Essential principles for effective communication in the CAE and 11 recommendations

Rarely in recent years has communication been as critical as it is now. In this COVID-19 crisis, we are faced with the need to communicate with unusual frequency.

Communicating effectively is of vital importance today.

The coordination of business activities (CAE) is an environment with added difficulties, as it involves a large number of companies and people outside your organisation.

In this article I try to share with you the most useful knowledge I have acquired in communication. I hope they will help you. As a summary, at the end of the article I offer you 11 recommendations for effective communication.

The importance of messages

In reality, all we are able to communicate are messages: imperfect or limited models of information. These messages must be interpreted by their receiver in order to construct knowledge from them.

I'll tell you a personal experience that has helped me a lot. The definition of "limit" is the first thing you see when you take calculus in technical studies. Well, a short definition, already seen in high school; I knew it by heart. However, I had a hard time understanding it. I didn't even know that I didn't "understand" it. That's why I didn't pass the subject. The day I understood it, I still remember, it suddenly became light. The freshmen looked at me with amazement when I helped the teacher to finish the demonstrations if she got stuck in class.

You have knowledge that you want to transfer. You have built this knowledge by accumulating information from different sources, but it is in essence something personal, I would say almost intimate; it exists thanks to interconnections created in your brain. Unfortunately, knowledge cannot be communicated.

You must select the most appropriate set of information elements, structure them in the best possible way, design the messages containing this information in an optimal way and communicate them effectively.

To understand something is the result of acquiring knowledge. This is one of the RAE's most useful definitions. "To understand: To perceive and have a clear idea of what is being said, done or happening, or to discover the deeper meaning of something. Your goal is to help your interlocutors discover the "deeper meaning" embedded in the messages you communicate. That's when things work; when we discover the essence of something, applying it is child's play.

We need to confirm that what we communicate has generated the necessary knowledge and we are not simply sending messages that are not "understood".

We already have extraordinarily effective resources: channels and protocols.

Thanks to information theory, we have been able to enable machines to communicate with each other and we have designed protocols and technologies that allow us to communicate in different ways with astonishing ease. It would not hurt to consider some of the principles that we have transferred from human communication to machine-to-machine communication to make it more effective.

Thus, for example, we may encounter poor quality communications in our remote meetings. Sometimes we forget to ask questions such as: can you hear me well, can you read the information on the screen I am sharing with you, is the font size appropriate, etc.?

Haven't you ever been cut off, tried to call each other at the same time and ended up on each other's voicemail? A simple protocol avoids this problem. For example, the person who initiated the call calls back if there is a cut-off.

It is necessary to select channels and mechanisms appropriate to the relevance of what is to be communicated.

What can happen if you mix highly relevant content with playful or irrelevant content in the same communication? You cannot use the same media to share a cooking recipe as to communicate the dropping of an atomic bomb.

How do I measure the relevance of a message?

If I leave the house saying "I'm going to walk the dog" at the same time as usual, it's not the same as if I go out in a panic because there's a fire.

Relevance is often directly related to the amount of information I am trying to communicate. If I walk my dog every day at eight o'clock, communicating it provides virtually no information. If a tornado has been created in an area and is moving north, the amount of information is vastly greater.

The amount of information related to an event is inversely proportional to the probability of the event occurring.

And who is responsible for getting the message across?

We send messages and we don't always check if they have reached their destination or if the recipient has understood them. How many times have you been told "I sent you an email" meaning "if you haven't heard it, it's your fault"? Where is it written that if you send me an email you have "complied"?

A few days ago, my wife and I prepared some half-cooked white beans. I put them on to cook and checked that they were cooked, then I passed the baton to her with the voice message "now salted". That was the end of the communication. As you can imagine, she also added salt. Luckily we were both restrained and the food didn't have to be thrown away. Who was to blame for the fact that we drank more water than usual in the afternoon?

As a general rule, the party initiating a communication is responsible for ensuring that the message reaches its destination.

Noise, a treacherous enemy

If you use a medium that your interlocutor may have labelled as noisy to communicate an important message, you have a problem. That is why it is necessary in business to choose the right channels and mechanisms of communication. This does not mean that you have to write a 100-page manual on the subject. It may be enough to pay attention to how you communicate and correct if necessary.

My professor of corporate communication made me understand something key in communication.

When communicating something it is essential that we have an objective.

If we do not have an objective or are not clear about it, our communication may do nothing more than introduce additional noise.

If we engage in noise in our communication channels, they will stop working.

Marketing, always a must

Those of us with young children know that we may be telling them something, but sometimes it goes in one ear and out the other. They don't listen to you. We adults are able to hide it a bit more.

To communicate something, you must first check that you have the attention of your interlocutor, otherwise everything you say will be lost.

This is the first state of AIDA (Attention), a must-have sales model; the next states you have to walk through with your interlocutor to meet your target are: Interest, Desire and Action. Be sure to look for more information on AIDA; it is sure to help you.

I love the way AIDA uses good radio spots; they need to get the attention of a listener who is normally totally distracted.

11 Recommendations for effective communication

As a summary, here is a list of 11 recommendations:

1. Always communicate with a purpose
2. Design your messages with love
3. Select the right channels
4. Do not mix
5. Establish protocols to ensure your success
6. Communicate relevant messages, not noise
7. If you initiate communication, check its effectiveness, do not neglect it.
8. If you don't initiate communication it helps, the initiator may not be perfect.
9. Define the appropriate frequency for each type of message.
10. Involve the right people, not more than necessary.
11. Don't become noise

dokify technology to the rescue

Focusing on the area of business activity coordination, if you have dokify in place you already have a few problems solved. For starters, you already have all your suppliers and contractors identified and a reliable communication channel in place, with the right mechanisms to communicate successfully.

The flexible structure of our CAE platform and its functionalities allow you to:

• Create groups of companies in a flexible way or related to the structure of the CAE.
• Communicating effectively with them
• Control the display and opening of messages

For example, you can show all your external companies a message that they will have to see in full. You can flexibly create lists of companies: you may need, for example, to send a message to all companies that have the risk of work at height with control of the receipt of the message.

We continuously improve our CAE platform to make the coordination of business activities and requirements management faster, more efficient and easier.

dokify is the easiest platform for the coordination of business activities (CAE), we create a collaborative network of companies.

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