Understanding Effective Professional Communication

The Importance of Effective Professional Communication

Question :

What is effective professional communication?

Professional communication is emerging as an area of investigation in various discipline like applied linguistics, study of communication, educational fields and the field of psychology as well. The approaches to these fields are almost similar but it still has lot of sections where the line of aproach is different from each other. The approach to speaking, listening, writing and reading part of communication is different and for all professional form of it keeps changing with the basic idea of sending across the right message.

The basic line of communication is simple. It has to be vivid, it has to be clear, it has to be natural and the person needs to be prepared for the speaking ability. There are different forms of situations which might pose problem to the communication.

Presentation are basically formal form of speeches and they usually get involved with lots of visual form, graphical data based information along with audio aids, and might involve more than one speaker for such presentation in order to work as a team.

These from communication angle point of view are something which involves recieving praise and criticism and these are obvious when one is attending a interview. The effective communication skill is also evident when one speaks in a group or is giving speech in a team meeting. The personal skill become evident when one attends such communication activity.

The purpose of professional communication

Wartella (1994) along with Zarefsky (1993) acounted the underlying the basic characteristic of the course by a very descriptive model of the intellectual pattern of the human discipline of learning communication.

Good professional communication requires careful planning and hence requires comprehensive plan of action. Research is definitely something which has systematic inquiry into a subject. These are points to the need to examine topics in a systematic manner instead of hapazardly running into the sources. Need to understand how profession and discipline is organized.

The field of communication discipline has grown in popularity from mere general description to descriptor of theory and research. Both journalism and speech agree that communication basically is a discipline which is practical in characteristics but the stream of journalism has focussed a lot in the educational part of professionals whereas speech professors have got themselves accustomed to the liberal forms of arts and also understood as well as value the idea that communication could be approached from numerous traditional forms such as humanities, science, social science and arts.

The key issue in this era is of course convergence. The media and technology coming together with each-other and finally produce newer forms of communication but they are increasingly making use of the existing tools of communication and form new set of communications. The phenomenon of communication discipline has basic four different types of properties.

• Different process the people usually practice or use to complete a task of communication with each other
• The various forms and types of communication that we come across in everyday life.
• The characteristics that are essential to complete a communication such as style and verbal codes that a communicator uses for creating message
• How a commmunication process changes depending upon a relationship that the individuals build and maintain throughout

Communication skills are considered to be very very important in business to ensure success. The workplace and global market place changes has gone through drastic evolution over the decade and any business that can maintain their level of awareness will survive and anyone who fails to recognise a good perspective of the value and cultural difference of the employees and their esteemed customers may face failure.

Approaches to Communication

Communication could be either verbal or non verbal and any employee who does not make use of effective communication with their superiors and ofcourse his juniors may not progress well in his career. 

According to Thill and Bovee the aspect of non verbal communication has six specific functions:

• It provides conscious and unconcious information
• It helps in regulating the flow of conversation
• It helps in expressing emotion
• It helps in controlling or influencing others
• It also helps in facilitating specific task or simplify it

• Most important of all fact of non verbal communication is its reliability. Ideas can deceive but words cannot and hence written communication is considered to be more reliable
• Non verbal communication is efficient from bot the senders and reciever’s point of view and the level of understanding is considered to be more effective
• Non verbal communication is more credible and plays a big role in business too and it establishes the leadership role as well.
• These form of communication is also considered to be more accurate and has better attitude interpreting the information

• Lack of secrecy is one of the biggest shortcomings
• The written part is useful only for small piece of information
• The gestures are hidden in words and can cause wrong interpretation
• Limitation of non expression of past events and ideas

This involves the use of symbols that usually have universal meanings for all and anyone who is taking part in discussion. Verbal communication could be either oral or written

Oral communication

Oral communication is the channel of communication in which the message is transmitted in spoken forms and the term oral actually relates to anything that points to mouth. The two components of oral communication are words and manner and in the way these words are pronounced.

It has the advantage of quickness in exchange of ideas and equally quick response. Oral communication helps in understanding the extent to which a reciever has understood the message through his feelings during the entire course of exchange.

It has other advantages of flexibility, economic resourcing, personal touch, removal of miscommunication and along with that motivation.

Disadvantage of oral communication

These are basically unfit for lengthy message, usually also not fit for policy matters, lack of written proof is another short comings and finally is considered to be expensive as well.

Oral communication is found to be useful when the information is needed to be kept secret. It is very useful when information needs to be given to a large section of people. This is useful when the receiver is illiterate.

Depending upon the situation oral communication could be of various forms.

• Face to face conversation
• Lecturing in presence of moderate crowd
• During meetings and conferences
• Interviews
• Telephonic conversation
• Social and cultural affairs
• Seminars
• Radio and television

The other form is written or printed form of communication.

Communication system uses two basic general models and they are the media systems while the other is oral systems.

In media systems the flow of information is activated through communicators who are professional which are for specific media channel transmission and they are printing media, radio transmission, satellite television, the mass media and film, the streaming video media, telecom based exchanges etc.

These messages are in a descriptive form as well as not very personal in nature while in oral system the exchanges are pin-pointing in nature and arising from sources which are allowed to speak by the hierarchy in society.

These messages are found to be prescriptive in nature and they are transmitted to very segmented different kind of audiences in oral channels. The primary groups completes the pattern of diffusion by acting for a relaying channel of communication within and also between the groups. The basic direction of change is found to be from the system of oral to media systems in almost every societies but they still co-exists and each of them are supportive of each other.

Basic models of communication: the basic way to understand the principles and processes that would define the nature of communication is by modelling and these are descriptive tools meant to approximate these things.

Shannon weaver model of communication

Shannon weaver model speaks about a mathematical model of communication. In 1949 Claude Shannon from Rockefeller Foundation propounded this to explain electronic communication which attempted to explain two things.

• The process of communication is reduced to a set of pure mathematical formulas
• The problems are discussed in a manner that could eventually be handled with the help of a model

Lasswell communication model

Lasswell proposed a model of communication in the year 1948 which was found not to be  very different from what philosopher Aristotle and this model suggested that the message flow in a society which has many aspects of a multiple social dictums. These revolved around control, content, media, audience and effect analysis.

Narula in 1994 discussed about the noise distortions in communication transmission says that channel noise has various connotations. It could be stated with state of technology along with physical and social access to these channels and people’s actual exposure to these messages.

Any activity will probably suffer from setbacks if the condition are contrary to the smooth fucntioning of the process emerge. The barriers are either sender oriented or reciever oriented.

Sender characterized barriers could either be voluntary or may be involuntary and hence efforts are taken on the part of the sender to isolate and finally remove them.

The sender is considered to be the originator of the communication and hence extreme caution should be taken not to create barriers.

Receiver oriented barriers could also be held responsible for putting up barriers during the course of the interaction and although the role in initial phase is found to be passive, it results in more and more active as the assimilation and absorption of information goes on. Some of these barriers emanating from receiver side are tendency to evaluate, poor retention and improper listening.

Conclusion:

The art of communication is essentially a practical one and includes skills such as speaking, writing and reading and these basic skills could be improved by the conscious effort of applying the five principles of good speaking or better known as principles of communication which states that we need to be clear, be prepared, simple, vivid, and also be natural. These instances goes a long way in creating effective communication channel which helps in allowing better resultants.