26-05-2014, 12:46 PM
The 7 Essentials of Business Communication
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Structure
How you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience.
Every good communication should have these three structural elements:
an opening,
a body,
a close.
This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is -- a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.
Remember - your communication's audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the point. Don't bog down your audience with irrelevant material, or charts with confusing, illegible numbers and colors.
.Pitch your presentation's graphics at a grade seven child. If THEY can follow and understand them, chances are good that your audience will too.
Close
The Close is where you sum up your communication, remind your audience of your key points, and leave them with a clear understanding of what you want them to do next.
The more powerfully you can end your communication, the more easily remembered it will be by your audience.
Clarity
Be clear about the message you want to deliver, as giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with them being confused and your message being ignored.
If you are giving a message about, say, overtime payments don't then add in messages about detailed budget issues or the upcoming staff picnic -- UNLESS they ABSOLUTELY fit in with your original message.
It's far better and clearer for your audience if you create a separate communication about these ancillary issues.
Consistency
Nothing more upsets a regular reader of, say, your newsletter than inconsistency of your message.
People who distrust you are exceedingly unlikely to take the action you wish them to take. They are also highly unlikely to pay any attention to your future messages.
As well as consistency amongst multiple messages, be aware that inconsistency within your message can be just as deadly to audience comprehension.
Medium
If all you believe you have as a communications tool is PowerPoint™ then pretty soon all you'll do is reduce every communications opportunity to a PowerPoint™ presentation. And as any of us who have sat through one too many boring slideshows will attest, "seen one, seen 'em all"
Relevancy
It never ceases to amaze me that business managers still believe that everyone would be interested in their message—and then proceed to subject any and everyone they can find to a horrendous PowerPoint slideshow put together by a well-meaning but aesthetically-challenged subordinate.
Screen-after-screen of lengthy text, in a small barely legible font size (because a small font size is the only way to fit all of the words onto the slide), which the manager duly and dully reads verbatim.
The psychological reality is that unless a person is interested in the subject of the message they are highly unlikely to pay any attention.
Which means that if you force them to attend to your message you will actually turn them against you and be even less likely to receive their attention in the future.
Save your in-depth budget and performance analysis Excel-generated charts for those who genuinely care and need to know about such things.
If your business communication needs to touch on several areas that might not be of interest to your entire audience, let them know of alternative resources that more fully address each of these additional areas.
You can do this by, for example, providing them with an easily-remembered and written link to a webpage where a greater depth of information can be stored.
[attachment=63669]
Structure
How you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience.
Every good communication should have these three structural elements:
an opening,
a body,
a close.
This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is -- a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.
Remember - your communication's audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the point. Don't bog down your audience with irrelevant material, or charts with confusing, illegible numbers and colors.
.Pitch your presentation's graphics at a grade seven child. If THEY can follow and understand them, chances are good that your audience will too.
Close
The Close is where you sum up your communication, remind your audience of your key points, and leave them with a clear understanding of what you want them to do next.
The more powerfully you can end your communication, the more easily remembered it will be by your audience.
Clarity
Be clear about the message you want to deliver, as giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with them being confused and your message being ignored.
If you are giving a message about, say, overtime payments don't then add in messages about detailed budget issues or the upcoming staff picnic -- UNLESS they ABSOLUTELY fit in with your original message.
It's far better and clearer for your audience if you create a separate communication about these ancillary issues.
Consistency
Nothing more upsets a regular reader of, say, your newsletter than inconsistency of your message.
People who distrust you are exceedingly unlikely to take the action you wish them to take. They are also highly unlikely to pay any attention to your future messages.
As well as consistency amongst multiple messages, be aware that inconsistency within your message can be just as deadly to audience comprehension.
Medium
If all you believe you have as a communications tool is PowerPoint™ then pretty soon all you'll do is reduce every communications opportunity to a PowerPoint™ presentation. And as any of us who have sat through one too many boring slideshows will attest, "seen one, seen 'em all"
Relevancy
It never ceases to amaze me that business managers still believe that everyone would be interested in their message—and then proceed to subject any and everyone they can find to a horrendous PowerPoint slideshow put together by a well-meaning but aesthetically-challenged subordinate.
Screen-after-screen of lengthy text, in a small barely legible font size (because a small font size is the only way to fit all of the words onto the slide), which the manager duly and dully reads verbatim.
The psychological reality is that unless a person is interested in the subject of the message they are highly unlikely to pay any attention.
Which means that if you force them to attend to your message you will actually turn them against you and be even less likely to receive their attention in the future.
Save your in-depth budget and performance analysis Excel-generated charts for those who genuinely care and need to know about such things.
If your business communication needs to touch on several areas that might not be of interest to your entire audience, let them know of alternative resources that more fully address each of these additional areas.
You can do this by, for example, providing them with an easily-remembered and written link to a webpage where a greater depth of information can be stored.