Writing Business Messages

Readers and listeners want to know how your messages will benefit them. Providing the right information in the right format is essential, but it's not the only important apect of adapting to your audience. You may also need to adjust your writing or speaking style for specific situations, and idoing so requires a concerted effort for most communicators. Adapting to your audience can mean altering your natural communication style to match specific situations. To adapt to your audiences in a way that provides a compelling answer to the "What's in this for me?" question, (1) be sensitive to your members' needs, (2) build strong relationships, and (3) control your style to maintain a professional tone.

Being Senstitive to Your Audience's Needs 

• Using the "you" attitude
• The "you" attitude is best implemented by expressing your message in terms of the audience's interests and needs
• Avoid using you and yours when doing so:
• Makes you sound dictatorial
• Could make someone else feel unnecessarily guilty
• Goes against your organization's style
• Is inappropriate for the culture
• "You failed to deliver on time" vs. "the customer didn't receive the order on time"
•  Maintaining Standards of Etiquette
• By being courteous to members of your audience, you show consideration for them an foster a more successful environment for communication
• When experiencing frustration with co-workers, customers, or others, you may be tempted to say what you think in blunt terms
• Venting emotions rarely improves the situation and can jeopardize your audience's goodwill
• Demonstrate your diplomatic skills by controlling your emotions and communicating calmly and politely
• Using Bias-Free Language
• Bias-free language avoids words and phrases that unfairly and even unethically categorize or stigmatize people in ways related to gender, race, ethnicity, age, or disability.

Buliding Strong Relationships with Your Audience 
Successful communication relies on a positive relationship existing between sender and receiver. Establishing your credibility and projecting your company's image are two vital steps in building and fostering positive business relationships.

• Establishing Your Credibility
• Audience response responses to your messages depend heavily on your credibility, a measure of your believability, based on how reliable you are and how much trust you evoke in others. 
• To build, maintain, or repair your credibility, empahasize the following characteristics:
• Honesty
• Objectivity
• Awareness of audience needs
• Credentials, knowledge, and expertise
• Endorsements
• Performance
• Confidence
• Communication style
• Sincerity
• Projecting Your Company's Image
• When you communicate with anyone outside your organization, it is more than a conversation between two individuals. Most successful companies work hard to foster a specific public image, and your external communication efforts need to project that image.

Controlling Your Style and Tone
Your communication style involves the choices you make to express yourself: the words you select, the manner in which you use those words in sentences, and the way you build paragraphs from individual sentences. Your style creates a certain tone, or overall impression, in your messages. 

• Guidelines for Using a Conversational Tone
• Understand the difference between texting and writing. The casual language used in text messaging and IM between friends is not considered professional business writing.
• Aviod stale and pompous language. To achieve a businesslike tone, you might be tempted to adopt such phrases as "attached please find" and "please be advised that."While these phrases were once common in business, they sound stale and pompous to contemporary audiences. 
• Avoid preaching and bragging. Few things are more irritating than know-it-alls who like to preach or brag. 
• Be careful with intimacy. Business messages should generally avoid intimacy, such as sharing personal details or adopting a casual unprofessional tone.
• Be careful with humor. In most situations, you have little to gain from humor and potentially much to lose. Never use humor in formal messages or when you're communicating across cultural boundaries.

Relevant Websites to Explore:

• www.write101.com/businessletter.htm
• www.ezinearticles.com/?Effective-Business-Communication&id=1875157 
• www.business.com

 
 

Planning Business Messages

Checklist for Planning Business Messages
A. Analyze the Situation.

• Determine whether the purpose of your message is to inform, persuade, or collaborate.
• Identify what you want your audience to think or do after receiving the message.
• Make sure your purpose is wothwhile and realistic.
• Make your the time is right for your message.
• Make sure you purpose is acceptable to your organization.
• Identify the primary audience.
• Determine the size and composition of your audience.
• Estimate your audience's level of understanding and porobable reaction to your message. 

B. Gather information.

• Decide whether to use formal or informal techniques for gathering information.
• Find out what your audience needs to know.
• Provide all required information and make sure it's accurate, ethical, and pertinent.

C. Select the best medium for your message.

• Understand the advantages and disadvantages of oral, written, visual, and electronic media.
• Consider media richness, formality, media limitations, urgency, cost, and audience performance.

D. Organize your information.

• Define your main idea.
• Limit your scope.
• Choose the direct or indirect approach.
• Outline content by starting with the main idea, adding major points, and illustrating with evidence.    
  

**The following provides detailed analysis of the above checklist**

Understanding the Three-Step Writing Process
The three-step writing process helps ensure that your messages are both effective (meeting your audience's needs and getting your points across) and efficient (making the best use of your time and your audience's time):

• Step 1: Planning business messages. To plan any message, first analyze the situation by defining your purpose and developing a profile of your audience. Then, gather information that will meet your audience's needs. Then, select the right medium (oral, written, visual, or electronic) to deliver the message. Finally, organize the information be defining your main idea and outlining your content.
• Step 2: Writing business messages. After you've planned your message, adapt to your audience with sensitivity relationship skills, and an appropriate writing style. Compose your message by choosing strong words, creating effective sentences, and developing coherent paragraphs.
• Step 3: Completing business messages. After writing your first draft, revise your message by evaluating the content, reviewing readability, and editing and rewriting until your message comes across concisely and clearly.

Planning Effectively
Analyze your situation. A successful message starts with aclear purpose that connects the sender's needs with the audiences needs. If you launch directly into writing without clarifying both your purpose and your audience, you'll waste time and energy, and you'll probably generate a less-effective message.

Define your purpose.  All business messages have a general purpose: to inform, tp persuade, or to collaborate with the audience. With the scope of its general purpose, each message also has a specific purpose, which identifies what you hope to accomplish with your essage and what your audience should do or think after receiving your meessage.

Gathering Information
When you have a clear picture of your audience, your next step is to assemble the information that you will include in your message. You can often use a variety of informal techniques to gather insights and guide your research efforts:

• Consider the audience's perspective. Put yourself in the audience's position.
• Read reports and other company documents. Annual reports, financial statements, news releases, blogs by industry experts, marketing reports, and customer surveys are just a few of the many potential sources.
• Talk with supervisors, colleagues, or customers. Fellow workers and customers may have information you need.
• Ask your audience for input. If you're unsure what audience members need from your message, ask them. 

Factors to Consider When Choosing Media

  The Importance of Good Organization
• Good organization helps audience members understand your message, accept your message, and save time.
• Good organizational skills are also good for your career becuase they help you develop a reputation as a clear thinker who cares about your readers.

Choosing Between Direct and Indirect Approaches
• The Direct Approach. When you know your audience will be receptive to your message, use the direct approach: Start with the main idea (such as a recommendation, a conclusion, or a request) and follow that with your supportive evdience.
• The Indirect Approach. When your audience will be skeptical about or even resistat to your message, use the indirect approach: Start with the evidence first and build your case before presenting the main idea. 

Communicating in a World of Diversity

Opportunities and Challenges of Intercultural Communication

Opportunities in a Global Marketplace
 Thanks to communication and transportation technologies, natural boundaries and national borders are no longer the impassable barriers they once were.Local markets are opening to worldwide competition as businesses of all sizes look for new growth opportunities outside their own countries.
FACTS: 

• Thousands of U.S. business rely on exports for significant portions of revenue.

• These companies export hundreds of billions of dollars worth of materials and merchandise, along with billions more in personal and professional services.
• Of the top 10 export markets for U.S. products, only two, Canada and Great Britain speak English as an official language.

Advantages of a Diverse Workforce
• Even if you never visit another country or transact business on a global scale, you will interact with colleagues from a variety of cultures, with a wide range of characteristics and life experiences. 
• Diversity is simply a fact of life for all companies

"More diverse teams tend to be more innovative over the long term than more homogeneous teams"

 -IBM's Ron Glover

Challenges of Intercultural Communication

• Today's increasingly diverse workforce encompasses a wide range of skills, traditions, backgrounds, experiences, outlooks, and attitudes toward work, all of which can affect communication in the workplace.

• Culture influences everything about communication, including:

1. Language
2. Nonverbal signals
3. Word meaning
4. Time and space issues
5. Rules of human relationships

• The interaction of culture and communication is so pervasive that separating the two is virtually impossible. The greater the difference between cultures, the greater the chance for misunderstanding.

Example:  The American-made movie Hollywood Buddha was advertised with posters showing the star of the movie sitting on the head of a statue of Buddha:

Such a depiction may have few spiritual implications for non-Buddhists, but it was a serious insult to many Buddhists - so much so that Buddhists in a number of countries took to the streets in protest.

Enhancing Your Sensitivity to Culture and Diversity

The Concept of Culture

• Culture is a shared system of symbols, beliefs, attitudes, values, expectations, and norms for behavior. Your cultural background influences the way you prioritize what is important in life, helps define your attitude toward what is appropriate in a situation, and establishes rules of behavior.

• You belong to several cultures, each of which affects the way you communicate.

• Learning culture directly: you are explicitly told which behaviors are acceptable.

• Learning culture indirectly: you learn by observing which values work best in a particular group.

Overcoming Ethnocentrism and Stereotyping

Ethnocentrism: The tendency to judge other groups according to the standards, behaviors, and customs of one's own group.

Xenophobia: A fear of strangers and foreigners.

• Distorted views of other cultures or groups also result from stereotyping, assigning a wide range of generalized attributes to an individual on the basis of membership in a particular culture or social group.

Cultural Pluralism: The practice of accepting multiple cultures on their own terms.

Three habits to help adapt to new cultures:

1. Avoid Assumptions. Don't assume that others will act the same way you do, use language and symbols the same way you do, or even operate from the same values and beliefs.
2. Avoid Judgments. When people act differently, don't conclude that they are in error or that their way is invalid or inferior.
3. Acknowledge Distinctions. Don't ignore the differences between another person's culture and your own.

Recognizing Variations in a Diverse World

Contextual Differences

Cultural Context: A pattern of physical cues, environmental stimuli, and implicit understanding that conveys meaning between members of the same culture.
High-Context Culture: People rely heavily on nonverbal actions and environmental setting to convey meaning.
Low-Context Culture: People rely more on explicit verbal communication.


Legal and Ethical Differences

• Making ethical choices across cultures can seem complicated, but you can keep your messages ethical by applying four basic principles:

1. Actively seek mutual ground. To allow the clearest possible exchange of information, both parties must be flexible and avoid insisting that an interaction take place strictly in terms of one culture or another.
2. Send and receive messages without judgment. To allow information to flow freely, both parties must recognize that values vary from culture to culture, and they must trust each other.
3. Send messages that are honest. To ensure that information is true, both parties must see things as they are - not as they would like them to be.
4. Show respect for cultural differences. To protect the basic human rights of both parties, each must understand the other's needs.

Social Differences
• Social norms can vary from culture to culture in the following areas:

1. Attitudes towards work and success
2. Roles and status
3. Use of manners
4. Concepts of time
5. Future orientation
6. Openness and inclusiveness

Nonverbal Differences
When you have the opportunity to interact with people in another culture, the best advice is to study the culture in advance and then observe the way people behave in the following areas:

1. Greetings
2. Personal space
3. Touching
4. Facial expressions
5. Eye contact
6. Posture
7. Formality  

Want to be more competitive when doing business across borders? Executive Planet offers quick introductions to expected business practices in a number of countries, from setting up appointments to giving gifts to negotiating deals. Visit: www.executiveplanet.com.

Mastering Team and Interpersonal Communication

Advantages and Disadvantages of Working in Teams
• When teams are successful, they can improve productivity, creativity, employee involvement, and even job security. They are not appropriate for every situation - even when they are, companies should weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of a team-based approach.
• Participative Management: The effort to involve employees in the company's decision making.

Advantages:

1. Increased information and knowledge: A team has access to more information in the decision-making process.
2. Increased diversity of views: Team members bring a variety of perspectives to the decision making process.
3. Increased acceptance of a solution: Those who participate in making a decision are more likely to support it and encourage others to accept it.
4. Higher performance levels: Working in teams can unleash new levels of creativity, energy, effectiveness as well as reduce employee boredom, increase feelings of dignity and self-worth, and reduce stress and tension.

Disadvantages:

1. Groupthink: Occurs when peer pressures cause individual team members to withhold contrary or unpopular opinions. 
2. Hidden agendas: Private, counterproductive motives, such as a desire to take control of the group, to undermine someone else on the team, or to purse a business goal that runs counter to the team's mission.
3. Cost: Assigning schedules, arranging meetings, and coordinating individual parts of a project can eat up a lot of times and money.

Guidelines for Collaborative Writing
• In any collaborative effort, it's important to recognize that team members coming from different backgrounds may have different work habits or priorities. To collaborate effectively, everyone involved must be flexible and open to other opinions, focusing on team objectives rather than on individual priorities. The following guidelines will help you collaborate more successfully:

1. Select collaborators carefully: Choose a combination of people who have the experience, information, and talent needed for each project.
2. Agree on project goals before you start: Starting without a clear idea of what the team hopes to accomplish inevitably leads to frustration and wasted time.
3.  Give your team time to bond before diving in: Make sure team members can get to know each other before being asked to collaborate.
4. Clarify individual responsibilities: Because members will depend on each other, make sure individual responsibilities are clear, including who is supposed to do what and by when.
5. Establish clear process: Make sure everyone knows how the work will be done, including checkpoints and decisions to be made along the way.
6. Avoid writing as a group: Group writing is often a slow, painful process that delivers bland results. The best approach is to plan, research, and outline together but assign the task of writing to one person.
7. Make sure tools and techniques are ready and compatible across the team: Minor details such as different versions of software can delay projects. Test the system before work begins.
8. Check to see how things are going along the way: Don't assume that everything is working just because you don't hear hear anything negative.

Using Meeting Technologies
• The focus of most meeting technologies is to enable participation among  people in two or more locations. These technologies have spurred the emergence of virtual teams, whose members work in different locations and interact electronically in virtual meetings.
• Teleconferencing: Long distance meeting tool that connects three or more people by phone simultaneously.
• Videoconferencing: Combines audio communication with live video, letting team members see each other, demonstrate products, and transmit other visual information.
Web-based meeting systems: Combine the best of instant messaging, shared work spaces, and videoconferencing with other tools such as virtual whiteboards that let teams collaborate in real time.
• Visit www.secondlife.com to learn about their recent developments in virtual meetings and other communication activities in virtual worlds.

The Important Process of Listening
• Listening is a far more complex process than most people think - and most of us aren't very good at it. To listen effectively, you need to successfully complete five separate steps:

1. Receiving: You start by physically hearing the message and acknowledging it. Reception can be blocked by noise, impaired hearing, or inattention.
2. Decoding: Your next step is to assign meaning to sounds, which you do according to your own values, beliefs, ideas, expectations, roles, needs, and personal history.
3. Remembering: Before you can act on the information, you need to store i for future processing.
4. Evaluating: Your next step is to evaluate the message by applying critical thinking skills to separate fact from opinion and evaluate the quality of the evidence.
5. Responding: After you've evaluated the message, you react. 

Effective Listening Video

Nonverbal communication  
Nonverbal Communication is the interpersonal process of sending and receiving information, both intentionally and intentionally, without using written or spoken language. These signals play a vital role in communication because they can strengthen a verbal message, weaken a verbal message, or replace words entirely. The range and variety of nonverbal signals are almost endless, but you can grasp the basics by studying six general categories:

1. Facial expression: Your face is the primary vehicle for expressing your emotions; it reveals
   both the type and the intensity of your feelings. Your eyes are especially effective for indicating attention and interest, influencing other, regulating interaction, and establishing dominance. 
2. Gesture and posture:  The way you position and move your body expresses both specific and general messages, some voluntary and some involuntary. Some unconscious signals that reveal how you are feeling include slouching, leaning forward, fidgeting, and walking briskly.
3. Vocal characteristics: Voice carries both intentional and intentional messages.  Varying pitch, pace, and stress can convey different messages.
4. Touch: Touch is an important way to convey warmth, comfort, and reassurance - as well as control. 
5. Time and space: Like touch, time and space can be used to assert authority, imply intimacy, and send other nonverbal messages. Some people try to demonstrate their own importance or disregard for others by making other people wait; others show respect by being on time.

The Importance of Business Etiquette 
• Attention to etiquette is essential to success in every form of business communication - so much so that etiquette is considered an important business skill. Poor etiquette can hinder team efforts, drain morale and productivity, drive away customers and investors, and limit your career potential.