Managing Barriers to Communication - Essay Example

 Effective communication is very essential for the success of the operations within an organization. The process of transmitting a piece of information from one individual to the other is very complex and if enough precautions are not taken, the process can be marred with many errors. A substantial proportion of the problems that arise at workplaces are due to poor communication from the top management down to the low-level employees.

Barriers to effective communication are those factors that hinder the proper dissemination of information. There are several barriers to this kind and managing them requires a proper understanding of their roots. 1. Physical barriers to effective communication are caused by the environmental conditions at the given organization that hinder effective sending and receiving of information. These are obvious barriers and include walls, background noise, and the distance between the different parties that need to communicate (Smoke, 2005, p.23). There will a barrier to communication between members of staff located in different buildings.

It would be inconvenient for staff to abandon his daily chores to pass a message to another staff in a distant building. Noise at a workplace can physically attract the attention of the recipients of information and affect communication. The use of faulty communication devices also poses a challenge to the communication process. Besides, the lighting system in a workplace can also affect communication that is characterized by reading and writing as the encoding and decoding processes respectively.

Management of these barriers to communication involves the elimination of the causal factors of each and adopting modern procedures. The first management mechanism is to adopt new communication technology in the operations of the organization. The use of e-mails, voice messaging, fax, or and phone calls will minimize errors resulting from these factors. Improving the infrastructure within the organization is a proper way of ensuring a good lighting system in the organization. The problem arising due to noise can be managed through developing an organizational culture that condemns the vice.