Try to stay upbeat, smile when you talk, and remove yourself from conversations that put others down.

Nurses' Use of Personal Smartphone Technology in the Workplace: Scoping Review

Background: There has been an increase in the technological infrastructures of many health care organizations to support the practice of health care providers. However, many nurses are using their personal digital devices, such as smartphones, while at work for personal and professional purposes. Despite the proliferation of smartphone use in the health care setting, there is limited research on the clinical use of these devices by nurses. It is unclear as to what extent and for what reasons nurses are using their personal smartphones to support their practice.

Objective: This review aimed to understand the current breadth of research on nurses' personal smartphone use in the workplace and to identify implications for research, practice, and education.

Methods: A scoping review using Arksey and O'Malley's methodological framework was conducted, and the following databases were used in the literature search: CINAHL, PubMed, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, Embase, MEDLINE, Nursing and Allied Health Database, Scopus, Web of Science, and Cochrane Reviews. Search terms used were Nurs* AND (personal digital technology OR smartphone OR cellphone OR mobile phone OR cellular phone). Inclusion criteria included research focused on nurses' use of their own digital technologies, reported in English, and published between January 2010 and January 2020. Exclusion criteria were if the device or app was implemented for research purposes, if it was provided by the organization, if it focused on infection control, and if it was focused on nursing students or nursing education.

Results: A total of 22 out of 2606 articles met the inclusion criteria. Two main themes from the thematic analyses included personal smartphone use for patient care and implications of personal smartphone use. Nurses used their smartphones to locate information about medications, procedures, diagnoses, and laboratory tests. Downloaded apps were used by nurses to locate patient care-related information. Nurses reported improved communication among health team members and used their personal devices to communicate patient information via text messaging, calling, and picture and video functions. Nurses expressed insight into personal smartphone use and challenges related to distraction, information privacy, organizational policies, and patient perception.

Conclusions: Nurses view personal smartphones as an efficient method to gather patient care information and to communicate with the health care team. This review highlights knowledge gaps regarding nurses' personal device use and information safety, patient care outcomes, and communication practices. This scoping review facilitates critical reflection on patient care practices within the digital context. We infer that nurses' use of their personal devices to communicate among the health care team may demonstrate a technological "work-around" meant to reconcile health system demands for cost-efficiency with efforts to provide quality patient care. The current breadth of research is focused on acute care, with little research focus in other practices settings. Research initiatives are needed to explore personal device use across the continuum of health care settings.

Workforce superpowers Wearables are augmenting employees abilities

Wearable technology can augment workers physical and perceptual abilities and help keep them safe. Its time for companies to assess the potential of this technology and consider its impact on workforce planning.

Its not only pessimistic sci-fi authors who have long envisioned a jobless futureplenty of analysts worry that robots may someday make human workers obsolete.¹ But this overlooks a crucial trend: Technology is already making workers more valuable by enhancing their physical and perceptual abilities. A new generation of wearable technologies is giving workers superhuman strength, endurance, vision, hearing, and awareness. Wearables are enhancing workers effectiveness and productivity and helping to keep people safe. Far from making workers obsolete, these technologies can improve their productivity, help them overcome physical limitations, or compensate for spotty skills. And they give employers new ways to plan for the workforce of the future.

Signals

Older workers are participating in the workforce in greater numbers: By 2026, 37 percent of those aged 65 to 69 years will be actively employed, versus 22 percent in 1996²
Annual workplace injury costs have reached almost US$60 billion in the United States³
Enterprises in the automotive, chemicals and materials, mining, and oil and gas industries are using wearables to improve worker safety while enhancing the quality and efficiency of their work
Wearables are also driving workplace productivity and well-being in nonindustrial settings such as health care, retail, travel, financial services, and real estate
Leading technology and industrial products companies offer a range of wearable workforce solutions
Venture capital investment in wearables startups totals around US$6 billion since 2014⁴
The global market for enterprise wearablesincluding smart watches, smart glasses, hearables, and exoskeletonsis expected to grow 41 percent annually to exceed US$60 billion in 2022⁵

New world of work, new technologies

The impact of technology on work has always been double-sided. Some technologies have eliminated jobs and displaced workers; others have made workers more productive. Making workers more productive and more capable is the promise of wearable technologies. Early signs suggest that wearables could have a significant impact on the workforce and the companies that employ them.

Its particularly important to understand how this plays out at a time of rapid technological change and one in which the workforce is changing in important ways. For instance, in developed economies, the workforce is aging,⁶ employers face shortages of employees with desired skills,⁷ remote working is on the rise,⁸ and regulators are carefully scrutinizing workplace safety.⁹

Wearable technologies such as smart watches, smart glasses, hearables, and exoskeletons can help company leaders navigate these challenges by augmenting workers physical and perceptual capabilities, amplifying their physical strength, lucidly conveying detailed task instructions as needed, facilitating virtual interactions, and alerting for hazards. All of this has the potential to significantly boost productivity¹⁰ and safety.

Advances in enabling technologies are propelling the market for wearables

Advancements in technologies such as robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) are driving enterprise adoption of wearables by improving their viability and utility: The hardware, including sensor modules, smart glasses, and exosuits, is getting smaller, lighter, and more affordable. Crucially, newer hardware is also offering longer battery life. A growing ability to capture and process complex data in real time, including voice and gestures, is making wearables easier to use. And vendor offerings of wearables-as-a-service and as end-to-end solutions are making them easier for enterprises to adopt.¹¹

The digitally enhanced workforce

Various forms of wearables are finding use in diverse settings, from manufacturing and construction sites to research labs and offices. This can bring benefits to workers and their employers in several ways.

Enhancing strength and endurance

Some businesses that employ physical labor are equipping their workers with exoskeletons that aim to support the body, helping employees conserve energy and avoid strainfor instance, they can also transfer the weight of heavy loads to the ground or to different muscles to boost strength and endurance. This is particularly useful in the context of an aging workforce.

At Ford, exoskeletons enable manufacturing workerssome over 50 years oldto engage in prolonged efforts with less fatigue.¹² And at Lowes hardware stores, exoskeletons help workers easily lift heavy objects.¹³

Because they provide muscle support, exoskeletons can help workers avoid overexertionthe leading cause of disabling workplace injuries, accounting for nearly US$14 billion in annual compensation costs for businesses.¹⁴ Organizations such as automaker Audi,¹⁵ construction company Gammon,¹⁶ and the US Navy¹⁷ are evaluating or using exoskeletons.

Augmenting vision

Augmented and virtual reality can amplify workers powers of perception. As we have written elsewhere, a growing number of businesses are finding applications for these technologies to guide workflow, collaboration, and productivity.¹⁸

Overlaying contextually relevant information such as instructions and explanations in a workers field of view can enable him or her to work faster and with better quality. For example, at GE Aviation, smart glasses ensure that mechanics need not stop work to check reference manuals, thus improving efficiency by 8 to 12 percent while reducing errors, potentially saving millions.¹⁹

Rich visualization capabilities afforded by wearable AR or VR devices can augment staffers design and data analysis abilities. For instance, Pfizers researchers can absorb complex data about protein structures more quickly by virtually stepping inside molecules, studying them up close and from every angle.²⁰

AR can also make collaboration more cost-effective by giving people the ability to see remote activities in real time. While repairing equipment at bottling plants, Coca-Cola technicians use smart glasses to share their visuals with remotely located experts for advice;²¹ this reduces delays and costs involved in flying in those specialists to the site.

Empowering speech and hearing voice

Connected hearables and voice-controlled wearables can bring instant, hands-free access to instructions and other information with the intuitive ease of speech. This can not only empower less skilled workers but increase efficiency by making workers more productive.

For instance, at Lufthansa, voice-based headphones enable a single technician to accomplish the maintenance work that earlier required two. Previously, in teams of two, one person would read out instructions, while another would execute them and report status, which the first would then write down. With the wearable, the maintenance checklist gets converted to voice commands conveyed to a technicians headphones; the technician then executes the tasks and speaks out the status, with that speech automatically converted into data and stored.²²

Voice wearables can also transform customer service. At Air New Zealand, with wireless headphones connected to machine learningenabled live translation capabilities on a smartphone, staff can understand customers speaking in any of 40 languages.²³

Improving awareness

Connected wearables can provide quick task and situational awareness to workers to increase their productivity and work quality. At Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, smart watches alert cleaning crews when and where they are needed. Dynamic task scheduling produces cleaner facilities than fixed rounds did, resulting in better traveler experience.²⁴

Wearables can help improve worker safety as well by monitoring the wearers physical status and environmental conditions and raising alerts when conditions become dangerous. At a Fujitsu factory, smart wristwear issues alerts at signs of heat stress,²⁵ while at a mining company, smart helmets detect driver fatigue. There is significant economic potential here: US businesses spend nearly US$1 billion per week compensating for workplace injuries.²⁶

Corporate wellness programs may be able to improve staff health and reduce health care costs by introducing such devices as data-driven motivators. For instance, with Fitbit, the Dayton Regional Transit Authority helped employees improve glucose and cholesterol levels while saving more than US$2 million in health care costs.²⁷ One projection sees 90 percent of enterprise wellness initiatives including fitness trackers by 2021.²⁸

Implications for enterprises

In augmenting human physical and sensory capabilities, wearables may change the game for organizations that struggle with skill shortages or aging workers and yet find full automation infeasible due to high costs, process complexity, or simply the fact that some work is best done by people rather than robots.²⁹ By supporting workers and embodying skills and abilities they may lack, wearables can expand the labor pool available to employers and reduce the time required to train workers for new tasks.

Effective deployment of wearables requires technology leaders to work alongside operations leaders to integrate the new tools into existing enterprise technology systems; some workflow procedures will no doubt need to be tweaked to incorporate employees new capabilitiesfor instance, aiming to digitize maintenance steps so they can be displayed over smart glasses or read over smart hearables. Additionally, organizations face cybersecurity and governance concerns related to wearable data transmission and storage. Depending on how wearable data is used, it may be considered protected health information under HIPAA regulations.³⁰

Change management programs to support the deployment of wearables in the workforce should include more than trainingthey may need to anticipate and address employee concerns over privacy and data usage: According to a recent UK study, many workers are concerned about surveillance through wearables or Big Brother watching.³¹ And plenty fear workplace discrimination based on health data captured from wearables.³² This suggests that leaders may need to clarify to workers how employers intend to use wearablesand how personal data will be protected. Its more likely that people will be enthusiastic if they understand how anonymized and aggregated data from wearables can inform work design, staffing, and other decisions to the benefit of employees as well as the organization.

Wearables in your workplace

In the coming months and years, well likely see wearables take even more forms and combine a wider range of emerging technologies. For now, their core utility remains to ensure the safety and augment the capabilities of workers. They are gaining traction. In manufacturing alone, half of 1,100 recently surveyed global enterprises plan to deploy these technologies by 2022.³³ Its time for companies not already utilizing wearables to assess their potential and to rethink workforce planning in light of the impact these technologies can have. After all, what employer wouldnt want a workforce with superpowers?