1.1 Communicating With Peers Part 1

Have you ever been at work and asked a colleague to help you out with something only to discover later that they did something completely different than what you expected? Or have you ever received an email from someone requesting information and you didn’t understand what they were asking for? What went wrong in those situations? It may have been due to a breakdown in communication. In the workplace, you spend a lot of time interacting with peers. Peers are colleagues who are in a similar category as you, usually in the same type of job, or who share a similar level of experience and expertise. Most workplaces have environments where peers need to rely upon one another to complete their work. For example, at a Starbucks store, baristas work together as peers to take orders, to make drinks, and hand each other items behind the bar. In an office environment at Apple, marketing managers may work together as peers to assess their customer, which might include sharing consumer data, reports, analyses and collaboratively design promotions that will increase sales in their market, which might include joint brainstorming, reviewing each others’ drafts, and asking for feedback, while at the same time, navigating different points of view. Even though these two examples are very different, what’s the common thread? They will need to communicate to work together most effectively. Whether your job is similar or different than these, communication can help you increase your effectiveness on the job and improve your performance, which can then translate to more sales, improve customer service, or a higher quality product, depending on the type of work that you do. How do you know if you’re effective at communicating? Try this exercise. Think about what you did yesterday. What’s the first thing you did when you arrived at work? Did it involve communication? What did you do next? Did it involve communication? Play out your day in your mind and see if you can identify the various ways in which you communicated. How many ways of communication did you identify and how do you know if you’re good at it? In the four modules of this course, we’re going to consider two types of communication, verbal and nonverbal. Verbal is pretty self-explanatory. Verbal communication occurs using spoken words, most of us know this as talking with one or more people. Nonverbal communication includes body language, specifically gestures and facial expressions and can also include nonverbal aspects of verbal communications such as the tone, pitch of your voice, and the speed in which you’re speaking. We’ll also consider two other types of communication in the workplace. The first is internal versus external communication. Internal communication refers to communication that takes place within the confines of your organization, regardless of geography. If you’re interacting with anyone employed by your company, you are communicating internally. External communication refers to communication which takes place with anyone outside of your organization who’s not an employee. These are generally suppliers, customers, even the general public. There can be some overlap with contractors, or onsite team members from closely partnering organizations but for our discussions, we’ll use employment as the distinguishing factor between internal and external. The last type of communication we’ll consider is in-person communication, live with another person real time, or virtual communication, which takes place using technology, either live or delayed. Today we’re using virtual technology. So think back to your example. Did you identify all the different ways in which you communicated yesterday? Now how do you know if you communicated effectively? In today’s assignment, you’ll have a chance to complete an assessment of your communications skills, so you’ll know exactly what areas to focus on. In our next session, we’ll discuss obstacles to communicating effectively with peers, and techniques you can use to overcome these obstacles. Wherever you are, enjoy the rest of your day or evening.