The Issues With Communication

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

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NAME: PRACHI JAIN

STUDENT NUMBER: 500329498

ORGANISATION AND PEOPLE

ABSTRACT

In this report I have mainly concentrate on my experiences while preparing the group assignment and have addressed a few issues emerged during the group assignment. I will be sharing my views on these issues and the way I felt while working in the group and draw a few positives and negatives outcomes from them. I have also being mentioning the measures that we took in while successfully completing our work and based upon the results that we obtained I have come up with a few suggestions on how we could have made it even better.

The main key ideas are DECISION MAKING, TIME MANAGEMENT, CONFLICT AND PROBLEM RESOLUTION, AND GROUP ROLES.

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Decision making in simple terms means to decide. It is a mental process (cognitive process) involved for selection of a course alternative among several alternatives. After decision making process it produces a final output. Decision making and planning always go hand in hand. Planning makes the decision making process simple. The output from decision making can be an action or opinion of choice.

Things that are very important for decision making are:

A clear objective must be established.

Objectives need to be classified in the order of its importance.

Alternative actions must always be kept in mind.

Evaluation of these alternatives is also very important.

The best alternative is the one that achieves all the objectives.

The alternatives are evaluated more for more other possible consequences.

To avoid problems proper action and decisive actions are taken.

Proper steps must be followed while taking decisions.

In a situation of featuring conflict, role-playing is helpful for predicting decisions to be made by the involved parties.

There are many steps involved in decision making. These stages are called phases. They are very important. They are as followed:

Orientation stage: This is the stage when you meet people in your group. You become familiar with the group members.

In our case this stage was not very important as the group was made with the mutual decision of the students. We dint have to go thru the orientation stage. We all were familiar with each other.

Conflict stage: Once the group members become familiar with each other, there are possibilities of arguments, disputes etc. Group members will finally come to a mutual decision and work it out.

We actually faced this problem while choosing upon the organisation. Everybody had different ideas and views. It was very difficult to come up to a conclusion upon whose idea to choose. There even was absence of a group member due to the health reasons and it became very difficult to handle the situation.

Emergence stage: This is the 3rd stage where the things start getting clear. The things start getting sorted out after proper conversation with the group members.

We all had specially kept a day for sorting out all the issues within the group. This meeting proved to be fruitful and all the things got sorted after the long conversations within the group members.

Reinforcement stage: This is the 4th and the last stage where members while justifying themselves come to a right decision.

In the same manner we also heard everybody’s point of view and after taking all the aspects into consideration we finally ended up coming to a mutual decision that was agreed by all.

All these stages are very important for proper working within the group. It is even said that critical norms in a group improves the quality of decisions. Due to much of collaboration between one another we tend to argue and finally come to a perfect conclusion. At times it does not mean that all the group members agree with the decision it is just that he/she is not willing to argue any further.

In the same manner after much argument we finally came to a conclusion that would benefit the group as whole and the group member as well. There were members in the group who were not fully satisfied by the decision taken.

After everything the thing that becomes very clear is that the activity of decision making leads to good leadership. Group members had to work together to:

Clarify and agree on the same decision decisions

Determine together, the objectives and criteria before decisions are sought

Seek out reliable and appropriate amounts of both facts and perspectives

Know and respect what is desirable and what is realizable in context

View decisions as reconciliation

Heighten awareness of the impact of decisions vis-à-vis the true intervention.

There were many tactics used by us to come to a decision. They were:

Putting a vote

Tossing a coin

Sticking pin in the list. etc

Regardless of the effort that is put into making a decision, we accepted the fact that all the decisions may not work fruitful. It is very difficult to make a high quality decision.

What a high quality decision should be?

With a process or framework, you have the mechanism you need to warrant the quality of your own decisions. Perhaps more importantly, you also have a common language and set of mental models that makes conversations about decisions more efficient and effective. This common understanding of decision processes, criteria, and roles avoids many of the common organizational decision traps, allowing people in your organizations to spend their conversational energies on creating better alternatives and validating assumptions and ultimately warranting their own decisions. It’s not that people don’t have the capacity to make high-quality decisions in them. Decision-making is a distinctly human activity. It’s what that great, big frontal lobe is for. We all make decisions all the time.

The other important factor in while working in the group was TIME MANAGEMENT.

Success is a process, a quality of mind and way of being an outgoing affirmation of life.

{Alex Noble, Forsyth, Patrick, Mar 03, 2010, Successful Time Management}

Any kind of job you do, if there are roles in a management or executive level, we need to utilise a number of resources. People, money, materials – all are very important. In any particular job, one resource may predominate. But there is one resource we all have in common "time". And time has always been a hard taskmaster. People usually experience problems in getting everything done, and doing it all in the time available. There are times and many activities where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. It is even said that juggling with flaming torches necessitates more than the specific movements of the hands. Avoiding any kind of accidents completely depends also on overall coordination, concentration and getting the individual movements exactly right. Time management is completely similar. It also depends on the individual techniques, ideas and tricks that will allow us to make some progress towards an effective and efficient way of working.

Time and tide waits for no man. This is a very important issue in life. We had a time bar to complete with the given assignment. Completing it in time was the toughest job to us. Time management is the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, it is always helpful to increase effectiveness, efficiency or productivity. Time management is always helped by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage the time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects and goals complying with a due date. There are sets of activities, and these include planning, allocating, setting goals, delegation, analysis of time spent, monitoring, organizing, scheduling, and prioritizing. Initially, time management referred to just business or work activities, but eventually the term broadened to include personal activities as well. A time management system is a designed combination of processes, tools, techniques, and methods. Usually time management is a necessity for the determination of project completion.

We had decided that for proper time management a tension free job was required:

Plan each day: Planning your day can help you accomplish more and feel more relaxed in your life. Write a to-do list, putting the most important tasks at the top is the 1st most priority. Keep a schedule of your daily activities to minimize conflicts and last-minute rushes. We did the same thing after allocating the work amongst group members.

Prioritize your tasks: This is a very time-consuming thing but relatively unimportant tasks can consume a lot of your day. Prioritizing tasks will ensure that you spend your time and energy on those that are truly important to you. The main priority in our task was to decide with the organisation. This had always been on the top of our priority list.

Say no to nonessential tasks: Consider your goals and schedule before agreeing to take on additional work. The goal was quite clear and all the nonsense task was kept on one side and more over jokes became really very less amongst the group while making the assignment.

Delegate: Take a look at your to-do list and consider what you can pass on to someone else. The time had come to complete the task assigned to the individual.

Take the time you need to do a quality job. Doing work right at one stretch was very difficult, but errors usually result in time spent making corrections, which takes more time overall.

Break large, time-consuming tasks into smaller tasks. Work on them a few minutes at a time until you get them all done.

Practice the 10-minute rule. Work on a dreaded task for 10 minutes each day. Once you get started, you may find you can finish it.

Evaluate how you're spending your time. Keep a diary of everything you do for three days to determine how you're spending your time. Look for time that can be used more wisely. For example, could you take a bus or train to work and use the commute to catch up on reading? If so, you could free up some time to exercise or spend with family or friends.

Limit distractions: Block out time on your calendar for big projects. During that time, close your door and turn off your phone, pager and email.

Get plenty of sleep, eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly. A healthy lifestyle can improve your focus and concentration, which will help improve your efficiency so that you can complete your work in less time.

Take a time management course: attend the seminar held at university that helps in better time management programmes.

Take a break when needed. Too much stress can derail your attempts at getting organized. When you need a break, take one. Take a walk. Do some quick stretches. Take a day of vacation to rest and re-energize.

It is said that people who use their time in a balanced way are always:

Less stressed

Feels better about their life and surrounding

Get their work done faster

Have ample time to pursue their hobbies, talents and other stuffs {Dodd, P. and Sundehim, D. 2008}

Group roles

At this point of time we actually had realised that the assignment that we had to undertake had many aspects like collecting data through interview, analysis, presentation, typing, etc. We thought it best to divide the work so everyone was asked which work they would like to undertake. It was surprising that everyone decided to take a different work and there was no conflict in relation to group role. This helped to improve motivation and group bounding. So I found that people must be asked about their area of interest before giving them work so that they would be motivated to work hard. We found that as we were from the same cultural background it was easy for us to gel together. I realised that this was not professional and requested that everybody must be on time as now we are going to become professionals. This was the time to show professional ethics. We had put a fine of 5 GBP on anybody who would enter late and this actually worked. We now had our meetings starting and completing on time. This helped to inculcate professional behaviour amongst all of us. Thus penalising had worked as deterrent to work on time and I realised that some form of deterrence can be used to induce discipline amongst the people.

Communication

Last but not the least communication played a very vital role while making the assignment. Expressing your ideas and views clearly, confidently and concisely in a speech is called as effective communication, tailoring the content in your mind and style to the group mates and promoting free-flowing communication is called as effective communication. Communication is always a two way traffic. The communication must be clear. It must be done with proper gestures. As using the different type of gestures helps a person to understand better. There are different modes of communication which we had used:

Phone calls

SMS

Skype

Whts app messenger service

Meeting in coffee shops

Meeting in library

We had used the latest technology to communicate with each other which made our work more easy and quick. Almost all the work could be done thru these different modes. These modes saved lots of our time as video calling was as good as meeting one another. These proved very vital because the college was very far away and travelling for everyone was very inconvenient. Varying the tone you speak, the pace and volume also enhances the communication and encouraged questions in the group.

Conflicts and problem resolution

My approach towards conflict resolution was completely different before doing the group assignment. The group assignment changed my thinking for conflicts. Initially, I was self-concerned and paid less head to what others used to say or had to say. But, the growth of conflicts within the group started affecting the productivity of the group. I started avoiding the competition and compromise with them. This helped me to concentrate more on my work and automatically I stopped wasting my time over arguing with my group members that could severely damage the group functionality and productivity. The best thing I learned was the mechanism of getting the work done in group with conflicts within the members by using the skill of persuasion with reasoning.

Some individuals took undue advantage of the freedom given by the leader in performing their allocated task which led to disorganisation within the group. The biggest issue which arose was of contention within the members when personal ambitions came into the picture before the goals to be achieved by the group and completing the task on time seemed to be an impossible thing. This was the most difficult problem to overcome as the hard working members of the group always have to compensate for the lenient members. But the credit for the entire work goes to all even though with the less contribution to the over- all work. This tends to create conflicts within the group. This can be avoided by mutual understanding within the group members.

The most important lesson to be learned from this scenario was that not every member of the team works according to the expectation of the members and in such scenario there has to be some back-up plan to be performed. One of the member in the group dint turn up till the date of submitting the assignment. We knew this beforehand that the group member would not turn up so we had already divide his part of work to every member in the group without his notice. The extra work finally had to be has to be shared equally among the remaining members to achieve the desired goal of the group within the time constraints. During the work, one of the members got ill and his work was to be equally divided among the other members of the group. It a duty of every individual to inform the other group members if he/she is unable to perform the work allotted to him. There was one girl who couldn’t complete her task due to health reasons but unfortunately she dint inform the group members. This led to further rearrangement of the tasks between the members and new deadlines were given for the upcoming tasks. This was a bitter spill to swallow as I had to conduct the extra burden of work because of someone else’s mistakes. This incident thought me a valuable lesson that a person has to be flexible enough while working in a group to meet up to the sudden emergencies that may arise due to some unwanted reasons. The individual must not be self-centred rather he/she must work for the benefit of the group. The other reason for the conflicts that arose during our group work was miscommunication or improper communication between various members of the group. This was mainly due to bad channel of communication with each other as most of the members had a one way traffic of interaction with the leader and the rest of the group members were not informed about it. It would have been smoother if all the members would have been in direct communication with each other.

CONCLUSION

Finally while concluding I can just say that making a group assignment was completely a different experience. We all behave like professional at some point of time and rest was completely informal. This helped us in establishing professional ethics. Understanding each other will become simpler next time. Any assignment given at university or at work place can now be handled in a professional way. I have learned to be punctual. This plays a very vital role in the life of an individual.

REFRENCING

Successful Time Management journal by Forsyth, Patrick, Mar 03, 2010

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