Communication Gap Overcoming Identified Communication

Communication Gap

Overcoming Identified Communication Gaps: Strategies for Organizational and Personal Success

Efficient and effective communication is a key to success in any group endeavor, and almost everything worth doing requires interpersonal interaction. Ideas have to be interchanged in order for them to be shaped into meaningful actions, and its communication that facilitates both of these processes. It is therefore essential that communication between the different members of a group occurs frequently, to keep everything moving along the same trajectory. At the same, if the various parties involved in a meeting, project, or transaction have an incomplete or incorrect understanding of each other, the results of such miscommunication can be worse than if no communication were taking place at all.

Issues of non-communication and miscommunication can both be referred to as communication gaps. There is a wide array of identified communication gaps that commonly occur in organizations and in the business world at large, and they often go unnoticed -- and thus cause greater inefficiencies and damage. Several of these communication gaps can be seen to apply both to my organization and to me personally, currently and in the foreseeable future. Identifying and addressing these communication gaps early can hopefully forestall any serious repercussions from these communication gaps; assessing the way information was being incorrectly received or simply going un-transmitted allows for a more conscious approach to communication within the organization, and also provides suggestions as to areas of personal communication that can improve.

Infrastructure Gaps

One major and easily identified communication gap within my organization has less to do with the people communicating and more to do with the tools implemented to effect communication. Lack of appropriate or adequate communications infrastructure is a growing concern for many organizations, both within the business world and in other sectors (Friedrich 2008). While this is generally not a problem with intra-office communication, as all phones and computers are centrally connected and easily called up when needed, as more and more off-site and inter-office communication has become necessary on a day-to-day basis, the communications infrastructure has failed to keep pace.

Some of the necessary adjustments are simple: a well-maintained and frequently verified list of cell phone numbers is an incredibly basic yet necessary piece of the infrastructure puzzle. As wireless Internet becomes both more available and more universally available, both through extensive networks and available products for setting up portable hotspots, both voice and text communications can also be facilitated with greater ease, and disseminated to recipients in diverse locations more easily and with greater assuredness (Friedrich 2008). New technologies enable communication to become at once more comprehensive and more streamlined and simplified, creating more efficiency (Friedrich 2008).

Information Processing

Efficiently generating and transmitting communications are both certainly essential steps in creating effective interconnections between disparate parties of a venture or members of a project/organization. But without the correct utilization of the information communicated, all of the infrastructure and efficiency in the world can't make the communication useful. Often, in fact, there can be an overabundance of communication without any effective organization or leveraging of the information thus obtained, which can lead to serious detriments to any organization or endeavor (Lager 2006). It is bad enough when one arm of an organization doesn't seem to know what the other is doing, but the problem seems somehow conceptually worse when the various arms have information regarding the rest of the organization, but don't utilize it. This is, unfortunately, partly occurring in my organization, and is also an issue I need to deal with personally as I incorporate the organization's goals and actions into my own thinking and methods.

This concept of the correct processing and utilization of information goes further than simply making the organization run more efficiently on an internal level. Especially as new regions of the world are becoming increasingly important for business, the use of communication to establish and leverage relationships is a vital aspect of conducting business (Lager 2006; Fitzgerald 2006). Collection and transmission of information can only take an organization so far, but being able to effectively communicate and utilize information outside the organization is what allows true growth to take place. Aligning organizational perspectives with those of potential clients, customers and investors can often present another significant communication gap, and this is one that is vital to address.