Communication
Communication is an important tool, on any account in work place or in family. It is about
expressing and conveying your thoughts, feelings, opinions and ideas to another person or a
group of people. In my opinion, team communication is a major tool with regard to the
workplace. Most companies and organizations have people working in small teams. This has
been found to be more effective and productive than a single individual toiling away at a project.
For instance, I am working in an administration team and we have three people working on an
issue. The advantages of working as a team is that we can access more creative ideas and
solutions than working by an individual person. However, there must be open and efficient
communication between teammates otherwise it cannot operate smoothly. I remember that I got
a hotel booking requisition from my guest. She informed us that her arrival time is on 27 Oct
2014 at 00:15 from Germany and departure on 30 Oct 2014 at 00:15 from Hong Kong.
According to this request, I made the hotel reservation for her from 27 Oct to 30 Oct (4 nights).
However, check out should be on 29 Oct as her flight was in the mid-night on 29 Oct. Luckily,
she clarified with me after she saw confirmation letter which I sent to her. At the same time, my
teammates also needed double check information of the return air-ticket for her. It was luck that
we have a good communication between us, so that the guest doesn’t need to pay unnecessarily
one more room rental for penalty and also could not get on a flight. It was because one of the
other guest also had this problem and he didn’t checked the reservation confirmation. Although,
he didn’t have to pay the room penalty at last as he is a VIP guest in this hotel. However, he
had to buy the new return air-ticket as he missed the flight (like he should arrived the airport on
28 Oct around 10:00pm if he took the flight on 29 Oct mid-night, but he confused and arrived the
airport on 29 Oct around 10:00pm).
I strongly realized that good communication skill truly make a task or work easier and more
effective, especially after learnt the communication skill from Thinking and Communicating
Skills Course.
With regard to the first transactional model of communication introduced by Claude Shannon
and Warren Weaver for Bell Laboratories in 1949. This model consists of three primary items:
- Sender of a message
- Channel used for message transport
- Receiver of the message
For these three objects the main questions are: How can we transmit the message accurately?
How is the meaning precisely conveyed? And What is the most effective way of receiving the
signification?
Referring to the case above which showed there were improvement rooms between my guests
and my teammates. After I have this experience, I have clarified the aim for the guest when I
received their requisition. If it is arrange the hotel and flight reservation, I will compose the
information with her after I got her message and transmit to her whether the information is
correct or not. Moreover, the decisive thing is to wait for her feedback in order to ensure that the
task is correct and complete. In order to avoid the mistake, I made the guideline that show it
below under transactional model which made our teammate easier and clearer to understand our
work process:
In Flight booking