Why Communication Skills Matter in Business?
Let’s start with formal definition of communication.
What is communication?
“Communication is simply the act of transferring information from one place, person or group to another.”
Therefore we can simply say that if there is a need for sharing information in any circumstances, the communication must be established. However, the communication among human beings is not only limited with sequencing the words. Body language, tone of the voice, the intention behind the message, time context and even the choice of words affect the communication quality. The information flow from one individual to another goes through these physical and psychological filters. Therefore, if we want to transfer information efficiently, we need to optimize these filters to maximize the information flow. In other words, we need to develop our communication skills if we want to exchange information with low loss rate. Since information exchange is extremely crucial in any business, communication skills needed to be taken into account while recruiting employees.
Because of the fact that I have been working for a quite big company, I had chance to observe the general profile of the employees . There are several common characteristics for a typical employee in my company:
- Being friendly
- Having good intentions
- Being wide open to communication
- Being modest
- Being helpful
- Being respectful
- Being cold-blooded
- Being honest
- Being punctual
- Being discerning
- Being responsible
- Being responsive
These are the main characteristics of the company. But I want to point out that, these are also roots of the prerequisites of good communication. For instance, if you don’t act friendly, probably the communication would be less desired. If you don’t act honestly, your words become unworthy. More examples can be populated related to the characteristics above but probably you got the point.
Especially in big projects there are so many stakeholders. These stakeholders need to maintain the project in a coordinated manner. Any sort of cooperation and collaboration is extremely important at this point. The best way to support cooperation and collaboration is to strengthen the communication between stakeholders. That minimizes the “dirty information flow” cost and helps the business to be maintained with high efficiency. To put in a nutshell, to minimize the cost because of information exchange inefficiency , the best way is selecting stakeholders (in our case these are employees) by considering their communication skills.
Thanks for reading!