In spite of the best intentions of sender and receiver to communicate, several barriers inhibit the effective exchange of information. As author George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished." Executives estimate that 15 percent of their time is wasted due to poor communications with employees. This translates into approximately eight weeks per person each year.

If there's one thing that a project manager needs to do well it is communicate. Up the line, down the line, with peers, just about every hour of a project manager's day involves communication. As such, it is vitally important to understand the barriers that are likely to get in the way of effective communication. The following will discuss four pervasive problems in this section: perceptions, filtering, language, and information overload.

Perceptions

The perceptual process determines what messages we select or screen out, as well as how the selected information is organized and interpreted. This can be a significant source of noise in the communication process if the senders and receivers perceptions are not aligned. For example, a plant superintendent in a concrete block plant picked up a piece of broken brick while talking with the supervisor. This action had no particular meaning to the superintendent -- it was just something to toy with during the conversation. Yet as soon as the senior manager had left, the supervisor ordered a half-hour of overtime for the entire crew to clean up the plant. The supervisor mistakenly perceived the superintendents action as a signal that the plant was messy.

Filtering

Some messages are filtered or stopped altogether on their way up or down the organizational hierarchy. Filtering may involve deleting or delaying negative information, or using less harsh words so that events sound more favorable. Employees and supervisors usually filter communication to create a good impression of themselves for superiors. Filtering is most common where the organization rewards employees who communicate mainly positive information and among employees with strong career mobility aspirations.

Language

Words and gestures carry no inherent meaning, so the sender must ensure that the receiver understands these symbols and signs. In reality, lack of mutual understanding is a common reason why messages are distorted. Two potential language barriers are jargon and ambiguity.

Jargon
Jargon includes technical language and acronyms as well as recognized words with specialized meaning in specific organizations or social groups. For example, "Microspeak" jargon at Microsoft can potentially improve communication efficiency when both sender and receiver understand this specialized language. It also shapes and maintains an organizations cultural values as well as symbolizes an employees self-identity in a group.

However, jargon can also be a serious communication barrier. A while back Newbridge Networks president Pearse Flynn discovered that jargon was a form of technical snobbery that prevented some employees from receiving important knowledge and undermined relations with customers. Jargon was also a problem at Wacker Siltronic Corp. Employees were breaking saw blades and causing a high rate of product defects after new machinery was introduced. Management eventually discovered that the manuals were written for engineers, and that employees were guessing (often incorrectly) the meaning of the jargon. Productivity improved and machine costs dropped after the manuals were rewritten without the jargon.

Ambiguity
We usually think of ambiguous language as a communication problem because the sender and receiver interpret the same word or phrase differently. If a co-worker says, "Would you like to check the figures again?" the employee may be politely telling you to double-check the figures. But this message is sufficiently ambiguous that you may think that the co-worker is merely asking if you want to do this. The result is a failure to communicate.

Ambiguous language is sometimes used deliberately in work settings to avoid conveying undesirable emotions. CEOs sometimes refers to the "integration process" with other companies. This sounds better than the "m" words of merger and monopoly. Microsoft doesn't warn computer users about fatal software ercors; they're "undocumented behaviours." And when millions of Microsoft Network customers suffered through significant e-mail delivery problems, the company described the incident as "a partial e-mail delay." Why the obfuscation? Customers tend to respond more calmly to integration processes, undocumented behaviors, and partial e-mail delays than to monopolies, fatal software errors, and e-mail lost for weeks or forever.

Ambiguous language may be a barrier, but it is sometimes necessary where events or objects are ill defined or lack agreement. Corporate leaders often use metaphors to describe complex organizational values so that they are interpreted broadly enough to apply to diverse situations. Scholars also rely on metaphors because they convey rich meaning about complex ideas. For example, some organizational behavior scholars compare organizations to "jazz ensembles" or "machines" to reflect different variations of their complex nature.

Information Overload

Every day, Dave MacDonald is flooded with up to 100 e-mail messages. The Xerox executive is also bombarded with voice mail, faxes, memos, and other pieces of information. "Without some kind of system in place, I'd spend practically all my time trying to sort through it and not get much of anything else done," says MacDonald.

Dave MacDonald is not alone. Office workers send and receive 100+ e-mails, phone calls, voice mails, faxes, paper documents, and other messages each day! "One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live in a state of information overload," predicted communications guru Marshall McLuhan decades ago. "There's always more than you can cope with."

Information overload occurs when the volume of information received exceeds the person's capacity to process it. Employees have a certain information processing capacity, that is, the amount of information that they are able to process in a fixed unit of time. At the same time, jobs have a varying information load, that is, the amount of information to be processed per unit of time.

Information overload creates noise in the communication system because information is overlooked or misinterpreted when people cannot process it fast enough. Moreover, it has become a common cause of workplace stress. One survey reports that two-thirds of managers blame information overload for interpersonal conflicts and dissatisfaction at work, and 43 percent say that they suffer from "paralysis of analysis" due to the volume of information they must process."

Information overload is minimized in two ways: by increasing our information processing capacity and by reducing the job's information load. We can increase information processing capacity by learning to read faster, scanning documents more efficiently, and removing distractions that slow information processing speed. Time management also increases information processing capacity. When information overload is temporary, information processing capacity can increase by working longer hours.

We can reduce information load by buffering, summarizing, or omitting information. Buffering occurs where assistants screen the persons messages and forward only those considered to be essential reading. Summarizing condenses information into fewer words, such as by reading abstracts and executive summaries rather than the entire document. Omitting is the practice of ignoring less important information. For example, some e-mail software programs have a filtering algorithm that screens out unwanted junk mail (called "spam").

Perceptions, filtering, language, and information overload are not the only sources of noise in the communication process, but they are probably the most common. Noise also occurs when we choose an inappropriate channel to send the message. The next section takes a closer look at communication channels.