Communication Breakdown

In the workplace, employees come from different walks of life bringing in his/her own uniqueness: background, values, personality and communication style.  These differences tend to increase the probability of misunderstanding.

I started working when I was 10 and so I can say “been there – done that” when it comes to witnessing how people affect business because their personalities don’t match or they don’t communicate successfully.  I recall a time when our IT people had to spend 2 full days fixing databank because they didn’t understand the instructions.  Instead of asking for clarification, they “thought” they were doing things correctly.  One time in the restaurant where I worked, we had a group of 40 people who had a special request for their menu.  The waitress was told that they didn’t want a particular ingredient in their food – I think it was spice.  To make the long story short, the customer was not satisfied because their request was not granted.  We had to discard the entire menu and cooked another set! Of course, they never came back.  Oh, I’ve seen a lot I’ve lost count.

What’s important here is that incidents like these result in waste of time, company resources and business opportunity.

And here’s what I’ve learned:  at any time we communicate, we should always be mindful of the elements of communication: sender – channel – receiver.  The process is simply a cycle: we send a message through a channel and the receiver gets our message; the receiver sends his feedback through the same channel and the initial sender, upon receiving the feedback now becomes the receiver.   Any disruption in any of these components can cause communication breakdown.  Along with hampering the rhythm of work, it can also affect relationships among colleagues and between employers and employees.  And this is not good for any business.

In the workplace, we deal with customers, stakeholders and colleagues.  We communicate in different ways:  face-to-face, via telephone, emails, online chats and other social media.  The words we use, the tone we use, our body language – all these can “throw” in different meaning to our message.  And because of the differences among people in the workplace, one’s personality becomes part of the message.  Sometimes, people find me too direct or too frank that I might hurt their feelings.  To hurt the feelings of others is never part of my agenda.  I am just being me, voicing my thoughts and my feelings out loud.

I’ve worked with people from different cultures.  Imagine what kind of caution I needed to take because I need to consider the differences in beliefs and practices resulting from the differences in culture.  At the same time, I have to understand what they are telling me from their perspective – how they talk, their limitation in the language – so that I do not misunderstand them.  I remember a time when I had Caucasian guest in my house.  When she came in, she didn’t take off her shoes;  this is very offending for Chinese whose practice is to take off their shoes upon entering a house.  Later on, I learned not taking off her shoes was her way of expressing respect.  She felt that because she didn’t have her socks on, the germs on her feet would do worse to the floor than her dry shoes.

Whether we are dealing with strangers or people known to us, we need to consider “timing.”  Imagine an employee asking for a raise in salary in the morning of Monday?  What’s the chance of him getting what he is requesting.

In short, in order for us not to be misunderstood, we should know how to say what we want to say and when to say it.  As listener or receiver of a message, we need to be assured that we understand the message well before we give our feedback.

Indeed, communication is like tango; it takes two to make it work.