Understanding the Communication Process in the Workplace

Institute of Leadership & Mana, Institute of Leadership & Management

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780080464336
• eBook ISBN: 9781136351310
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Super series are a set of workbooks to accompany the flexible learning programme specifically designed and developed by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) to support their Level 3 Certificate in First Line Management. The learning content is also closely aligned to the Level 3 S/NVQ in Management. The series consists of 35 workbooks. Each book will map on to a course unit (35 books/units).

Session B

Communication media

1 Introduction

How many ways do you receive communications in a normal day? Face-to-face, no doubt, but also phone calls, text messages, faxes and emails? Television, radio, Internet, public address? There are more ways – or media – of communicating information available now than ever before.

This should be an advantage, but there are problems in it for senders and receivers. Too much information can be as much of a problem as too little.

The American Marshall McLuhan said famously that ‘the medium is the message’ – how you say something matters more than what you say. Sometimes you may feel this is true, but ultimately the GIGO factor will catch up with those who send messages that are worthless.		Because no matter how sophisticated the delivery medium and how great its capacity to deliver 24/7, there are still only 168 hours in a week – and most people need to sleep for at least 25% of them.
		So, both at work and at home, people need to make informed choices about which medium to use and when to say ‘no’.
		The communication cycle (see Session A) applies to all media. Information is received, decoded, processed, encoded and transmitted. Some media, such as broadcasting, telephone networks and the Internet, effectively have infinite capacity to transmit data, but the people who do the processing – the makers of a feature film, for instance – do not.

The GIGO principle – garbage in, garbage out – applies to every medium used, including email, text messaging and the intranets which many organizations use. The more information is fed into them, the more its quality and relevance needs to be controlled.

This session will help you to select the correct medium for the information you need to communicate – from face-to-face interviews to sending a message throughout the organization and beyond.

2 Choosing the right method of communication

We are spoilt for choice when it comes to media. How do we choose the right medium for our message?

2.1	Looking at the medium’s effectiveness and efficiency

‘Effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ are often used as though they mean more or less the same thing. But, in management terms, they have very different meanings.

Activity 14

What do you understand by these two ‘e’ words?

Efficiency

Effectiveness

I’m going to use the following definitions throughout this session; see how they compare with yours.

Efficiency is getting the greatest amount of output for the effort and resources being used.

Effectiveness is producing a desired result. It is a matter of quality as well as quantity. A desired result may not be quite the same thing as sheer amount of output, as the example below shows.

Activity 15

Holibus operates coach holidays throughout En...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series preface
• Unit specification
• Workbook introduction
• Session A The communication process
• Session B Communication media
• Performance checks
• Reflect and review
• Backcover