Effective Workplace Communication?
It’s More Than Just Talk

Jeff Harlig

(appeared in the Facilitator, newsletter of the American Association for Training and Development, Central Indiana, May/June 1999,  pp. 4-5)

In the last issue of the Facilitator, Kris Butler talked about the need for better communication in the workplace, and ways to spread information effectively in the office. In this issue, I’d like to follow up by discussing some problems that occur in communication, and why they happen. Awareness of these problems is the first step toward recognizing and solving them. Employers are often the last to know about communication problems in their companies — because of communication problems in their companies! After all, when information isn’t flowing down and out, it often isn’t flowing up, either.

“Information deficit”
Amazingly enough, in this age of information overload, it is still possible to find many workplaces where employees are suffering an information deficit. They don’t have the information they need to do their jobs. It’s not that they lack data from external sources. They’re missing vital information that their supervisors and coworkers have right at hand, but unfortunately don’t have on the tips of their tongues. Many cases of information deficit occur because the people possessing the information can’t distance themselves sufficiently from their own experience to recognize the knowledge state of those around them.		 workers

In the modern office, the best example of this kind of problem is probably the case of one person teaching another to use a computer program. Knowing a program well does not lead automatically to being able to articulate all its steps. In fact, the greater the knowledge, the more difficult it may be to visualize the needs of a person who knows nothing about what’s being taught. The same applies to passing on information about any process, from production to record-keeping.

Communication style
Some people strike us as better at expressing themselves than others. We find them naturally understandable and congenial. They may speak at a rate we find comfortable to listen to, use a range of vocabulary that is similar to ours, speak in a tone of voice which is engaging, or, at least, neutral. They get to the point in about the same amount of time that we would. However, other people speak too fast or too slowly to suit us. Their volume is too high or too low. They use words we don’t understand, or words that we’d only expect to hear from our children. They may have a tone of voice which is shrill or sing-songy. We’d all agree that there is a small range of “good” ways of speaking. The fact that we don’t agree on what those ways are can lead to communication difficulties.

The problem is that we make judgments about the way people are based on the way that they speak. It’s not just that we may not get the message when we talk to a person with a radically different style. Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, makes the very important observation that we also come to believe things about that person’s character and motives, unconsciously, yet with great certainty. We consider people who speak loudly or with a high pitch to be pushy. We find people who take too long to “spit it out” to be distracted, or possibly not very bright. As these (often incorrect) assumptions become solidified, they create serious, long-term barriers to successful interaction.

Gender differences
There are numerous accounts of real and alleged differences in the way that men and women speak and conduct themselves in conversation. Books on the subject include Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation and Barbara Bate’s Communication and the Sexes. These books and many other studies indicate that there are certain typical differences in communication style between men and women. These differences are not just in what men and women say. For example, in group situations, men typically interrupt more, and are less likely to let someone else speak, than women. Men tend to sit in ways that take up more space than women, giving an impression of power that everyone feels. Women interrupt less, yield their speaking turn more quickly, and sit more “primly.” The male features make women feel that men are pushy and aggressive; the female features make men feel that women are meek and don’t have much to contribute to discussions.

There is a more serious form of miscommunication between men and women in the workplace, too: when female employees fail to respond decisively to male supervisors and peers who systematically underrate and patronize them. Instead of addressing the problem, they become defensive, or worse, reinforce the view the male holds of them. Kathleen Kelly Reardon calls these “dysfunctional communication patterns” in her book, They Don’t Get It, Do They? Communication in the Workplace — Closing the Gap Between Women and Men.

Native language differences
According to a recent Indianapolis Business Journal article, Indiana will see a gradual increase in workers who are non-speakers or non-native speakers of English. These workers will range from highly educated, short-term-resident professionals to possibly unskilled immigrants. In situations like this, there is the obvious problem of communication with employees who lack English skills.

However, there are less obvious problems that occur even with good non-native speakers: Cultural patterns of what things can be said, how they should be said, and to whom they can be said differ dramatically around the world, in ways that most of us can’t even imagine. The resulting mismatches in expectations can all too frequently lead — needlessly — to suspicion and anger.

Conclusion
Communication can be improved, but doing so is not always an easy process. It requires time, will, and motivation. Perhaps the most difficult obstacle is the fact that good communication requires us to think very deliberately and very consciously about something we can easily accomplish with almost no attention whatsoever: speaking. We need to remember that the person facing us may not share our knowledge or our way of speaking. Communication is nothing more than bridging that gap.