Communication at Workplace

Shreena Patel

Topic – Communicaton in workplace

In today’s world, people communicate with each other in many different ways. In old ages, there were only few options for communication such as words, actions, face-to-face meetings, but now the ways of communication has changed with the help of new technologies, for example, instant messaging, e-mails, blogs, and telecommuting. With the help of this new devices, wireless phones and computers it has become much easier to commute with our co-workers and supervisors at our workplace.

“Communication is what the receiver understands, not what the sender says”. Newstrom has explained many different kind of processes for communication like two-way communication, upward and downward communication which is between managers and employees and many more. In the two-way communication is an eight step process which are develop an idea, encode, transmit, receive, decode, accept, use and provide feedback. Two-way communication are effectives most of the time but sometimes it also cause difficulties. In this type of communication both person involved are satisfied with the each other, they understand each other well and work will be much easier. If one of the step is being passed over by one person in this communication, then the whole process will go on a different route and it will create problems due to misunderstanding. This communication is called as ineffective communication.

Effective communication in the pharmacy is very important as it is related to patient’s health. Most of the time we have to communicate with doctors over the phone. Telephone communication is not always effective as we don’t know if the person on the other side is understanding our message in the way we are trying to say it. To avoid this misunderstanding we ask questions and get more information we need to avoid mistakes. Sometimes we have to call the same person twice or thrice to make the message clear. If there is a one percent doubt about the prescription the doctor wrote, we call them to clear the doubt before filling a prescription. Ineffective communication takes place when a person doesn’t speak the language we understand and we don’t speak their language. At the pharmacy, many of our customers doesn’t speak English and so we had to call the translator. A middle person would not have any information of the pharmacy. When customers tells the middle person, he translates to us but, when we hear the same message from the translator in the different way, it changes the meaning of it. We faced many problems due to language and also our customers. As Newstrom mentioned, communication is the transfer of information and understanding from one person to another. Due to language problems, we were unable to transfer and understand any information they are trying to give us and we were unable to question them as they won’t understand what we speak.