By Dana P Skopal, PhD

The terms communication skills and soft skills can mean different things to different people, particularly in the workplace. The two concepts are abstract nouns, which means a reader/ listener creates their individual understanding of the term (unlike a concrete noun, such as ‘table’).

Good communication is considered essential for any business to operate effectively. If workers, especially managers, do not communicate clearly, then it is questionable how well staff can complete their tasks. So how can we define or measure the key (soft) skills relating to communication in the workplace?

An employee with good communication skills would relate better to clients and co-workers, and these inter-relational skills, or soft skills, can drive business outcomes. Further, research showed that ‘increasing the quality of communication’ between team members led to greater efficiency (Lam, 2015). Business outcomes can be measured by income generated, while good teamwork is evident through project completions.

After consulting with Australian industry personnel, Deloitte Access Economics (2017) placed communication skills into the broad concept of soft skills. This broad term refers to work skills that are transferable between professions and link to technical skills. These concepts are again abstract nouns, so can we practically define them?

Good communication skills would mean clear effective speaking and writing, and also listening (in addition to all the reading one has to do for work). The other side of the speaking and writing process would be to measure the comprehension of the message by the final user.

Focusing on writing in the workplace, good communication skills include clear organisation of ideas as well as sentence structure. Our research (Skopal & Herke, 2017) showed that readers responded positively when the written text comprised of:

• clearer Themes and Rhemes (relating to coherence)
• macro-structural signposting (a document’s global information organisation)
• multi-modal design features, such as use of bold text.

The lexico-grammatical features favoured by the readers were:

• an average sentence length of 20 words or less
• shorter nominal groups (describing the what, who, where)
• a low ratio of embedded clauses/phrases per sentence
• the use of personal pronouns to refer to the organisation.

All these elements can be taught at university and through workplace training, as writers are more motivated to re-write/ edit their texts when writing in their discipline (area of expertise) and understanding the purpose of their document.

Deloitte Access Economics. (2017). Soft Skills for Business Success: Building Australia’s Future Workforce. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Lam, C. (2015). The role of Communication and Cohesion in Reducing Social Loafing in Group Projects. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 78 (4), 454-475.

Skopal, D. P. & Herke, M. (2017). Public discourse syndrome: reformulating for clarity. Text & Talk, 37 (1), 141–164,  doi: 10.1515/text-2016-0041.

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