Communication

Due to my current experiences with Hurricane Irma, I will focus on how my workplace used effective and ineffective patterns of communication during this time. According to Newstrom (2015) “organizations cannot exist without communication” (p. 54). This past week communication has been very important. Not that it hasn’t been before, but due to evacuation purposes everyone’s whereabouts’ have been an importance to my first line supervisors. Preparation was a priority within my workplace before evacuation. For the preparation process to begin my workplace used downward communication to enforce these actions. For example, receiving information from higher authority (Newstrom, 2015, p.65). I think this is an effective and ineffective way of communication because it gives structure to our workplace but could also be a potential problem based on the feedback and inferences from members in the workplace. When receiving commands from superiors it is never a face-to-face situation. Like I’ve mentioned before each member in my workplace has a different job that allows us to be in different places i.e. indoor or outdoor. Text messaging is a heavily relied upon members in my workplace. As we all know, cell phone usage is the most common form of communication. King (2011) reports 73% of Americans who own cell phones send