Barriers to Effective Communication

Recognizing barriers to effective communication is a first step in improving communication style.  Do you recognize these barriers from your own personal and professional experience?

1. Language encoding and decoding - Encoding is how you word and phrase things. Decoding is being able to understand how another person words and phrases things. Inability to converse in a language that is known by both the sender and receiver is the greatest barrier to effective communication. When a person uses inappropriate words while conversing or writing, it could lead to misunderstanding between the sender and receiver.

2. Cultural Differences - Cultures provide people with ways of thinking - ways of seeing, hearing, and interpreting the world. Thus the same words can mean different things to people from different cultures, even when they talk the "same" language. When the languages are different, and translation has to be used to communicate, the potential for misunderstanding increases.

3. Psychological differences - people's state of mind, if someone has personal problems like worries about their health or marriage, then this will probably affect them.

4. Physical barriers - one of the major barriers of communication in a workplace is the physical barrier. Physical barriers in an organization include large working ares that are physically separated from others. One example is long distance communication by phone.

5. Environmental Condition