Business Communications Chp. 1 (1)

1) Communication is the process of transferring information and meaning between senders and receivers, using one or more written, oral, visual, or electronic media. 2) Stakeholders are those groups of people affected in some way by the company's actions like customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, neighbors, the community, the nation, and even the world. 3) Business communication is increasingly relying on technology, teamwork with a diverse workforce, globalization to market products in other countries, knowledge workers to provide valuable business information to provide competitive insights. 4) In a matrix structure, employees report to two managers at the same time such as a project manager and a department manager. 5) Downward communication flows from executives to employees, for example, when the president conveys executive decisions and provides employees information that helps them do their jobs. 6) Informal communication takes place naturally when employees interact, both on the job and in social settings. Some of it takes place when the formal network doesn't provide information that employees want. 7) Horizontal communication occurs when a secretary sends an email to another secretary in a different department on a new company wide policy. Upward and downward are other directions that communication can flow in a formal network. 8) An audience-centered approach involves understanding and respecting the members of your audience and making every effort to get your message across in a way that is meaningful to them. 9) The five ways to get the audience to notice your message is to 1) consider audience expectations, 2) ensure ease of use, 3) emphasize familiarity, 4) practice empathy, and 5) design for compatibility. 10) First, the recipient has to remember the message long enough to act on it. Second, the recipient has to be able to respond as you wish. Lastly, the recipient has to be motivated to respond. 11) Traditional business messages are scripted by designated communicators, approved by someone in authority, distributed through selected channels, and delivered without modification to a passive audience. In the 2.0 approach, customers and other stakeholders are active participants who influence or take control of conversations. 12) The overuse or misuse of communication technology can lead to information overload, in which people receive more information than they can effectively process. Information overload makes it difficult to discriminate between useful and useless information, lowers productivity, and amplifies employee stress both on the job and at home - even to the point of causing health and relationship problems. Information overload has nothing to do with fear of technology. Anyone who uses a computer, a smart phone, or other advanced gadget is susceptible to information overload. 13) Ethical communication includes all relevant information, is true in every sense, and is not deceptive in any way. In contrast, unethical communication can distort the truth or manipulate audiences in a variety of ways. Examples of unethical communication include plagiarism, omitting essential information, selective misquoting, misrepresenting numbers, distorting visuals, and failing to respect privacy or information security needs. Both formal and informal communication should always include ethical communication. 14) An ethical dilemma involves choosing among alternatives that are not clear-cut. Perhaps two conflicting alternatives are both ethical and valid, or perhaps the alternatives lie somewhere in the gray area between clearly right and clearly wrong. Every company has responsibilities to multiple groups of people inside and outside the firm, and those various groups often have competing interests. 2 15) Many successful companies encourage employee contributions by fostering open climates that promote candor and honesty, helping employees feel free enough to admit their mistakes, disagree with the boss, and share negative or unwelcome information. 16) Today's employers expect you to be competent at following accepted standards of grammar, spelling, and other aspects of high quality writing and speaking. 17) Multitasking is virtually guaranteed to create communication distractions. Moreover, research suggests that chronic multitaskers experience lowered productivity and increased errors. These findings suggest that multitasking should be avoided whenever possible. 18) Following five principles can help you create effective messages: considering audience expectations; ensuring ease of use; emphasizing familiar words, images, and designs; practicing empathy; and designing for compatibility. Familiar words, images, and designs can draw positive attention, decrease frustration, and make your messages stand out. 19) A major issue in business communication transparency is stealth marketing, which involves attempting to promote products and services to customers who do not know they are being marketed to. This type of marketing falls under ethical and legal communication and is deceptive because it does not give the target or audience the opportunity to raise their instinctive defenses against the persuasive powers of marketing messages. 20) To make your communication efforts as effective as possible, focus on making them practical, factual, concise, clear, and persuasive. 21) Tall structures have many layers of management between the lowest and highest positions. Hence, communication breakdowns and delays can occur as messages move up and down through multiple layers. 22) For an audience member to receive a message, three events need to occur: The receiver has to sense the presence of a message, select it from all the other messages clamoring for attention, and perceive it as an actual message (as opposed to random, pointless noise). 23) When teams are successful, they can improve productivity, creativity, employee involvement, and even job security. Teams are often at the core of participative management - the effort to involve employees in the company's decision-making. Participative management is not about profit sharing participation, an authoritarian management, or exclusive control. A team is a unit of two or more people who share a mission and the responsibility for working to achieve a common goal. 24) Groupthink occurs when peer pressures cause individual team members to withhold contrary or unpopular opinions. Like other social structures, business teams can generate tremendous pressures to conform to accepted norms of behavior. The result can be decisions that are worse than the choices the team members might have made individually. 25) Team members can play various roles. Members who assume self-oriented roles are motivated to fulfill their personal needs, so they tend to be less productive than other members. Team-maintenance is one group of functional roles. Coordinating is one type of functional role. 26) In the conflict phase of the group-development process, different opinions and perspectives begin to emerge. 27) Shared workspaces are online "virtual offices" and give everyone on a team access to the same set of resources and information: databases, calendars, project plans, pertinent messaging and exchanges, reference materials, and team-created documents. They are also sometimes called intranets and extranets. 28) Constructive feedback sometimes called constructive criticism focuses on the process and outcomes of communication, not on the people involved. Destructive feedback delivers criticism with no guidance to stimulate improvement