Case Study

Developing communication skills, for new ways of working

A very, very, large retailer came to us to ask for help with developing communication skills in a rather specialised team. The issue they face, and the issue that more and more are facing, is that face-to-face communication is being reduced and replaced by e-mail, video-conferencing, and the telephone. This is true of many businesses; with home-working, with outsourcing, and with increasing geographic spread.

One you remove the face-to-face element of communication, the potential for misunderstandings and misinterpretations escalates, enormously. Our client had become aware of the issues that were being caused by this, and asked for our help.

We designed a programme which mimicked the challenges faced when the face-to-face element of communication is removed; and we observed and learnt from what happened.

Further Information

Spending days talking through communication theories would have bored the team senseless. That's why that's not the way we do things. Here's what we actually did.

• We would introduce, and have a discussion about, particular and real examples of where communication "mistakes" were happening.
• We then split the team, so that most went off with a task to complete, but a couple were left to guide and instruct them, over the radio.
• The communication was monitored closely, as was the resulting action.
• Finally, the group was brought together again to discuss what had happened, where the errors were, and what could be done about them.

We cycled through this process many times, to flush out as many potential pitfalls as possible. We focused on re-interpreting the pitfalls we observed into the context of the workplace, and developed action points for the group to take back, ensuring that they didn't fall into the same traps again.

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