Overcoming Barriers To Effective Communication

Introduction

Excellent communication skills are mandatory in today’s busy working environment. Every job advertisement, in almost every field lists this as an essential requirement and almost everyone would claim to have them. The question is what does it mean to have “excellent communication skills”?

According to Career FAQs website, good communication skills involve conveying information to people clearly and simply, transmitting and receiving messages clearly, and being able to read your audience (Career FAQs, 2015). Mike Kermode, author of the article for Career FAQs, suggested that empathy and being a good listener are important factors in good communication.

Communication in supply chain management is particularly important. By its very

personally or technological aid, e.g. email, telephone, video link.

• Receiver – this is the intended recipient of the message.

• Decoding – understanding of the message by the recipient.

• Feedback – a return message proving that the initial communication was understood.

Barriers to Effective Communication

If communication is to be effective, people must be able to express themselves clearly and understand each other. Communication is ineffective when barriers stop people from expressing themselves or understanding others. Communication is about overcoming barriers. Unfortunately no matter how good the communication system in an organisation is, barriers can and do often occur. Barriers of communication are the hindrances or difficulties involved in the process of communication which distort the message from being properly understood by the receiver.

Figure 3: Communication barriers (Gwyn Teatro, 2011)

Types of Communication Barriers

Broadly speaking, barriers to communication can be classified as physical, emotional, cultural, language-based and gender-based (Siddiqui, 2012).

Physical Barriers

These are obstacles that are often outside the control of the person sending the message or the recipient, for

One of the most well known and oft quoted is “Effective Public Relations” by Cutlip and Center (Cutlip and Center, 2005). This book introduced the now well-known 7 C’s of Communication (Figure 5) which are a set of recommendations for communicating well. Some of these overlap with the communication characteristics in the previous section, however as there are only 7, they are easy to remember and therefore can easily be incorporated into any management strategy at any level, e.g. a strategy for managing supply chain communication from start to finish or used as a guideline for communication between team members within a particular