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05. Communication Destination

Dated: 21-12-2024

The destination of communication can be either internal or external and it varies from organization to organization but for larger organizations, the rate of internal communication increases rapidly as compared to the external ones.

Internal Communication

Internal communication includes:

  • Upward communication
  • Downward communication
  • Lateral communication

Effective internal communication - Increases - Job satisfaction - Safety - Productivity - Profits - Decreases - Absenteeism - Grievances - Turn over

External Communication

Organizations often depend on publics for their economical survival.
Therefore, external communication plays a major role in their operations.

Types of media used to communicate externally are:

  • letters
  • reports
  • stockholder reports
  • proposals
  • stockholder meetings
  • telephone conversations
  • conferences.

The informal reports are used internally within the organization, meanwhile the formal reports are used externally.

Benefits of Communication: Employees

Following are the benefits of good communication skills for employees

Conflict Resolution

Within the organization, we often find people having opposing ideas, which often result into conflicts.
Now, these conflicts can either be resolved into something which benefits everyone, or they can either hurt the professional relationships between people.

Motivation

Motivation is the process of satisfying one's internal needs by their behavior or actions.
People are not born with motivation, but rather motivation develops over time.
And these motivations are different among different people depending on their psyche, desires, and deep-rooted needs.

Problem Solving

In business, you need to create an environment for people to work together, and these people come from different cultures, expectations, backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences, which causes differences among these people and can make working together harder.
Therefore, effective communication is necessary to solve the problems among the people so they are able to work together.

Public Relations

The public relations function takes many forms in different organizations, including:

  1. public information
  2. investor relations
  3. public affairs
  4. corporate communications
  5. employee relations
  6. marketing or product publicity
  7. consumer service or customer relations

Benefits of Communication: Organizations

Following are the benefits of effective communication for organizations.

Positive Image

While delivering a message either from oral or written medium, the communicator has infinite opportunities to spoil the organization's positive image.
It can either happen due to the communicator failing to answer a question from the outsider or delivering completely incorrect information.
An unfortunate situation arises when the listener or reader receives a totally incorrect perception of what the speaker/writer intended.

Cost Reduction

Effective communication is responsible for cost reduction as well.
Let us take an example.
Let us say that we have to write a letter which costs 10 PKR to write, but if the letter fails to communicate the message effectively, then the letter has to be written again.
In many instances, the employers fail to communicate to their employees, which creates the impression in the employees that their manager or employer does not care about their positions or their work.
Hence, it causes the morals of the employees to deteriorate.

Essential for Employee Productivity

Management's failure to communicate its goals and expectations to the employees causes the employees to have decreased productivity because they are not aware how the job tasks need to be done and what is expected form them.

Misconceptions about Communication

Sometimes in the organizations, we get to see managers complaining about the fact that they are isolated and are not able to communicate with the executives.
But the question is, is the problem related to the amount of communication or the quality of communication?
When we wake up, we are bombarded with a lot of messages from different places and people.
Our eyes can handle 500 million bits of information per second, but our brains can only process 500 bits of information per second.
As a result, the probability of misinterpreting the message increases a lot.

Communication Solves All Problems

Communication is not a cure for all problems.
It has potential of creating problems as well as solving the problems.
Another problem is that we sometimes associate meanings to certain words which are result of our background and may differ for other people because of the fact that they come from different background which you cannot see, possibly resulting into negatively affecting your communication.