You have been hired as a consultant to improve communication between engineering and marketing staff in a large high-technology company. Use the communication model and the four ways to improve that process to devise strategies to improve communication effectiveness among employees between these two work units.

The textbook describes four ways to improve communication through coding-decoding. Students can identify various practices to improve communication for each of these general categories:

Ensure that both parties have similar “codebooks” -- In this scenario, this might occur by having marketing and engineering staff learn basic concepts commonly used by the other profession. Staff in each unit might include people who have double degrees or have spent part of their careers in the other profession, so have acquired the language and meaning of words used by both groups.

Ensure the sender has experience encoding (sending) the message topic -- This strategy specifically refers to experience with communicating on the topic rather than just experience with the work context. The main recommendation, therefore, is that the sender has practiced communicating the message. This might occur by having one person speak to many others about important matters (e.g. executive “A” communicates new human resource policies whereas executive “B” keep employee informed about financial matters. By specializing the communication role, each communicator becomes an expert at communicating that narrower band of content to employees throughout the organization. In contrast, if Person “A” is responsible for communicating all company matters to one particular employee group, that communicator would have less knowledge and experience about communicating each topic.

Ensure that sender and receiver are motivated and able to use the communication channel -- This category suggests that both engineers and marketing specialists should be familiar with meetings, email, instant messaging, and other channels through which both parties will be communicating. Training and establishing ground rules can also improve communication effectiveness in this regard. For example, before starting a project involving engineers and marketing staff, both groups might receive training in video conference meetings, and they might form rules on when to use this communication channel and what behaviors are required or discouraged when using this communication channel. The group might also figure out which media people prefer to use more than others.

Ensure that both parties have similar mental models about the context of the information -- This can be accomplished by having people in both professions gain experience in specific project areas. For example, if one of the company’s work field is laser technology, then both engineering and marketing staff who communicate with each other should have previous experience working on projects in that area. In contrast, communication problems and inefficiencies will increase when either party is new to working on laser technology (either as engineers or marketing specialists).

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