Effective Communication in the Workplace
First of all, I will like to suggest that effective communication in the workplace is of paramount importance and integral to the success of any enterprise.
When we communicate with family members and friends, we do not invest much thought in what we say and how we say it, which can lead to misinterpretations and misperceptions with little or no consequence. In the workplace, these misinterpretations and misperceptions can have serious repercussions such as poor productivity, unmotivated employees, financial losses or even law suits. This is why organizations need to invest time, effort and even money to employ strategies to foster effective communication in the workplace.
I have personally witnessed a scenario where effective communication saved the day at a workplace a few years ago at a school where I worked. The Principal of the school had a habit of sending work related emails during the weekends to school employees and expecting immediate responses. Most employees didn’t feel obligated to respond to her during the weekend because the figured that they get paid by the school to work Monday through Friday for 8 hours a day. We whispered to one another that if she expects us to respond to her during the weekends that she needed to pay us for overtime. The Principal started to issue pink slips to us for not responding to her emails immediately which made some employees to threaten the school with law suits, so she decided to have a meeting with all the employees so everyone could be on the same page.
At the meeting, we all expressed to her that the weekends were time for us to spend with family and friends and to for school work. We also advised her that giving us write-ups for choosing not to work when off the clock may just infringe on labor laws.
The Principal advised us that she completely understood our grievances and that she would make amends to compromise with us on this issue. She thanked us for making our dissatisfaction known to her as opposed to going behind her back to file a complaint with the school board. She assured us that every write-up issued to us on this subject would be shredded and she followed through. She even went as far as not sending emails to us over the weekends or outside of work hours.
There are three major reasons why I think this communication was effective and they are as follows:
Face to Face: By face to face, I mean we had a meeting in the flesh instead of over the telephone in the form of a conference call or by way of email or text. Technology is very good as an invaluable asset to most organizations because they help to speed things up but some things still have to be done the old fashioned way (Watson, n.d.). Nowadays, co-workers that are just a cubicle apart would rather communicate by email in lieu of just walking over to each other and having a face to face conversation. There are gestures and facial expressions that can’t