Potential Barriers

What are the potential barriers to effective communication?

There are a numbers of potential barriers in effective communication. These barriers may become an obstacle between effective communication and ineffective communication. These barriers are language, noise, overload, emotion, gaps and inconsistency.

Overloading

Overloading information could lead to misunderstanding, hard to take the information at once or taking too much time to make the decisions. This may delay the work. Moreover overloading information could also mean that there would be a possibility that the information might irrelevant to the topic. This may make the receiver think that the sender is unorganised which will make the information in effective as well as creating misunderstanding.

Emotion

During communication, emotions might be conveyed throughout the procedure which may make the information misleading. Also when communicating, emotions, such as nervousness may be shown to the receiver which would led the sender to become more hesitant. Eventually, this would lead the procedure to be filled with a lot of gaps which may stop the message from being passed on without misinterpretations.

Inconsistency

If the sender keeps conflicting or sending inconsistent messages, then the receiver may ignore the message which may lead the important message being disregarded.

Gaps

Being too hesitant would cause the message being twisted and this may prevent the message being passed on. 

Language

Language could be a potential barrier to effective communication because the person might not know the same language you are speaking and may have difficulty to understand. Another reason why language could be a barrier is because even though you speak the same language, some people might have regional differences or they may use slang which you might not know the meaning of. This is a problem because the person wouldn't get your message which means the communication wasn't efficient or they may misunderstand the message which may cause problems towards work in the future. To overcome this obstacle, you can show more visual information instead of being verbal or they could invite an interpreter if they don’t speak the same language.

Physical barriers

Physical barriers could make communication ineffective because of the background, (e.g. loud music, road/building construction, texting someone at the same as communication verbally, talking on the phone, inappropriate environment and disorganisation), which will make it harder for the person you are communicating to understand and this may miss lead to misinterpret. Other psychical barriers would be disturbing clients who keep walking in and out of the office.  This will make the client repeat again as they would forget what they were talking about or misunderstand who the client is speaking to. To overcome this barrier, the client should put a “do not disturb” sign on the door, make sure there is no background noise by closing the windows and switching of their phone.

Lack of knowledge on the subject

Having lack of knowledge on the subject would cause hesitant between the clients and the receiver might obtain the information wrong which then creates misunderstanding. They may not understand what your message is, therefore it leads to misinterpretation. For example if you presenting something to a number of clients and you don’t know much about the topic, it would lead to make up false information which may mislead the message. By this, your message may not get through. To overcome this barrier you should research in order to get enough knowledge to get your job.