Communication Barriers and Strategies

This assignment provides an overview of common communication barriers and strategies for overcoming them. It highlights the importance of effective listening skills, cross-cultural communication, and managerial communication in different contexts. The references include various studies and articles that discuss these topics, providing a comprehensive understanding of how to improve communication in personal and professional settings.

BLOSSOM CORNERS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
From the past decades there are major changes happened in UK business world.
Businesses are becoming diverse and with this diversity, business staffs, customers and their
relatives are also becoming diverse.
This is basically focused on the issues faced by Blossom Corners Care Home due to
diversity. It also includes the communication between staffs of the organisation, between staffs
& customers and between staffs and customers' relatives.
Present report will highlight on the importance of communication and communication
practices for the success and growth of organization. It will also tell about the communication
breakdown and its impact on the organization. It will describe about the recommendations that
board of directors or a manager should do to improve the communication as well.
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Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.............................................................................................................1
BACKGROUND.............................................................................................................................3
ANALYSIS SECTION 1 ................................................................................................................4
Good Practice in Communication................................................................................................4
ANALYSIS SECTION 2 ................................................................................................................6
Analysis of the Causes of the Communication Breakdown.........................................................6
ANALYSIS SECTION 3.................................................................................................................8
Managing Improvements.............................................................................................................8
CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................................9
LIST OF RECOMMENDATIONS.................................................................................................9
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................10
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BACKGROUND
The Blossom corners care home not only has diverse clients but also they have diverse
clients who have different background. For this reason, management of the company has to face
some communication issues. Communication is an important part for the care home in which
care providers (staffs) have to communicate with each others, with their clients and clients'
relatives.
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ANALYSIS SECTION 1
Good Practice in Communication
The staffs of Blossom Corners Care Home who are providing care taker services to their
clients are different personalities due to different cultures, nations, values, perceptions and
religions. Their clients are also from different nations, cultures, values, perceptions and religions
which make them diverse (Voinea and et.al., 2015). These diversities also impact their
communication skills.
Communication skills refers to the required qualities which is essential for the
communication with another person and understand the perceptions and thoughts of another
person. The key communication skills which are identified as important skills are such as active
listening, critical listening, empathic listening, dialogic listening and report writing ((Yousif and
et.al., 2017)).
The first key communication skill is Active Listening. Active listening refers to the
communication skill in which listener carefully hearing, understanding and learning information
provided by the speaker with fully attention regarding clients and their needs. In case of care
home, Julia is using this communication skill (Vermeir and et.al., 2015). This skill helps
Blossom Corners Care Home in many ways. The staffs of the home care understand the clients
and their needs with more information which help them to provide accurate services to their
clients.
The second key communication skill is critical listening. It refers to the process of
understanding and evaluating the meaning of speakers' messages. In short, critical listener focus
on what is being said and why is being said aspects of speakers' messages. Alan has this skill
which helps him to understand the communication style of Julia and Alex with their clients, their
relatives. It also helps them to reduce the misunderstanding with clients regarding their clients
and their needs (Verghese, 2017).
The third key communication skill which is required for the Blossom Corners Care Home
is empathic listening. It refers to the practice in which listener is carefully listening to the speaker
and try top understand the meaning of communicated words from his points of view. It is
considered to be most important skill in service sector in today's time. In order to understand the
clients and their relatives, Julia is using this skill to understand the clients problems and solve
them (Steiner, 2011).
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The forth key communication skill is dialogic listening. In this listening process, two
people are sending and receiving messages to each other in order to understand the meaning of
messages and to understand each other's point of views. It is considered to be a part of
conversation. In the case of Blossom Corners Care Home, Julia and Alex are using this skill to
understand the position of another parties and their problems (Raina and Roebuck, 2016).
Accordingly, they find solutions which helps their clients in many ways.
The fifth and last one skill is report writing skill. It is an important part of Blossom
Corners Care Home as the report contains every details of the events, meetings, discussions,
clients' details and their problems and solutions etc. (Pina and et.al., 2019). It helps clients and
firm both to have complete and correct information. Alex has this skill through which he sends
the information to their clients and asks them for the feedback. This helps company to improve
their business services.
With the help of these various key communication skills, the Care Home is able to help
their employees to improve the quality of services which they provide to their customers through
the firm. It also helps company to gain customers as well as staffs satisfactions which is
beneficial for the company. Also, for the increment in customers and staffs satisfaction, company
need to focus on the upgrading skills which is in their staffs (Phutela, 2015).
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ANALYSIS SECTION 2
Analysis of the Causes of the Communication Breakdown
Due to different cultural background of clients and customers, these cultural diversity and
their factors impact the service provided by the company. In the case of Blossom Corners Care
Home, these cultural factors may positive or negative impact on the company's service quality
and customers' satisfaction level. The main factors which impact the service quality and
customers' satisfaction level are such as time orientation, attitude to power distance, prejudice,
stereotyping and ethnocentrism (Kapanadze, 2019).
First cause which negatively impact the organisation's communication and cause to
communication breakdown is Time Orientation. Time orientation related to the communication
refers to the value of time for cultures. For example some cultures are giving importance to their
past while some another are giving importance to their present and some another cultures are
giving importance to their future (Lloyd, Boer and Voelpel, 2017). Due to different perception
towards time through the culture's perception lead company to not deliver their target on time
and miss some important meeting with their parties and clients which is not good for the
company.
Second cause which lead care home to face communication breakdown is attitude to
power distance. Power distance refers to the power of authority. Higher the hierarchical
management structure, higher the power distance which means higher the power of authority in
organisation. It also reflects that people respect the rules and regulations. They also comply these
rules and regulations in their decision making process and working style. It is also related to the
cultures in the respect of treating others with equality or inequality. In the case of Care Home,
Alan is not considered their staffs equal which lead one of his clients to call to his relatives at
mid night (McGloin, 2015).
Third reason behind the communication breakdown in the company is prejudice. It refers
to the attitude of people towards a particular group of people. It refers to the not correctly judge
the people because of some previous experiences or unfair activity which is happened with the
person who are doing judgement of another person. This also create a barrier in effective
communication. Alex believes that Care Home should only hire the employees who are from
western countries, so that company don't need to face any kinds of problems (Mittal, 2018). This
judgement is not good from others' point of views who are working in the company.
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Forth point of causes of communication breakdown is Stereotyping. Stereotyping is
another reason behind communication barrier which is facing by the company. This is one of the
most common factor which causes parties to face communication breakdown during
communication with each other. It refers to assumptions or perceptions which lead people to
behave in a particular way with the particular group of people. In case of Blossom Corners Care
Home, Alan has perception towards his staffs that they are not equal which lead both parties to
behave with each other in a particular way and this impact the organisation's service quality and
customers' satisfaction level (Ocasio, Laamanen and Vaara, 2018).
Fifth and last cause which impact the communication and lead to communication
breakdown is ethnocentrism. It refers to the concept in which people understand their cultural
values superior to others. In simple words, people thinks that their culture is the best and can
help to solve the problems in accurately ways. Occurrence of this factor during communication
between people can cause to miscommunication because they both understand each other wired.
This lead to create of tension between them. Alex has shown ethnocentrism by disagree that
there are too many foreign clients who are working in the Blossom Corners Care Home (Perkins-
Dock and et.al., 2015).
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ANALYSIS SECTION 3
Managing Improvements
By analysing the communication skills of staffs and factors that lead to communication
breakdown in Blossom Corners Care Home, it can be clearly understand that Managers and
Board of Directors (BODs) of the company should take actions to improve the communication
skills and provide accurate resources to remove the communication breakdowns (Bennett, W.L.
and Livingston, 2018). These actions are as follows -
Managers and BODs should provide their all staffs and managers Diversity training in
which trainers provide them knowledge on the diversity issues and their impact on the work
place, importance of diversity for workplace, provide and develop necessary skills in order to
deal with the diversity environment in order to interact, collaborate and work with different
personalities of people in the organisation who are belonged to different nations, cultures and
religions etc. (Czarniecki, 2017).
Managers and BODs of the company should organize multicultural events in the
organisation in order make understand the staffs about the different cultures and make them
respect for the cultural differences. It will improve the understanding between staffs (who
belonged to different nations, cultures and religions etc.) and encourage them to work with each
other. It will also enhance the creativity in the organization which improve the quality of the
services (Fathi and Hamidizadeh, 2019). This will increase the employees' satisfaction level
which also impact the customers' satisfaction level by providing good quality services.
Company's managers and BODs should also focus on the team building for the
improvement. For the team-building, they can hire a good leader whose focus on the team
building rather than achievement of the organisation. They should implement the open
communication policy and system in their organisation in which an employee can communicate
with anyone in the organisation. They also should establish the team rules in order to bring
change in the organisation and employees will be bound to work in team which later improve the
team building of the organisation (Gullbekk, 2016).
Managers and BODs of Blossom Corners Care Home should analysis the service quality
and try to find out the service quality gap in the workplace. To remove this gap, company should
focus on the employees' training rather than how to improve the quality and quality strategies.
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Because providing proper training can improve the efficiency of the staffs which improve the
quality of services which they are delivering (Holt and et.al., 2017).
Managers and BODs of the company should not only focus on the service training but
also focus on the customers service training which deals with the customers services. As
customers are most important for the company and make them satisfied is the main aim of any
company (Jenifer and Raman, 2015). Thus, company should hire trainers who improve the
customers service skills and another skills such as listening skills, questioning skills and empathy
skills etc. So that employees can improve the customer satisfaction and gain customer loyalty.
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CONCLUSION
From the above study, it has been summarized that without effective communication and
lack of communication skills, no organization can become successful. Managers and Board of
directors should focus on the communication flow and communication process being adopted by
organization. They also should focus on the relationship of clients and staffs so that they can
improve the customers' satisfaction and service quality aspects. There are so many ways to
improve the communication skills and remove the communication barriers in order to create
understanding between employees-employees-managers-customers which should be adopted by
every small-medium-big enterprise. So that organizational environment can be friendly and
stakeholders of the company can feel comfortable.
LIST OF RECOMMENDATIONS
 Diversity training
 Multicultural event
 Team building
 Improvement on service quality
 customer service training
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Voinea, D.V., and et.al., 2015. Embarrassments in managerial communication. Polish Journal of
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