Maintaining Healthy Work Environment: Importance of Communication
In a fast-growing world of technology, people with different skill sets collaborate to develop or maintain innovative products. Finding an individual with an overall knowledge of technology is an impossible task. Therefore, cross-functional is inevitable. One of the biggest challenges of cross-functional teams is developing patterns of effective communication. This the importance of communication in life essay examines the topic due to nowadays situation.
Good communication helps the team to collaborate, work together more efficiently to solve problems and manage conflicts. If an organization faces problems, crisis, and conflict due to miscommunication, it causes unnecessary delays in product delivery and effects personal and organizational growth. I would like to talk about one experience when administrators in an organization were unable to create an environment that promotes open and clear communication and its negative impacts on the work and the productivity.
The organization I chose is Finagraph (name changed to preserve anonymity), a leading finance solution company in the Northwest region. Finagraph provides retirement, benefits and life insurance solutions across the country. The main motto at Finagraph is Value, Transparency, and Sustainability. Common functional areas at Finagraph are sales, finance, marketing, human resources, and technology. As a senior software developer in the technology division, I closely work with members from the sales division to deliver the best product for our customers. Frank is a quality assurance engineer from the sales division, and he does thorough testing of the requirement before delivering it to the customer. As a first step to working in a cross-functional team, we (members from Sales and IT) agreed on a contract which includes, expectations, a methodology to handle bugs or errors in the system and standards for how the team communicates with special emphasis placed on transparency, honesty, and collaboration.
One day a developer reported a bug in the production environment on one of the user stories I worked. During the daily update meeting, Frank mentioned to the whole team that the issue is resolved even before me looking into the issue, but never communicated with us the kind of analysis he did to resolve the issue. I asked him to explain to the team how he resolved the issue, but he said with the commitments we have for the month, we do not have time to spend on analysis and asked us to move on. This violated the basic principles of working in a cross-functional team i.e. transparency and open communication, as stated in our contract. After a few days, another developer reported the same issue to me. When I went into our log files to look for a solution from the previous case, to my surprise I could not find any. Due to a lack of information sharing and transparency, I could not resolve the issue on time and delayed product delivery.
During the retrospective session, I brought up this issue and reminded about team contract i.e., discuss and analyze all possible options with team members before working on the problem. I pointed out that a lack of communication and collaboration between sales and technology division led to this situation. Frank’s manager, Alison immediately jumped in and made it very clear that solving the problem at hand is more important than sticking to the rules and processes and dismissed the conversation. This very same attitude led to the reoccurrence of the bug in the system and the delivery of poor products to the customer. Inadequate communicate led to confusion and conflict in the team and resulted in an argument.
In the Joseph and company party case, Joseph was not upfront about his issue with a party being hosted on a Friday and he waited until the last minute to let Mike know about his decision not to attend. If Joseph was open and honest with Mike about his issues with the party from the beginning, they may have resolved the issue. Similarly, if Frank had discussed with the team his analysis and problem solving, we as a team would have suggested a more permanent solution to the problem and avoided the reoccurrence of the bug and delivered a better product earlier. If Alison as a manager created an environment where we can openly discuss the issue with effecting the safety of team members will definitely help the team not repeat them in the future.
In conclusion, I often see that team members or managers do not understand the importance of communication and do no convey their thoughts or ideas effectively. Maintaining honesty and open communication will help team members to have more information to do the job. Such a healthy work environment will encourage people to be more focused, responsible and can avoid workplace conflicts.
