Mechanisms that can reduce the impact of communication barriers

There are always potential barriers that come into place when trying to communicate which can completely ruin the conversation. Whether it may you trying to talk to somebody and their phone rings, or somebody shouts that person also, it’s difficult to stay tuned when there are other distractions going on.

Noise/Lack of Concentration

Noise will always be a barrier when trying to communicate, it could be working in a work environment where there is a lot of background noise going on, or it could be a small room where there is heavy rain and thunder going on outside, either way you process it is sometimes not knowing and it causes you to lose concentration on what you were primarily focusing on. By making sure it’s a quiet working environment with minimum noise, it will increase the chances of communication between people in the workplace. The new system put in place is usually rules to prevent noise from happening, from mobile phones going off when entering a room, to everybody staying quiet and listening until they need to ask questions and without everybody talking at once.

A lack of concentration hugely causes a person to zone out and lose communication in the conversation. As a conversation requires at least two people to be fully communicating to make it work, it will show signs of disrespect that the other person is not listening and the conversation will either go wrong or end completely. Sometimes this isn’t always down to the person they are just lacking concentration whether it may be to background noise or distractions or their own personal matters that are causing them to lose concentration. By communicating in a quiet environment where the other user can easily communicate back without anybody coming over or any type of noises going off you are putting your own system in place to have a successful conversation.

Use of technology (Presentations)

The advance of technology has reduced both time and concentration barriers when it comes to producing presentations. From a decade ago having to manually insert a new sheet of paper over a projector or dragging a big heavy TV into the room to progressing onto changing slides or starting a video at the click of a button. This stops the time delay from switching slides or loading a video manually which can usually be the cause of users losing focus.

Spelling Errors

Before technology and the use of automatic spell checkers there wasn’t a lot of barriers in place to prevent spelling errors. People would often make mistakes writing letters and not realise that they were making spelling error mistakes, because of the amount of computer software that have built in auto-correctors, not only does it identify the spelling error for the user for them to put correctly. But it also helps them learn new words and improve their English literature skills.

Use of technology (Social Networking)

The change and use of technology has advanced massively over the past decade. The speed of how quick technology can communicate between two or two hundred people is now live, without having to move or spend any money people can now communicate fast and efficient. There are anonymous forum boards and social networks that have dramatically improved communication barriers. These can be confidence factors between only having to send a message to somebody you don’t know that well you can confidently write out a message to them and start a conversation compared to when technology didn’t allow this and you had to meet face to face.

Online & Automatic translators

When communicating online to somebody of a different culture who may not speak your language, there could be some problems trying to understand and communicate before the use of automatic translators, you would have usually needed a human who could translate manually or understand the language to deal with the other person. Whereas today most places on the internet where you speak to somebody of a different language you are sometimes offered a translator feature which can translate the message from their language to yours so you can understand instantly and respond, it helps keep a conversation from dropping compared to many years ago, when there wasn’t such features people would usually get frustrated and give up.