Thursday, November 19, 2009

Communication Is All About It!?!

I'm not so proficient in English but can manage to be as clear & simple as possible. I hate to use native language at work place, but there will be circumstances where we will be forced to do something which we don't like to. Corporate cultures should be so inspirational that an employee would feel comfortable in all the ways being with a company. Both hygienic & motivational factors affect an employee.

You would have come across this quote somewhere: "If You Have To Do It, You Might As Well Do It Right! If It Is Worth Doing At All, It's Worth Doing It Right!!!”
Both employee & employer level communications should be good enough that no one can point out or laugh at it. Especially, when a customer visits a company's web site, he should not feel there's something not good in it or something which sounds bad even though it may be right grammatically. After all, the web site resembles the company's reputation/ image, in this e-world.

Corporate Level:
I was going through one of my employers' policies (intranet) and found the phrase "travel cum hotel expenses". I mean, Cum???!!!! Grammatically it may sound good, but it's a slang in other countries which has a vulgar meaning. What I mean to convey here is we can use better words in a written communication (at least) avoiding people to make fun out of it. Especially when there is a scope of client's coming across company's information - no matter over web or any other channel.

You may now say "what's there in using 'cum' here?”, but please give it a thought putting yourself in an audience's (can be clients/ customers/ whomever) shoes. Then you will get to know what exactly I'm talking about. I personally did notice people laughing at such things, when I was at client's place/ country.

An Individual Level:
Also, see how awful you'll feel when you get to see your inbox with a newly popped up email like below:

Subject line contains:
"u r free" (as it is, no caps, no exclamation, nothing)

And the Body contains:
"Hi

If u r means come to my place, we will discuss on XXX."

What actually will you feel looking at it? First thing is at that instance, I did not understand what actually it means. Secondly, I thought I did something wrong and that person want me to go to him to discuss on the same. Next the subject annoyed me a hell - I'm free?????? I'm mean??? And what not can we think of!? Huh!!

Actually, that person is 'requesting' me to train him on the subject XXX and wanted to check with me whether I'm free to sit and discuss with him or not. But did convey me a totally different message which made me feel very uncomfortable.

These things happen to every one of us, in some or the other way and occur only because of lack of communication skills (at least I feel that).

I can give you more real time examples than the above, which happened throughout my career and I am sure many of us would have faced this kind of stuff.

This lack/ gap can be filled if one has that willingness to improve himself/ herself throwing his/ her ego aside. It also depends on companies who really have to identify these lacking stuff in their employees and allocate some budget to provide training(s) necessary to every individual. After all, communication is an exchange, not just a give, as all parties must participate to complete the information exchange and hence it's so important.

So what all I mean to convey here is:
"Communication works for those who work at it." - John Powell

Please share your thoughts on this.

Cheers!!