How Management Should Communicate With Employees

Business Communication

What are the most important communication issues to face when launching a career as an executive?

It is clear that effective communication at all levels of business is extremely important, but executives and managers must take great care to be sure what they need to communicate and what is being communicated to them has clarity and is fully understood. One important communication issue that is certain to come up is when executives spend far too much time -- up to 30% of their time -- looking for "metrics and status updates" (Nielson, 2012). By spending too much time dealing with minutiae and status reports the executive is missing out on the chance to communicate with team members and with middle managers. Worrying about deadlines and pouring through data takes away time from good solid communication with the team and with other leadership in the company.

Another issue certain to come up in a career as an executive is how to encourage and implement good honest communication with employees at any level. There should be no ivory towers and totally top-down communication; rather, the communication should be vertical as much as possible. If communication is not vertical and open to all then the company is failing in its greatest opportunity with its employees. It is a fact that many executives fail to keep an open door for communication with staff at any level. It is true that in many companies and organizations lower level staff members are not invited to participate in meaningful communication with those in management or executive positions. A way to encourage communication for an executive is to do more than wait for people to come to you; a good executive will roll up his sleeves and go to the staff in the trenches, or at the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak. Ask them what their concerns and questions are. "An open door goes both ways," means that executives shouldn't wait for people to come to them; rather, the executive that understands good communication will go to his workers (Ribbink, p. 3).

A third issue entails making the most of resources; according to Nielson, about 43% of employees interviewed say their organization is "disorganized," and about 21% of those queried say their departments "suffer from missed deadlines." By missing deadlines and not having good communication between departments, managers find themselves working later than they need to, which means they are "flying blind" (Nielson, p. 2).

Will communication become more complex or less complex? Why?

With the ongoing trend of globalization, the need for good communication is increasing because when an American company, for example, establishes an office in Bangladesh, there is a vital need for understanding between the Americans working in Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi workers. We're not just alluding to communication in the spoken language of both countries; what is important comes down to communication that relates to cultural differences. This is where the complexity comes into play: The cultural differences between people in a globalized business world will mean it is important to implement policies involving good communication, and those policies of communication become more complex because of vast cultural differences.

On the other hand, according to Internet pioneer David Hughes, the seven billion people on the planet will "…sooner or later be connected to each other and fixed destinations" (Anderson, et al., 2014). That will mean that every person on the planet "…can reach, and communicate two-way, with every other person on this planet," and if this is true, communication may not be as complex as it may seem likely at this moment in history (Anderson, p. 3).

Discuss what role technology will play in the communication of thoughts and ideas.

Continuing the thought about future communication from the last question, the sharing of information and communication in the future will be so "effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible," writes David Clark, a senior research scientists at MIT (in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) (Anderson, p. 2). Devices in the future will have what Clark calls "…their own patterns of communications" and "their own social networks," which will be used to both share and to aggregate information (Anderson, p. 2). Computer-generated communication will become "more pervasive but less explicit and visible," Clark writes.

Communication will be more integrated and accessible than ever before, which will help people around the world become connected; and the way people relate to each other will be very different than it is today, the experts explain. "We will grow accustomed to seeing the world through multiple data layers," says Daren Brabham, with the University of Southern California (Anderson, p. 2). Social practices will change, job interviewing and professional networking will also change, due to the evolution of digital technology, Brabham explained.