How Dumb Do You Need to Be, to Be Told Not to Touch Alligators?

COMMUNICATION

Could this sign be any clearer?

How dumb do you need to be, to be told not to touch alligators?

Yet, people still will.

This is NOT effective communication, because people will still end up getting bitten by the ‘gators. You could say that this is a good thing, because people that stupid need punishing, but…

What is communication?

At its most basic, communication is the transfer of information.

A friend sends you a text which reads:

Hi, can u mt me at 6 by the cafe on Nelson rd? txt me back to let me no.

What does your friend want?

If you have been able to interpret the message and can state the two things your friend wants you to do, then the pair of you have engaged in successful communication.

This tells us something important about communication:

·  Communication must involve two parties

·  Communication is about a transfer of information
However, if you understand what your friend wants but you don't text back, the communication has not been entirely successful. This leads us to identifying our third important point about communication.

·  Communication involves some action on the party receiving the information

Your friend will not know whether the communication has been successful until you text him or her back and tell them whether you can meet them at 6 at the stated place or not. If you don't, they might not know whether you want to meet them, or whether you do, but the time or place is inconvenient (or both), or even whether you have received the text in the first place.

The Basic Communication Model

To try and help us understand the basic principle of communication, we can look at a diagrammatic representation of communication as follows:

The source is the person or group or organisation sending out the message/information.

The medium: The message is given out in some sort of medium - this is the means by which the message is sent. This can be either:

·  Oral - spoken

·  Via electronic means - e-mail, fax or through the Web for example

·  Telephone

·  Paper based - letter, memo, scribbled note, poster etc.

·  Image/visual

·  Sound

·  Silent communication - smell, touch, body language, colour, how letters or numbers are presented. For example, Ford's new Mondeo car has a number of models within the range, including the Titanium and Titanium X - which do you think is the better model?

The Receiver - the person, group or organisation that is receiving the information.

Feedback - The source will not know whether the communication that they have sent has been successful unless they receive some feedback in the form of some action or changed behaviour.

'Noise' and Barriers to Communication

The problem is that communication is rarely as simple as this model would suggest. There are lots of different types of medium to send a message in and the way that the receiver perceives the message might be very different to that which the sender intended. Have you ever received a text message from a friend that you thought meant something different to what your friend intended?

When messages are sent, the source has to try to understand what they are trying to say. This might be interpreted differently by the receiver. Messages are said to experience 'noise' along the way - the more noise there is, the less likelihood there is of the message being received properly. This represents a barrier to communication. Barriers to communication can take many forms, which include:

·  Language

·  Technical content

·  Lack of understanding of what the receiver wants or needs

·  Inadequate feedback

·  Emotional interference - can you really send out a clear message when you are upset, for example?

·  The degree of knowledge and expertise of the sender and the receiver

·  The quality of the information sent

·  The use of an inappropriate medium

·  Lack of trust or honesty in the source

·  Cultural differences

·  Poor listening skills

·  The position or status of the source

As a result, our communication model might look more like this:

Successful and unsuccessful communication

Given the range of different communications that businesses have to make it is not surprising that mistakes are made and that sometimes communication breaks down.

Task:

For each of the barriers above, try to find two examples for each that highlight the problem. We have given you one example below: This is a quote from a Web site that covers a computer operating system called Linux:

The Linux source code, with which the project has initially been linked, presents the indexer with some very tough obstacles. Specifically, the heavy use of preprocessor macros makes the parsing a virtual nightmare. We want to index the information in the preprocessor directives as well as the actual C code, so we have to parse both at once, which leads to no end of trouble.

Understand that? Certainly there are some people out there who can but for many people the language used and the technical nature of the subject will mean that this is meaningless to a large number of people. It would be an example of either language and/or technical barriers to successful communication - for some people.

Interpreting Communication

Given the basic model that we have outlined, we need to ask some important questions. If we assume that the 'business' is the source of the messages we are concerned with in this context, we need to ask: who is the receiver?

Part of the problem facing businesses is that the receiver can be many different people and groups and it is not always clear who they are! In addition, the receivers might be many different types of people, so each might react to the message and the medium in different ways.

For example: See ‘Faces PPT’

The last activity might give you some idea of how difficult communication can be sometimes - quite often the message that we might think we are giving out is quite different to the way that someone else receives it.

For businesses, communication occurs every day in all sorts of different ways to all sorts of different people. Draw a diagram that summarises some of the people who might be receivers of communication that will be important for the business. Take each group of stakeholders, and then explain the different ways in which a business might communicate with them.

How do we know if communication has been successful?

Having looked at some possible causes of barriers to communications, let us now turn to looking at how a business might know if its communications have been successful.

In the first section on the nature of communications, we pointed out that communication requires some form of feedback from the receiver to the source. Successful communication will take place if that feedback is in line with what the source was aiming for when sending out the message in the first place.

Take this simple example. Your teacher takes you to one side and talks to you about your homework. She tells you that you have not been handing in your work on time and that it is of poor quality. She wants you to realise that your grades depend on you doing your homework properly and to the best of your ability and handing it in on time.
If, as a result of this talk, you begin to hand in your work on time and the quality of it improves, then the teacher's message will have been successful. If you continue to not do your homework or do it without much care and attention then the communication will not have been successful. How does the teacher know? Because you don't hand in your work on time and it is of poor quality - the two main points of the message!

Successful communication, therefore, will bring some sort of feedback that links back to the intention of the source in giving out the message - that the message is having the desired effect.

Task:

In each of the following business cases, what sort of response do you think the source will be looking for as evidence that the communication has been successful? What other reactions might the source get as a result of the message being sent?

·  A manager posts a notice to all staff in her section telling them that there will be a staff meeting at 3.30 that afternoon

·  A small business places an advert in the local press telling prospective customers that next Saturday they will be offering a two-for one- promotion between 10.00am and 1.00pm.

·  A receptionist leaves a message on the answer phone of a member of staff asking the individual to phone back Mike Burks in Sales before 5.00pm.

·  The London Olympic organising team release the new logo for the 2012 Olympic Games.

·  A business publishes its annual report and financial accounts to shareholders.

·  A large business announces to suppliers that it is going to increase the length of the credit terms it has from 28 days to 60 days.

·  The government announces new limits on the amount of waste products businesses can produce.

·  A company producing bio-fuel announces plans to build a new plant on the outskirts of a small town in a rural area.

·  Microsoft announces plans to reduce the prices of its Xbox console in the UK.

·  A new office worker on his first day in a new job sends a joke he has heard over the weekend to his new boss via e-mail

·  An employer sends a text message to 40 of his staff telling them they are out of work because the company is insolvent.

·  A company encloses a slip of paper in every employee's salary information sheet at the end of a month informing them of the new mission statement that the company has decided upon.

Successful communication

BUSINESS STUDIES IGCSE