Do you feel energized at the end of the workday? Or does your work experience drain you so much you're just happy to make it through the day?

If you're like most people, you're probably somewhere between just doing OK and slogging through. According to annual surveys from Gallup, most employee workdays are anything but energizing. Your 100 percent effort may sometimes feel like it's not as productive as you would like.

It's frustrating. And, like most employees, Gallup would label you as "disengaged." Why is that?

A key reason is likely communication breakdowns between leaders and the workforce. They make work harder than it should be.

This was the case in a technology company where managers pressured software developers to deliver a product by a certain deadline. The developers kept getting stuck because they were told to take every problem to the project leader or to the architect — both of whom were too busy to respond quickly. Instead of writing code, developers paced the halls waiting for answers.

Meanwhile, the project leader and architect were doing what they had been ordered to do — keep tight controls on quality. As leaders grew impatient for the product, they put more pressure on the architect, and the architect spread it generously to everyone on the project.

You can guess what it was like to work there. Grumbling and them-and-us squabbles became their office Muzak.

Employees snarked that leaders were out of touch, and leaders charged developers with being undependable. Lousy communications caused everyone to lose sight of the goal to create a great product. Until leaders and developers fixed the communications breakdown, frustration would mark the relationship and derail the project.

Have you ever played the telephone game where you pass a message through a line of people? If you have, you know how easy it is to mess up information. Nobody should be shocked when one-way communication fails the effectiveness test. It's a leading cause of breakdowns in organizations.

But good communicating is about more than pushing messages back and forth. It takes openness and collaboration to draw the company together and pull the same direction. That's supported by results from Glassdoor.com — a database and research company with millions of company reviews and CEO approval ratings.

Glassdoor research finds that when employees lack regular, straightforward communications and feel no one listens to them, they see leaders as out of touch. Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman explains that open communication channels between leaders and the workforce "are key to helping leaders understand what's working and what can be improved." He points out that whether employees like their CEO depends a lot on how much they feel he or she listens to them.

Poor communications obscures the big picture. When that happens, people defend their departments at the expense of the business. They compete for resources instead of using them collaboratively for the benefit of all. And they get into illogical, counterproductive situations like those in the tech firm.

It's OK for leaders to send information to employees through the hierarchy. But when leaders use conversations to also share the organization's goals, strategies and reasons for them directly with employees, they can skirt some of the causes of communication breakdowns that occur in one-way communication.

Open communication that allows leaders and employees to share their concerns, arrange resources and provide straight answers to sometimes-tough questions helps everyone to be on the same page. You can see the logic when leaders include employees — the ones who will execute the strategy — in planning discussions to do just that.

Great communication re-energizes the workforce by helping employees who may feel they are giving 100 percent see results that more closely match their efforts. That's because communication that builds unity and a collaborative culture gets everyone working together toward the big picture — competing successfully as a business.