Communication used to live on the list of soft skills, somewhere near the bottom, treated as a nice-to-have rather than a make-or-break. That label has not aged well. The world of work has become volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and in that VUCA environment communication has quietly moved to the center of everything. A recent Wiley survey found that 64 percent of people called it the single most important leadership skill. It is the anchor that keeps a team steady when nothing around it is.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Because we all talk every day, we assume we already know how to communicate, and we assume everyone else does too. In fragmented, hybrid, and remote teams, that assumption falls apart fast. Let’s dig into why it is so much harder now, and what good communication really looks like in practice.
The skill that stopped being soft
When things are stable, a team can survive weak communication. Gaps get papered over, context fills itself in, and the work still moves. Almost nothing is stable right now, and that is what changes the math. Strong communication becomes the difference between a team that thrives and one that is merely surviving, at every level, from the people doing the work all the way up to leadership. It is no longer the soft skill on the side of the desk. It is the thing holding the desk together.
Why it got so much harder
Teams are more distributed than ever. People work across regions and time zones, sometimes with no meeting window that is comfortable for everyone. On top of that, there are more ways to reach each other than at any point in history. Email, Slack, Teams, video calls, and the old-fashioned walk to someone’s desk all compete for attention, and people are overwhelmed by the choices. We have also drifted toward a text-first culture, partly because writing is easy and partly because a written trail feels safe when someone wants to prove the message was sent. The result is a lot of monitoring, a lot of channels, and a lot of room for the message to get lost.
The 7-38-55 rule, and the 93 percent you lose
There is a useful idea taught in facilitation classes called the Mehrabian 7-38-55 rule. When a message carries emotion, it lands as 7 percent the words themselves, 38 percent tone of voice, and 55 percent body language and facial expression. Send that message as an email or a Slack with no voice and no face, and you can lose up to 93 percent of what you meant to say. Even a phone call without video still drops the 55 percent that lives in expression. So the next time something matters, the honest question is not whether you sent it. It is whether you said it in a way the other person could fully receive.
Say it seven times, in seven ways
A message usually needs to be heard about seven times before it sticks. The catch is that those seven times have to come in seven different formats, not the same email blasted out seven times in a row. One pass might be a town hall, another a short webinar, another a one-on-one conversation. For something core, like a set of values or a major change, it can be worth getting creative and putting the message where people actually live, on a mug on the desk or printed somewhere they will see it day to day. Rolling out change is never one and done. It takes repetition, in different forms, with ongoing updates on how the change is going.
The over-communication trap
Repetition has a dark twin, and it is volume for its own sake. Flood every channel and people stop reading any of it. Think of the parent who gets seven emails a day from a school and quietly tunes out all of them, or the online store that wonders why subscribers keep leaving when it sends a sale email every single day. The intentions are good. The effect is noise that drowns out the signal, and a team that has learned to ignore you. More communication is not the same as better communication, and knowing the difference is most of the skill.
Make it two-way, and put it in the working agreement
So what works? Start by tailoring the message to the audience and how they prefer to receive it. Some people want the bottom line first, a short checklist at the top with the detail underneath for anyone who needs it. Next, pick your channels and consolidate them. A team that agrees on where conversations happen, for example one shared team channel plus an engineering channel for deeper technical chat, spends far less time hunting for the thread that matters. Pick your formats too, so a request always arrives in a shape people recognize and can act on.
The most important shift is making communication two-way. It is push and pull, not one person broadcasting downward. Open the door, ask for input, and create real moments for dialogue, whether that is office hours, set availability windows, or protected quiet time so focus is possible. A few simple rules of thumb help: if you find yourself hitting reply all for the third or fourth time, stop and get people on a call, because a quick conversation beats a long thread and brings back the tone and expression that text strips away. Best of all, write these norms down. How will we communicate, and what are our best practices, belongs in the team’s working agreement, and it deserves a place in the retrospective so the team can keep tuning it.
What to take home
- Communication is not a soft skill anymore. In an unstable world it is the difference between a team that thrives and one that just survives.
- Words are a small part of the message. The 7-38-55 rule is a reminder that tone and expression carry most of the meaning, and text drops both.
- Repeat yourself, but in different forms. People need to hear something about seven times, in seven different ways, before it lands.
- More is not better. Flooding every channel trains people to tune you out, so protect the signal.
- Pick your channels and formats. Agree as a team on where conversations happen and what shape requests take.
- Make it two-way and write it down. Build dialogue in, then put your communication norms in the working agreement and revisit them often.