Problem analysis
Causes
The lack of communication between shop floor employees and upper managers occurred at the Aluminum Elements Corp, and it negatively influenced employees’ performance of their job such as misunderstanding instructions from superiors. Consequently, the lack of communication made employees feel dissatisfactory with supervisors, which broke the good working relationship within employees and managers at AEC. The main reason of causing this problem is that inappropriate use of communication models. In order to better understanding reasons of these issues occur, we use the communication process model to analyze these problems. By using the communication process model, the use of inappropriate communication channel causes less communications between staff members and supervisors. Based on the communication process model, it is more efficient to communicate when the communication channel is suitable for two parties within the communication. The sender can organize messages and explicitly express them to the receiver through the selected communication channel that is both suitable with the sender and receiver, and then the receiver could immediately understand those messages and quickly give feedback to the sender through the selected communication channel. There is no misunderstanding happen when the communication channel is appropriate. However, supervisors use the incorrect communication channel to talk with employees at AEC. For instance, “George usually sent written memos to the floor in order to avoid a direct confrontation with John.”( cited from the case) Usually senders hardly express their actual ideas throuth memo. Also, information overload always occurs on memos, and it makes memos seem complicated, so that receivers cannot fully understand what senders really want to say. In the case of AEC, upper managers never talked to floor employees face by face, and they used memos to communicate with employees such as making task demands. As a result, floor employees were having difficulty understanding instructions from their superiors, or even completely understand in an opposite way. For example, George was actually complimenting and gave an opportunity to promote John, so he wanted John to take a management skills conference. However, John did not appropriate understand the real meaning of this seminar, and he thought that he was punished. (cited from the case) It clearly shows that the inappropriate use of communication channel causes misunderstanding within employees and managers. According to the communication process model, the lack of similar codebooks is another reason why there is less communication between employees and supervisors. “ With similar codebooks. the communication participants are able to encode and decode more accurately because they both have the same or similar meaning.” (cited from textbook p.248) It is easy to understand messages from each other if senders and receivers convey something in the same way. In the case of AEC, “no one from the shop floor was invited to the meeting, unless thee was a specific problem.” (cited from the case) Managers do not care employees’ ideas, so that managers do not have similar languages or ideas with employees. Then employees complained their supervisors, and they were frustrated in their work place. Consequently, it triggers a potential conflict on the working relationship within employees and managers.
Effects
Due to the reason the upper management of AEC used memos as a main communication tool instead of using face-to-face communication, which decreased people’s enthusiasm to communicate, led different problems appeared. This communication method between managers and employees would cause some negative effects to a company. Reducing politeness and respect would be one negative effect to the AEC. When people used memo as a communication tool, they were more likely to use the words or sentences they did not use in face-to-face