It is interesting that our world is so developed, and something that interests me is the improvement in communication in terms of quality and quantity, and this is evident in the real word.

For example in my high school Geography class we were given examples of how improvement in communication has improved the functioning of co-operatives. So in this blog post I am going to use OB concepts and explain the example of co-operatives that I learned in my Geography class.

A company changed its tracking employee hours from hand written system to an electronic, and this change had good and bad impact. This decision allowed communication richness to improve which is the amount of information recorded in one go, hence improving the speed, efficiency and accountability. This method also reduces the barriers to effective communication. For example a barrier is emotion and when an employee is angry he or she would not be pay much attention on signing in or out, compared to when they are in a good mood. Another example can be to prevent filtering, as an employee can easily manipulate the information to their favour on a hand written document, but it is difficult to do so with an electronic device.

So what went wrong for the company was the mangers did not effectively take part in downward communication, which means that the mangers did not inform the employees about the change. It is common in many organizations for its mangers not to communicate effectively with their subordinates as mangers find it a waste of time and unimportant. However to maintain a positive work environment managers have to communicate a certain matter multiple times, and it wasn’t the case with the organization. The first time the employee heard about this change was through a brief discussion between two mangers. This wasn’t good as it created a grapevine communication network, which is the most common informal network in an organizations through which rumours and gossips transfer. Hence the general agreement between employees was not to trust the mangers as they did not inform them about the change, and this created a negative environment. Also majority of employees are afraid or not ready for change, so the higher authority should do everything in their power to reduce the harmful impacts of change.

In conclusion, I believe that effective communication is important and especially for this organization. This is because bad communication in this situation resulted in long term loss of motivation of employees and trust.