What is business communication skills – Communication is pervasive and an inevitable activity in the life of every human.
In a business environment, workers, employers and customers need to constantly relate by exchanging information for mutual understanding and organisational success.
Therefore, these participants engage in verbal and non-verbal communication to achieve set goals, ensure mutual understanding, send and receive favourable response and maintain favourable relationship.
That is why it is important for business organisations to promote business communication skills for effective communication between and among their internal and external stakeholders.
Effective Business Communication Skills
A big part of effective communication is effective listening and understanding. This is why it is essential to know when you’re listening to others, pay as much attention to them as you can. Notice quirks in their body language.
Listen to their words and, if you have trouble focusing on them, repeat their words in your head to help you retain focus and absorb the information. Here’re the four effective business communication skills:
1. Modern communication skills
Learning modern communication skills are essential skills required in every organization. With modern communication, you can communicate with workforce without all the complexities that come with time and distance or location.
The contemporary communication media has facilitate communication and data exchange among a large number of individuals across long distances via email, teleconferencing, internet forums and many other forms of communication in business environment.
The aim of modern communication skills is to promote principles to becoming more effective communicators in a business environment.
These communication skills gives rules, steps and practical ways of achieving effective communication in a business organization. Therefore, it is possible for workers, would-be employees and managers to study and apply these skills to be better communicators in their companies.
Another example is when one studies major barriers to communication and devise practical ways of overcoming the barriers while delivering messages. The modern communication approach sees business communication practices (writing memos, listening to others, attending meetings, sending e-mails etc) as predictable and amenable to control.
This perspective places a lot of responsibility on the sender who must observe certain rules and procedures for communication to be effective. This is highly prescriptive and theoretical.
2. Interpretive Skills
The interpretive skills recognises the place of setting, context and individual differences in achieving effective business communication. This business communication skills will help you reveals the complexity and richness of organisational communication by offering a better understanding of your own communication practices, with your deep-seated values and norms.
The messaged meanings constructed by a receivers from the messages are very much dependent on the performance of the sender. The interpretive skills will develop a better working relationship and a collective responsibility, where the communicators help each-other to achieve a better understanding of the message.
The two people involved in the communication process must will understand the peculiarities of each-other, respect these values and norms and package their messages to suit the workplace diversities.
For example, the gender, religious, educational, political, cultural, and economic differences will be built into communication in a business environment. Therefore, organisations will be sensitive to these diversities as they communicate with the employees, shareholders, managers, suppliers, clients, customers and other external stakeholders with which the organisation communicates.
3. Critical Skills
The critical skills is an important business communication skills commonly practiced by the business managers or a higher rank in the business environment. The critical skills teaches everyone in the business environment to understands the influence of power relations in business or organizational communication.
It also help to understand various communication strategies that top-level managers adopt in exercising power over other stakeholders in a business organisation. When employers are ready to exercise power and influence some decisions and plans, they apply different communication channels to achieve submission and control.
So, any information that the organisation seeks to communicate, the way it is passed and focus of the information can be political rather than literal.
Effectiveness of the communication process becomes highly politicised as strict observance of power relations prevents the receivers from understanding some information and asking questions concerning them.
Managers adopt the critical skills when there is perceived threat to the security and success of their organisations if power relations are not employed to reduce the quality and quantity of communication with the other stakeholders, and even threats to their own positions and influences.
4. Collaboration and Teamwork
Collaboration and teamwork are vital to business success. Being able to collaborate carries a number of benefits for an employer, from better marketing to increased employee satisfaction to a higher quality of product or service.
The art of collaboration and teamwork isn’t just one thing, it’s a complex network of interrelated skills. In order to collaborate, you must be good at asking questions, respecting others’ contributions, generating their trust and considering their perspectives.
These skills contribute to an employee’s ability to collaborate effectively, and there’s another important component of collaboration: emotional intelligence and awareness.
