Methods of communication

Why a business cares about this at all

Communication is the passing of a message from a sender to a receiver, and it is only complete when the receiver has understood it. That last clause is where most of the marks live. Sending an email is not communicating; it becomes communication when the person at the other end reads it and acts on it.

Four parts make up any message, and a fault in any of them ruins it: the sender, the message, the medium (the method chosen to carry it) and the receiver. Feedback is the receiver's response, and it is the only proof the sender has that the message landed.

Communication is worth spending money on because bad communication costs money in ways that are easy to name in an answer:

• Instructions that arrive wrong produce the wrong goods, which is wasted materials and wasted labour hours.
• Orders that are lost or misread mean deliveries arrive late, so customers go to a competitor.
• Employees who are told nothing about a change decide the worst and resist it, so motivation and productivity fall.
• Decisions are taken on stale information, because the person deciding never received the update.

Internal and external communication

Internal communication is between people inside the business: a manager and a supervisor, one department and another, an employer and the workforce.

External communication is between the business and somebody outside it: customers, suppliers, banks, the government, the local community.

The distinction decides how formal the message must be and how careful the language has to be. A note to a colleague can be brief; a letter to a supplier is evidence and may be read out in a dispute. The most common slip in this topic is an answer that lists a method as internal when the example given is external. A poster in the staff room is internal; the same poster in the shop window is external.

The methods

Digital methods of communication have been added to Topic 2, and Cambridge states that change in the syllabus itself, so virtual meetings, text messages and social media are examinable by name alongside the older methods.

Two ideas cut across the table. A method with feedback, such as a meeting or a phone call, checks understanding but takes the receiver's time. A method with a written record, such as an email or a letter, proves what was said but does not prove it was understood. Several methods have neither, and a few have both.

Choosing a method, and justifying the choice

0264 asks you to recommend and justify which method of communication to use in a given situation, and the mark scheme rewards a decision that fits the situation, not a favourite method.

Four features of the situation decide it:

• How urgent is it? Same day means a phone call, a text message or a virtual meeting, not a letter.
• How many receivers, and where are they? One person is a call; three hundred across four sites is an email or a meeting held virtually.
• Does it need a record? Anything legal, financial or disciplinary needs writing down.
• How sensitive is it? Telling somebody they have lost their job by text message is cheap and fast and would be indefensible, because the effect on the person and on everybody else in the building outweighs the saving.

Here is the shape of a full answer. Knowledge: a virtual meeting allows immediate feedback. Application: the firm's three factories are in different countries, so a face-to-face meeting would mean flights for eleven managers. Analysis: holding it online saves those travel costs and the two days of management time, so the decision can be taken this week rather than next month. Then the evaluation step: a letter would create the written record the bank wants but would take days and allow no questions, and a group email would be read at eleven different times with no discussion at all. Saying why those two were rejected for this business is what lifts the answer, because it shows the choice was weighed rather than asserted.

Communication barriers

A communication barrier is anything that stops the message getting from sender to receiver in the form the sender intended.

What the barriers cost the business. Wrong orders and wasted output. Deadlines missed because two departments each assumed the other was doing the work. Money spent twice. Accidents when a safety instruction is not understood. Falling motivation, because employees who never hear anything reliable conclude that management is hiding something, and rumours fill the gap. Customers lost when a complaint is never passed on.

How to reduce or remove them:

• Choose the method to suit the receiver, not the sender. Shop-floor employees with no email address are reached by a team briefing or a noticeboard.
• Keep the message short and in plain language, and cut the jargon.
• Ask for feedback and check it. "Tell me what you are going to do first" finds a misunderstanding in ten seconds; "any questions?" usually does not.
• Shorten the chain of command, so fewer people can distort the message on its way down.
• Fix the physical problems: repair the equipment, hold the briefing away from the machines, provide translation where the workforce speaks several languages.
• Train managers in how to communicate, and improve relations with employees so that messages are trusted when they arrive.

Common mistakes

• Defining communication as sending a message, with no mention of the receiver understanding it.
• Saying email is faster than a phone call and stopping there, without saying why speed matters to this business.
• Treating any method used inside the business as internal only. Email and letters are used in both directions; it is the receiver who decides which it is.
• Listing methods rather than choosing one and defending the choice against the others.
• Recommending the cheapest method for sensitive news such as redundancy, with no mention of the effect on morale.
• Saying social media is good because it is modern. The reason is the size of the audience and the low cost, and the risk is that complaints are public.
• Giving a barrier without the problem it causes. The marks come from the consequence: wasted output, a missed deadline, an accident.
• Suggesting "improve communication" as a way to remove a barrier. That restates the problem instead of solving it.
• Forgetting that a noticeboard and a poster carry no feedback at all, so nobody can tell whether the message was received.

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