Introduction To Business Communications

When you think of business communications, what springs to mind?
The telephone? E-mail? Online forms? Reports and accounts? A receptionist?
All these could be examples of business communications – it is a very big area.

Businesses also know that they communicate with us in very subtle ways – sometimes the business might not even know what it is communicating! Other times, the business communicates in ways that it really does not want to. If this all sounds a bit like a riddle, then you are right – we need to look in a little more detail at what business communication is all about.

This is the first of a series of articles looking at business communication. In this first resource, we will look at what we mean by communication and how communication is not always successful.

When you are doing the tasks, remember that there are no ‘right’ answers to any of the questions. One of the important things about these tasks is that you try to understand why you might have different answers/responses to your class mates.

Business Communications is split into the following sections:
What is communication?
Our starting point is to ask what communication is.

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

Consider this statement.
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:

1. Communication must involve two parties
2. 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.
3. 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:

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