The deadliest accident in aviation history, known as the Tenerife airport disaster, is attributed to “a misunderstanding between the tower and the aircraft.” In essence, a communication problem.
Whether you’re flying a plane, writing copy for a website, or building software, ineffective communication can have extraordinary consequences. In this blog post, we explore communication barriers and how you can handle them.
Barriers to Effective Communication and How to Tackle Them
Summarize this article for me pleaseUnderstanding Communication Barriers
A communication barrier is anything that hinders one person from communicating clearly and the other person/persons from understanding the message. Communication barriers can be detrimental to organizational functioning across several dimensions.
❗️Quality: Ineffective communication creates gaps in understanding, which results in suboptimal work output.
❗️Productivity: Without a complete understanding of the instructions, team members might take too long to process, try and fail, or be inefficient in their work.
❗️Effectiveness: Imagine communication barriers between an employee and a customer/manager, leading to misunderstandings. The employee will struggle to deliver what’s expected of him/her effectively.
❗️Disengagement: When communication becomes harder—overcoming barriers every day—team members develop fatigue and disengage. This can significantly affect workplace performance.
❗️Innovation: Collective creativity requires smooth communication. Without that, innovation would be a distant dream.
❗️Culture: Good communication creates a sense of collective purpose. The lack of it creates a dysfunctional culture where people are distant or even distrustful. In fact, communication barriers are an important reason for the Great Resignation and quiet quitting.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, let’s see how it happens in the workplace.
Summarize this article for me pleaseCommon Communication Barriers in the Workplace
Good communication is when one person articulates their message clearly and in a way that is easily and completely understood by the intended audience. Anything that comes in the way of this can be treated as a communication barrier. Here are the top ten examples.
1. Physical barriers
The simplest communication barrier is physical. Whether you’re trying to communicate with someone a few feet away from you at a concert or making a presentation on faulty equipment, physical barriers are everywhere.
They’re simple because they are clear and tangible. It can be fixed with changes to the system.
For example, if you’re having trouble explaining a concept to someone on the phone, you can use a video conferencing tool with screen share to solve the problem of this communication barrier.
2. Psychological barriers
Unlike physical barriers, psychological ones are in the minds of people, and hence exponentially more complex to handle. Some common psychological barriers of the speaker include stage fright, social anxiety, speech disorders, self-esteem issues, etc.
The receiver can also have psychological barriers like biases, judgments, and untested assumptions, which makes conversations behind closed doors ineffective.
3. Language barriers
The most basic language barrier is when two people don’t speak the same language. For instance, a native English speaker from the US might experience language barriers while communicating with colleagues in France, Germany, or Japan, where English isn’t the first language.
That’s not the only language barrier, though. Accents, dialects, technical terms, local lingo, or even an unfamiliar metaphor can hinder communication. For instance, if you order chips, you’ll get two completely different things in the US and the UK!
On the other hand, teams and organizations can have their own language.
For instance, terms like ‘peeling the curtain,’ ‘falling down the rabbit hole,’ ‘sidebar’ etc. are common, while not familiar to those who don’t speak that lingo.
Our social team has a lot to say about that!
4. Cultural barriers
Cultural differences create communication barriers. For example, the power distance in some Eastern cultures can be high, making junior team members reluctant to challenge their bosses.
Some organizations, especially long-standing ones, might have a formal work culture where all communication needs to be in writing in specific formats. This can leave a lot of information unsaid, creating communication gaps in the workplace.
You might also have a new team member who, until now worked in a different culture, needing realignment to communicate effectively with you.
5. Organizational barriers
Organizational idiosyncrasies can often be communication barriers.
For example, a startup built by a small group of close friends might feel exclusionary to new employees outside their network.
A remote team that does not have the right workplace communication tools can also create barriers. Without a common place to have all conversations, teams end up scattering information across tools, creating cracks in understanding.
6. Process barriers
Any organization is a collection of processes. For a task to be done, multiple people perform parts, which are then handed off to others as part of a coherent process. Now, think of a situation where one person doesn’t know who to hand off to or how to do it right.
In software development teams, the designer-developer hand-off is a very common challenge.
7. Context barriers
A context barrier is when the people communicating with one another don’t have the same information on the project’s background, goals, needs, etc.
For instance, a new team member might not know all the previous solutions tried to solve a given problem, resulting in rework. When the content team doesn’t have a style guide, there can be inconsistencies in their output.
8. Technological barriers
Most communication today is digital. However, not everyone is comfortable with digital communication in the same way.
Some might not understand emojis—know anyone who thinks the thumbs up emoji is rude? Others might have placed their video camera wrong during a meeting. Accessibility can create barriers as well.
9. Emotional barriers
The days of keeping our emotions at home have given way to bringing your whole self to work. Either way, every workplace is a potpourri of people nurturing various emotions and attitudes.
Someone who has had a bad morning might be closed to receiving critical feedback. A stressed team member might be unwilling to go the extra mile.
10. Value system barriers
Typically, the best work is done by people with common beliefs, such as transparency, integrity, customer centricity, etc. When the value systems of people are in conflict, communication breaks down.
For example, when a manager believes that good work is done when the team meets in person, but the team prefers some remote work, each party might become biased toward their view and create communication barriers, even if inadvertently.
While communication barriers can have significant consequences, they are common occurrences in every organization. They are a natural result of bringing together diverse people to work toward common goals.
So, don’t fear communication barriers. Create systems to overcome them. Here’s how.
Summarize this article for me pleaseOvercoming Communication Barriers
Communication barriers are inevitable. So, the first step to overcome them is to observe and understand them. Begin there.
Identify communication barriers
Set up strategic imperatives to observe, identify, and understand common barriers.
- Make it part of every manager’s key performance indicators to monitor communication breakdown
- Encourage employees to escalate concerns around communication and collaboration in the workplace
- Invite team members to give regular feedback on team effectiveness
Nurture a communicative culture
Create a culture of effective communication in your organization. Encourage the sender of the message to take responsibility for it being understood. Enable the receivers to ask questions or challenge ideas when they need clarification. Lead by example, demonstrating transparency, openness, and collaboration.
Conduct regular trainings
Everyone can communicate, but effective communication is a completely different ball game. Enable everyone to communicate effectively through regular training.
Depending on the skills of your workforce, this can be about listening thoughtfully, writing emails, working remotely, using inclusive language, or client communication. It also helps to have bite-sized lessons, posters, or checklists on how to share information with team members or how to avoid miscommunication in the workplace.
Set up tools and resources for effective communication
Don’t expect everyone to know how to communicate effectively. Set up systems that encourage them to do better.
For example, software development teams can use templates or forms to capture all relevant information. Content teams can hire editors/proofreaders who ensure consistency.
In fact, these systems can be as simple as an agenda format for every meeting. Or as comprehensive as a collaboration platform like ClickUp.
Bonus Read: Here are some asynchronous communication tools that can help.
Team collaboration
Modern teams require effective hybrid workplace communication. They need a place to communicate contextually, connecting projects, tasks, comments, documents, and video conferences.
ClickUp Chat is designed to enable exactly this. Use ClickUp Chat for overcommunication at work. Create channels that mirror the way your workspace is organized. Keep everyone in the loop with Posts. Connect existing tasks or create new tasks from chat conversations. Set up one-click calls with automatic summaries and action items all within ClickUp!
Task management
For communication to be effective, it needs to cover the what, how, who, and by when. In project management terms, this would be the following:
- What: A brief or feature request
- How: Standards or acceptance criteria
- Who: Assignee or task owner
- By when: Deadline
A good task management tool would enable you to document all of this. ClickUp Tasks offers all this and more. It enables you to estimate time, track it, exchange comments, and add any number of custom fields as you need.
What’s more? You can also use ClickUp Assign Comments to ensure accountability of communication to the right team member.
At the other end, enable your teams to conquer notification overload with ClickUp Inbox. It helps your teams see everything in one place and focus on what matters.
If you’re new to this, try ClickUp’s Communication Plan Template to get started. Improve internal and external messaging, create knowledge banks, share widely, and minimize communication barriers with this template.
⚡️Template Archive: More communication plan templates for you to choose from.
Documentation
Not having enough background information is one of the biggest virtual team challenges. Address that with clear documentation.
Whether it’s a service level agreement (SLA) or the company’s culture, write it down with ClickUp Docs. Use the various styling elements to emphasize important points. Link related documents, connect them to workflows, tag people, and edit collaboratively.
If you’re creating training and education material, try ClickUp Clips. Use it to unambiguously demonstrate your process with screen recording.
Brainstorming
The simplest way to shatter communication barriers is to bring them on the same page, literally. Spin up ClickUp Whiteboards and brainstorm ideas, draw processes, discuss patterns, or prototype products.
Once you have the team’s agreement, convert elements into tasks and get to work directly from your whiteboard!
Consolidation
If you’re using multiple digital tools in your organization, communication is bound to be scattered. Avoid that by integrating all your tools into one centralized communication platform.
ClickUp integrates with 1000+ tools, such as Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, GitHub and Discord. You can also automatically import information from dozens of tools to ClickUp.
Automation
Not all communication needs to happen manually. ClickUp Automations offers 100+ pre-built templates for you to get started quickly. Tasks like notifying a developer when the testing team has created a bug or alerting an editor that a new article is in their pipeline can be done automatically.
AI can take this one notch higher. Team members can discuss, collaborate, and brainstorm with AI in ways hitherto impossible. Get instant answers to all their project-related questions, create automatic summaries, run spell-checks, build templates, transcribe videos, and more with ClickUp Brain.
Several organizations have tried and succeeded in minimizing communication barriers with the above tools and strategies. Let’s take a look at a few.
Summarize this article for me pleaseReal-World Examples and Case Studies
If you’ve ever watched a foreign language film with subtitles, the company has efficiently overcome one form of communication barrier. You’ll see that around you, businesses follow various strategies and tactics to communicate more effectively. The following are a few examples.
Multilingualism at the UN
The United Nations is made up of 193 member states, people of which speak nearly as many languages. Eliminating language barriers in such an organization demands thoughtful, comprehensive, and unfaltering communication strategies.
The UN is one of the largest employers of language professionals around the world. It sets high standards for interpretation (speech to speech) and translation (written word to written word) across languages.
Speeches during UN events are interpreted simultaneously in six official languages—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. For those who wish to speak in any other language, the UN facilitates interpretations and translations on request.
Disambiguation in Wikipedia
Ever seen the disambiguation notice at the top of a Wikipedia page? Try, for example, searching for Top Gun or Prince. You’ll find a message telling you what the current page is about and lead you elsewhere if you’re looking for something else.
Disambiguation is a great way to minimize cultural and contextual barriers to communication. It helps preempt possible misunderstandings and make alternative information available to the user across different cultures. It’s user-centric, empathetic, and effective.
How ClickUp’s marketing team uses ClickUp
ClickUp’s distributed marketing team works with dozens of freelancers and agencies to get the work done. As the team expanded, geographies dispersed, and budgets tripled, several communication barriers emerged.
To handle this flywheel, the marketing team created a virtual workspace with ClickUp. With functional folders, lists, goals, and dashboards, the team seamlessly launches campaign after campaign, in addition to their business as usual.
Need some inspiration? Read more about how ClickUp marketing team uses ClickUp.
Airbnb CEO minimizes one-on-one meetings
In a recent interview, Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb called the one-on-one meeting model flawed. He said,
For eliminating psychological and cultural barriers around transparent communication, Cheskey prefers meetings with multiple participants. He believes that it helps more people to contribute and challenge each other, accelerating information flow and decision-making.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBreak Down your Communication Barriers with ClickUp
Good communication is the foundation of everything, be it personal relationships, business functions, or public interactions. Everyone from the President to the airline pilot needs to be able to communicate clearly, assertively, and effectively every single day.
Achieving this depends as much on the individual as on the organizations they work for, which is why there are communication professionals like speech writers, processes like the crew resource management training program, and workplace collaboration tools like ClickUp.
With ClickUp, you can not only communicate effectively but also make it contextual, multimodal, and automated. See what a comprehensive project management tool can do for you.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
