Communication
Communication Skills Examples for Work
Practical communication skills examples for the workplace: listening, written updates, difficult conversations and presentations, with wording you can adapt and practise.
Communication skills at work are the observable behaviours that make information move clearly between people: listening until you understand, writing updates people can act on, raising difficult topics early and presenting ideas so others can decide. They are not a personality trait you either have or lack—each one is a set of behaviours you can practise and improve.
Employers consistently rank communication among the most valued workplace skills, and it is the skill most often named in feedback conversations. This guide breaks it into concrete examples you can recognise in your own week, with fictional wording to adapt. Use it to prepare for a review, build a development plan or simply notice what you already do well.
Listening and checking understanding
Listening is the least visible communication skill and the one colleagues notice most when it is missing. The observable behaviours: letting someone finish, asking a question before responding, and summarising what you heard before acting on it.
Example: ‘Before we finalise the plan, let me check I have understood: the deadline moved because of the supplier, and your team needs the spec a week earlier. Have I got that right?' This takes ten seconds and prevents the most common workplace misunderstanding—two people leaving a conversation with different versions of what was agreed.
A development version: if colleagues often say ‘that's not quite what I meant', practise summarising before responding in your next three meetings. Ask a trusted colleague afterwards whether your understanding was accurate.
Written updates people can act on
Most workplace writing fails in one of two ways: the request is buried, or the reader cannot tell what is decision, what is context and what is action. A useful update separates those three explicitly.
Example structure: ‘Decision needed: approve the revised timeline by Thursday. Context: the supplier delay moves testing by a week. Action: if I do not hear otherwise, I will notify the client on Friday.' The reader knows in five seconds what you need from them.
Adapt the length to the reader. Your manager may need three lines; a cross-team handover may need a page with owners and dates. The skill is not brevity itself—it is giving each audience the version they can use.
Raising difficult topics early
The clearest sign of strong communication is raising a problem while it is still small. The observable behaviours: naming the issue factually, owning your part, and proposing a next step rather than only reporting the problem.
Example: ‘I want to flag the integration risk now rather than at the review. My estimate assumed the API documentation was current, and it is not. I can revise the estimate by tomorrow, or we can descope the integration for this release. I would recommend revising.'
Compare that with the weak version—waiting until the deadline, then explaining why it was impossible. The information is the same; the timing and the proposed next step are what make it skilled communication.
Presenting ideas so people can decide
A workplace presentation succeeds when the audience can make a decision at the end. That means stating the recommendation early, giving the reasoning in the order the audience needs it, and naming the trade-offs honestly.
Example opening: ‘I recommend we pilot the new handover format with two teams for a month. Here is the problem it solves, what it costs, and what we will check before rolling it out.' The audience spends the rest of the presentation evaluating a proposal, not guessing what it is.
Handling questions is part of the skill. ‘I do not know, and I will find out by Friday' is a stronger answer than a confident guess. So is acknowledging a fair challenge: ‘That is the main risk, and here is how we would notice it early.'
Giving and receiving feedback
Feedback is where communication skills become most visible. Giving it well means describing behaviour and impact rather than character: ‘The report went out with two figures unchecked, and the client queried them' rather than ‘you are careless.'
Receiving it well means listening without immediately explaining, asking for a specific example, and saying what you will do with it. ‘Can you give me an example from this week?' turns vague criticism into something you can act on.
Both directions are learnable behaviours, and both show up in how colleagues rate you. If feedback conversations make you defensive or vague, that is a normal starting point—not a fixed limitation.
How to know where you stand
Self-assessment is a starting point, but communication is precisely the skill where your view and others' experience can differ most. You judge your communication by your intent; colleagues judge it by what landed. Both perspectives are real, and the gap between them is where the useful development goals live.
Ask colleagues specific questions rather than ‘how is my communication?': ‘Was my project update useful enough to act on?' or ‘In our last meeting, did you feel heard?' Specific questions get specific answers.
ERA Skills structures this comparison: a free self-assessment across Communication and four other interpersonal skills, then pooled feedback from at least three people who know your work. No individual rater's answers are shown, so people can be honest. The result is a grounded picture of how your communication actually lands—which is the version your career runs on.