communication - barriers
Inevitably, most businesses (perhaps all) suffer from failures in communication. Poor businesses suffer from persistently poor communications.
Perhaps the best way to think about the way in which communication can go wrong is to think about what good communication would be like:
- It would use appropriate language (e.g. no poor use of jargon; written so that the intended recipient can understand)
- It would go only to who should receive it - not everyone
- It would use the right medium to communicate the information
- The information would get to the recipient in good time for it to be used
Taking the above list, it easy to produce a list of how communications go wrong:
- Information is omitted or distorted by the sender
- Information is misunderstood due to the use of inappropriate jargon or lack of clarity
- Information is presented using an inappropriate medium (e.g. via email rather than in a proper report, or via telephone when face-to-face is better)
- Information arrives too late, or incomplete
Barriers to good communication
Research suggests that, amongst the many reasons why information fails to be communicated, the following are the main barriers:
- Different status of the sender and the receiver (e.g. a senior manager sends a memo to a production supervisor - who is likely to pay close attention to the message. The same information, conveyed in the opposite direction might not get the attention it deserves)
- Use of jargon - employees who are "specialists" may fall for the trap of using specialist language for a non-specialist audience (e.g. the IT technician who cannot tries to explain how users should log onto a network, in language that sounds foreign to most users of the network)
- Selective reporting - where the reporter gives the recipient incorrect or incomplete information
- Poor timing - information that is not immediately relevant (e.g. notice of some deadline that seems a long way off) is not always actioned straightaway
- Conflict - where the communicator and recipient are in conflict; information tends to be ignored or distorted
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