Business Communications Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 1

Business Communications - Essay Example The electronic media has changed the world of communications. Daily meetings, face-to-face chats and trips to other cities and countries are gradually being replaced with emails, teleconferences and video-conferences. This new breed of communications has brought solutions as well as problems for office communications. This paper reviews the academic work on communications in the workplace and the impact introduction of emails have had on workplace practices. Emails have also brought new issues for management. The paper discusses management practices adopted to address these issues. The consequence of introduction of emails in an organization is an important subject for a company using electronic mail. The managerial and working practices need to be adapted to benefit from the positive aspects of using computer mediated communications (CMC) and the negative aspects of CMC as well as effect of reduced face-to face contacts need to be controlled or minimized. Compared to face-to-face contact or telephonic conversation, the advantage of CMC include the ability to retrieve and search materials, overcome the difficulty of time and distance, one-to-many communications, electronically organizing and retrieving emails and other media and reprocessing of other contents with the materials to be handled by CMC. It is often debated whether em... nfluences the decision making and participation within organizations, which types of email adoption are practiced by any single organization, uses and misuses of emails and the technology and/or discipline used to control email misuse are subject of considerable interest in the use of this medium of communication. The argument for and against emails versus face-to-face communications are often discussed in terms of Media Communication Theories. [D'Ambra et al, 1998] discuss the new organizational media with reference to Media Richness Theory (MRT) developed by [Daft & Lengel, 1986]. Media richness theory is often applied to determine the question of choice and effectiveness. The [Daft &Lengel, 1986] classification considered immediacy; the opportunity to provide timely feedback, Multiple cues; the capability of the media to provide meaning through cues such as body language, voice and tones, language variety; the capability of the medium to explain the message by using different words and personal source; the ability to convey feelings. This classification gives oral media over written media. A typical classification of different media according to [Daft & Lengel, 1984, 1986] MRT is as follows [cited in Mondyu, 1997] Media Ranking [cited in Mondyu, 1997] Communication Channel Score Face-to-Face 1.00 Telephone 0.94 Tours and Visits 0.82 Voice Conferencing 0.79 Formal Group Meeting 0.65 Computer Generated Reports 0.47 Memos and Documents 0.27 Email 0.13 Facsimile 0.11 However, the original Daft and Lengel criteria were not designed with modern communication media in mind, assuming Face-to-Face as the standard, produces a result that is biased against the Computer Mediated Communications (CMC). [Daft & Lengel, 1984] argue that a 'rich' media must have no or low