The Two Barriers to Communication
About the same stage of development where you are learning to toddle around and interact in your environment, you begin to produce words that have meaning. Rapidly, you learn that words have association. Saying "mama" brings the attention of your mother. Saying "drink" gets you something to quell your thirst. You also learn that communication is more than words, even if you're too young to know exactly how. Crying or laughing brings different types of attention.
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Cultural Barriers
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Cultural differences is a broad statement that simply means people act differently based on many factors. A straightforward cultural difference is language. If you speak English and another person speaks Spanish, you do not have the verbal skills to communicate with each other. However, cultural differences go far beyond the language barrier. One culture may restrict women from communicating with men. Another culture may have a stringent hierarchy for communication. While these differences may be quickly understood and you learn to change your communication skills, other cultural differences are much more subtle. For example, a culture may believe that a person must be soft-spoken. If this person is an employee, you may believe that he is not motivated or not fully engaged in his job when that is not the issue at all. He may be insecure about voicing issues because he learned that questioning an authority figure is frowned upon.
Cultural Education
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To bridge the cultural gap and improve communication requires education and open communication. If you have employees from a specific culture, learn about that culture while coaching the employees on open communication. You may need to set expectations with employees. For example, you can make sure employees understand that opinions are welcome from everyone. But, you may need to devise ways to allow the open communication. If you work with people reluctant to speak up, you can request that each person present one idea or problem per staff meeting. This may create a discomfort level at first, but you are teaching a new business cultural norm that improves communication. Consider a person who was taught to follow directions without question. You may give that person an assignment with an unknown problem. For example, if you ask an employee to mail a flier but it has a printing error, you need the employee to feel comfortable bringing up the problem or the error may be costly. You may also have to adjust your management style to accommodate cultural differences. If you are a male manager and you have female employees from a culture of not interacting with men, you must change your style of communicating. If you normally have weekly one-on-one meetings with staff, you may need to shift this to team meetings to eliminate any sense of inappropriate behavior.
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Non-verbal Barriers
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Non-verbal communication plays a large role in overall communication and can create barriers. In an office environment, consider a manager who arrives to work angry. His face is hard, he may walk forcefully, ignore smiles of greetings and slam things around on his desk. If the manager comes into a staff meeting an hour later and asks the employees to voice concerns or problems, the employees will be very reluctant. The manager has not spoken a word about his anger, but he has given plenty of non-verbal signals.
Improving Understanding
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Communication barriers can be reduced by an awareness that differences exist and learning to find a common ground. Other cultures can be an asset to a company and other ways of looking at situations may give a broader perspective and produce new ideas. In a company, a customer may appreciate the quiet attention of a certain culture or a customer may feel more comfortable purchasing from someone from her own background who speaks in her language. However, if you have an employee who glares at customers or doesn't smile when interacting, you must understand how to coach the employee on how his non-verbal communication impacts the company. To begin a program of breaking down the barriers of communication, recognize both the large gaps such as cultural differences or the seemingly subtler non-verbal interactions.
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References
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