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Day by day I convince myself more about the importance of communication on companies. Many times when we have employees and they commit mistakes in their tasks, we think it is their fault because they are not following our instructions. However I think the easiest path is to blame the others but I also think that almost always the mistake is in hands of the bosses and not of the employees.
But why do I state what I have just written? Because even though we talk the same language I think there is a huge problem on communications among human beings. Many times we omit important information because we think it is obvious –but it isn’t-. Also many times we don’t make sure that the other person understood. I think that as bosses we should detail as much as we can our requirement and end asking our employee what did he understood, to make sure instructions were clear enough for him.
In addition to what I have just written, I think we have another problem, which makes worse the situation. Today people can easily access to Internet and different distractors. Let`s remember that time is a limited resource and that companies and different media are fighting for users attention during the time they are active –including our employees-.
Therefore generally when we are imparting to them orders and tasks, we have to fight against companies ads, news, gossips on social media, among others. However if this occurs I think it our company’s culture is partly guilty as well as the example we are giving to our workers.
It is true we cant forbid them to stay connected while they are at the office, but I also think there is a time for everything. It might be healthy that they have 10 minutes twice a day to read their personal mail and their social networks, but they shouldn’t do it while they are talking to us. However if we want it to work in this way, we must be the fist ones to act in this way, and only connect to this distractors in these moments and not when we should be working with all our attention in the task we are performing.
To conclude I think that communication is really a problem of our days, but that we have ways in which we can mitigate it such as not omitting relevant information, make sure that or employees understood what we told them and finally create a culture where our employees understand that while they talk to us they must center all their attention in our conversation.
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