Step One: Communication barriers

     What are the communication barriers in business? Barriers include noise, ineffective listening, and incivility. I will explore the meaning of each barrier and the tools to help overcome each one of them. Barriers are not limited to the ones i brought up, but are made because of the lack of wanting to understand each other. Once we learn to understand each other, work meetings and team groups will have the tools to achieve their shared goals.

    Let's start with noise. When communicating to other workers there can be an external and internal noise. Meaning that for external there could be a loud noise, like construction, that makes you interpret the other person. Internal noise could be having other thoughts that don't allow you to fully listen to your team member. Other examples of noise could include psychological or semantic. Psychological could involve loss of hearing or mental illness. Semantic means that there could be different meanings to the same words. Theses are all situations where noise is a barrier. These barriers could also include ineffective listening. To help with this meetings should be held in a quiet room and team members including the boss could practice active listening. Which includes paying attention, clarifying, summarizing, reflecting and sharing. Another tool could be to hold meetings at a time where workers are at their sharpest. The time is usually around 10 a.m. Another tool s for team members to be more straight forward with their discussions and to become louder than they usually are. We sometimes think we are speaking loud but the best way to speak during a meeting is to speak even louder than they are comfortable with.

    Incivility refers to team members not showing respect to one another. This could include ignoring the thoughts and ideas of others. It could also include having no courtesy of others and disrespecting other members efforts , privacy, or dignity. If there is no respect for others there is definitely no active listening going on; which makes meetings ineffective. A tool to overcome incivility is to embrace different viewpoints and to build a work culture around value, norms, and goals. Having a work place where they want different ideas could make for a more open and trusting work environment.