Communication barriers and how to overcome them

In the interaction between teams, inside organizations, and between employers and employees, communication is crucial.

While efficient communication ensures the success of an organization, its absence causes a number of hiccups in its internal operations and the relationships between its members. The success of a company’s training, motivation, management of daily instructions, discipline, hiring, and performance reviews are all impacted by communication. As a result, it is necessary to remove all obstacles. I will use the tactics listed below as a manager to go through process, personal, physical, and semantic hurdles.

The process of communication entails the sender and the receiver of information.

Communication is the process of transmitting information from one person to another, and hence, the process is very vital to effective communication. A shared understanding by both communicating parties is, therefore, essential for the transmission of information. As a manager, I will consider strategies of overcoming any form of hindrance to the process of communication.

To overcome the process barrier, I will employ effective procedures of developing adequate communication systems or structures within the organization to enhance smooth flow of information from one place to another.

I will also foster clarity of information delivered, proper induction programs and feedback through effective communication frameworks such as training.

Personal Barriers

Personal barriers include ineffective listening, use of vocabularies in communication, selective attention, failure to give feedback, status, and power, a tendency of evaluation and bipolar thinking among others. Overcoming the personal barriers to communication will entail developing a systematic approach to communication where all individuals are required to give feedback, foster listening of the management to the upward flow of communication, develop frameworks for the use of universal language in carrying out organizational activities and uphold maintenance of attention in communication. Other practices to overcome the barriers will include encouraging feedback from employees, facilitating positive responses and creating an environment void of fear.

Physical Barriers

Physical barriers to communication are easy to spot. They range from the distance between people, interruptions such as telephone calls, walls, static on the radio, environment and drop-in visitors among others and affect the effectiveness of communication. As a manager, my first step to overcoming the barriers would be to open-concept offices to improve communication. I will also employ six design Meta-trends to improve communication among different stakeholders of the organization. Adoption of video conferencing and messaging apps to help employees get immediate feedback and easily track organized conversations will also be among my strategies to overcoming physical barriers.

Semantic Barriers

Semantic barriers entail situations where the sender and receiver of information have different understandings of the message. The barriers create the problem of obstructions in the encoding and decoding of information and hence lead to incorrect translations, use of wrong words and different interpretations. I will lay out initiatives of overcoming semantic barriers by promoting a culture and systems that that ensures the use of direct, straightforward and meaningful language as a means of communication. The information will be worded to reach the level of the readership.

Conclusion

Communication plays a key role in the relationship between employees and employers, between teams and in the organizational process. Effective communication guarantees organizational success. Nevertheless, its absence results in a series of hitches in the processes within an organization as well as the relationships between individuals and teams. Some of the barriers include physical, semantic, personal and process. The aforementioned strategies help in overcoming the barriers.