Employers all over the world are adjusting to the new way of working. For the ones who are still adjusting to the flexible and remote working setups, it can be considered a privilege to have a physical office space and desk for your team. Either way, there is a paradigm shift in communication or employers’ need to adjust themselves as we saw last week. In today’s world, we have the choice of technological solutions to communicate with our peers and colleagues and it is high time some of us found ways to leverage it and eliminate the barriers that will of course arise.

With the rise in Covid-19 cases in the country, and some companies shifting back to work-from-home, these communication barriers can have massive impacts on staffers’ personal and professional lives. Furthermore, they are amplified still when we are dependent on digital tools. Barriers can be anything that prevents the communicator from delivering the right message to the right person at the right time or vice versa. There are three major types of barriers to communication that can make effective communication challenging.

• Physical communication barriers such as social distancing, remote work, desk-less nature of work, closed office doors, and others.  

• Emotional communication barriers result from emotions such as mistrust and fear. 

• Language-communication barriers refer to how a person speaks both verbally and nonverbally.

However, the above is just a surface-level classification of barriers. Let us take a deeper look and we will find that is just superficial, to say the least.

1. Varied skill levels and styles of communication

People have individual communication styles. Some employees tend to focus on the painful details while others tend to generalize everything to express the gist of the information. Communication skills are highly essential because they can often have huge repercussions. After all, some important details may get lost in translation.

2. Disengagement

Two-way communication is fundamentally about engagement. When there is a disconnect between the two parties involved in the communication, disengagement is what arises in that space and it completely defies our purpose.

3. Complex organizational structures

The most common among the barriers we are discussing here is a rigid and complex organizational structure. Complex organization structures must have efficient and simple communication systems, Otherwise, they result in a lack of engagement and loss of productivity. An example of a complex organizational structure is an employee having to report to two different bosses who independently assign him/her mutually exclusive tasks.

4. Lack of Trust

Essentially, what is a company? A group of people working in coordination united by a single goal. In such a situation, the most important factor in the equation is trust. Hence, two-way communication is completely impeded by a lack of trust. If your employees do not trust you, you do not have a team. Studies have shown that 1 in 3 employees do not trust their employer or boss.

5. Lack of Personalization

One-size-fits-all email newsletters are a thing of the past. In the era of social media, people need personalized messages that are relevant to them and their nature of work. The lack of such personalized messages causes them to ignore future communiqués coming their way.