Corporate Communication - The essence

Communication:

Definition: "Communication is the process of exchange of ideas, thoughts and feelings in commonly understandable words."

This is the most simple definition that I can think of on this subject.

In this definition, the word commonly understandable is very important. Reason......we may convey something......but the receiver also has to perceive it in the same context that we are trying to say. For example........you tell your friend to meet you at 4.30 pm, but hears it as 5.30 pm and comes an hour late. Here there was no common understanding.....Hence, communication is incomplete. I would rather say, there was no communication..... why it didn't fulfill the above definition. Below is the communication flow diagram.

The above diagram is simple and doesn't require much explanation. The sender has a message that he encodes in his language and sends it to the receiver through a medium (channel). The receiver receives the message, decodes it, understands it and gives response. Now we assume that the receiver decodes the message in the same manner the sender wanted it to be decoded. If this doesn't happen, as I said before, communication becomes incomplete and it becomes a failure. In Management terms, this is called Communication Gap (CG).

Communication Gap: The misunderstanding of the message by the receiver sent by the sender is called the Communication Gap.

And the factors that contribute to CG are called barriers in communication.

Barriers to communication: Definition: Aspects of or conditionsin a workplace that interfere with effective exchange of ideas or thoughts.

We will discuss about the various barriers in communication and the components of communication in the next blog