Workplace Communication: Too Much, Too Little, Just Enough

How many times have you walked away from a meeting thinking to yourself that you don’t have enough information to perform the tasks at hand? Or maybe you sat through a long stretch of discussion in the meeting where a lot of information was shared by the team but none was relevant to you.

Communication, we all acknowledge, helps us perform better, but the corollary to the fact is that when there’s too much or too little of it, there are breakdowns in overall productivity. Too much communication is a general pain point these days, but what most people don’t realize is that, with the wealth of information around us these days, we may exchange a lot of information but it may not necessarily be effective communication.

In the case of client-service provider relationship, the role that communication plays becomes pivotal. Add to that an onsite-offshore delivery model and the communication lines become even more complex. Over the years, many benchmarks have been set up for such settings, but the process and channels continue to stay riddled and prone to errors caused by too much or too little communication. Some ground rules can be established in order to set the tone for a good relationship.

• Establish rules of communication after a formal discussion with the client. Once the process is formalized, it offers the advantage of no longer being prone to the variations of individual styles.
• Conclude on what needs to be communicated in status reporting, including all stakeholders that need to be copied on the daily/weekly/monthly statuses and emails.
• Formalize a format of communication, for instance the communication of questions during the planning phase of a project to be logged in a tool or sent across to business team directly.
• Once the process has been established stick to it by any means, say the monthly metrics for all projects are communicated on a quarterly basis, then this schedule must never get disrupted without prior notification.

Where too much communication can hurt productivity, too little communication can lead to an array of disasters like unclear expectations and low team morale followed by gossip and rumours. Withholding pertinent information from anyone, be it superiors, peers or subordinates, results in them feeling disregarded and many times leads to them inferring assumptions from the lack of information. A common mistake made by a lot of people is being afraid of asking for help at work. It is very important to communicate with your team/manager and ask specifically for what you need in order to get the job done right. When unclear on whether you have provided enough information, make sure that you leave the door open for further conversation by mentioning “you can get in touch with me whenever you need” or “please feel free to ask questions”.

In order to make your communication effective focus on these areas:

Verbal communication

• Listen well
• Do not make assumptions
• Ask for feedback
• Practice your presentation skills
• Ask questions wherever you need clarification
• Always check with the other person if they have a few minutes when you call

Non-verbal communication

• Work on having a confident body language
• Display interest in what the other person is saying
• Learn about the cultural differences when working with people across different cultures

Written communication

• Always perform a grammar and spell check before sending out any document/email
• Always provide a relevant subject line to the emails
• Always double check the attachments or links provided in the email

Teleconference/Videoconference calls

• Keep up time
• Announce yourself when you join the meeting
• Mute your phone if you’re not the speaker
• Take notes
• Ask questions whenever you need more clarification

We can improve our communication and ensure getting the right message across by being clear, concise and precise. Having an agenda for a meeting, sticking to it and including only the people related to the agenda helps in furthering the effectiveness of communication and helps maintain good productivity levels. Similarly, keeping your email and phone conversation brief and to-the-point saves valuable time for everyone.

Think of your team/workplace as a network where all individual systems work together in coordination. If there is lack/delay/overflow of load then it is bound to crash. Beat the issue of over or under communication by constantly assessing the amount of emails, teleconferences/videoconferences, and phone calls against your productivity. Over time you will be able to figure out the middle path where you will communicate just right.

It was previously thought that that you either have communication skills or you don’t. We now know that communication is a skill that needs constant honing.

Farhat Afridi is a Test lead at Prolifics having over 10 years of experience in testing, with extensive experience in Retail domain. She specializes in Oracle retail suite of applications. She holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering from Bangalore University.

A Closer Look at Outsourcing Contracts: Common Challenges and Proposed Solutions

Software engagements can often be met with many challenges and problems. These challenges can arise during outsourcing, advanced technology and services, application deployment and maintenance, software development, business services, IT disputes, cloud computing and more. In this article I would like to share some of the typical challenges surrounding outsourcing contracts and make a case for learning from these challenges so that they can be avoided in the future.

Taking the Initiative on Provisions to Solve Outsourcing Contract Problems
Outsourcing suppliers frequently face issues that can cause significant damage but are not grave enough to virtue using contractual preparations, which are typically confined to termination of the contract or even in some cases customer claims the damage.

The traditional contractual preparations fail to take into account how reliant a business is on their contractors. Simply ending an association could be incapacitating – the businesses require an alternative way of addressing glitches.

Taking the initiative on provision also known as “Proactive Preparations” is one possible solution for this challenge in an organization. This solution drives a framework in habitation that establishes a comprehensive assortment of events or conditions that could cause problems, and provides a structure for managing the risks involved in business by using various tools other than contractual remedies such as termination or damages. It also identifies that problems can occur that are not the fault of both the parties, and that these problems still have to be resolved.

Not only are traditional remedy arrangements of small practical use in many situations, they also lean towards to be reactive rather than proactive – the client has to wait until it can establish that there has been a contractor default before it is able to trigger what groundwork are available within the agreement or the contract.

By difference, proactive preparations are designed to avoid key business and also prevent service risks from becoming realities. The preparations are designed to focus the parties' minds on good contract and risk management before things go horribly wrong.

Such issues can likely affect the client's business or the outsourcing relationship between supplier and client - a corruption scandal affecting a key sub-contractor; an important profit warning; a large scale severance program. Each party consequently gains benefit from an intensified level of attentiveness and preemptive or proactive management by both client and service provider.

Proactive Preparation is “Good Governance”
Contracts, however, sometimes pay lip service to governance and contain little more than a list of governance bodies, terms of reference and meeting schedules. Everybody agrees that robust and strong contract management, which is generally known as Service Level Agreement or governance, is censoriously vital to the successful delivery of the outsourced services and to the health of an outsourcing service association. It is all too common for the parties, over time, to if the essentials of good contract governance are disregarded, the unavoidable result is that poor performance goes unaddressed and real business risks, perhaps unrelated to outsourcing service provider performance, are not anticipated and managed.  With all good proactive preparations mechanism, the parties will have a pre-agreed process for keeping an eye on the issues that substance furthermost to the business.

How does the “Proactive Preparation” Work in an Organization?
We can define the proactive preparations in such a way so that the external risks can be controlled by both parties before they become problems for the organization. At the same time, we can also have a structure that addresses minor loopholes, predominantly where it is convenient to overlook a circumstance which can ultimately impact on the association or relationship in a significant way if it is not addressed.

How to Organize Proactive Remedies
To be useful, proactive preparations must be tailored to the customer's business - they should be industry and context specific. Proactive preparations are usually drafted collectively as a schedule to the contract or can be built into the contract governance or like the performance management system / regime.  To ensure the regime leftovers relevant to the client's business, at that point there should be a mechanism for review and updating on a regular basis.

The contract should set out the following:

Elicit Events
Thinking about which risk procedures to pay attention to, clients often ask: In addition to service breaches, what events would significantly impact on our business? For example, consider negative media that impacts reputation.

Risk Levels
We must set the proactive remedy in proportion to the level of risk the trigger event exposes the customer. The preparations to address particular risks when they are still at a relatively low level may be as simple as enhanced monitoring or an investigatory report, perhaps at the customer's cost. If those risks escalate, however, the risk level may increase to the next level. The contract should identify the circumstances that will constitute the different risk levels for the purposes of the regime.

Preparation Points
The preparations that apply in a proactive preparations regime should be tailored so that they are effective to address the risks that are identified by the parties. They may include:

• The supplier provides requirements as a detailed information and/or plans about the trigger event
• Allow client to choose an independent third party consultant to audit the supplier's business in relation to the event if they wish
• The initialization of an additional benefit scheme in lieu of named members of the supplier's workforce to incentivize swift resolution of the situation
• High level risks related to service delivery that have not been addressed and the necessary termination or step-in rights for the customer.

Proactive preparations can help the customers and the suppliers focus on risk management as part of the contract governance regime and allow them to address the general concern that contracts focus on mechanistic and legalistic preparations. They are tools which supplement traditional contractual preparations rather than replacing them and can be useful in highlighting issues that could impact on a customer's business beyond service breaches.

For more information about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com

Dhanraj Dadhich is Technical Architect at Prolifics. He has 14+ years of experience in design and development of applications and has designed various Banking, Security, Social Media, Mortgage and Payment Gateway applications. With Prolifics, he is promoting the use of technology, and of specific products, to help enterprise management and IT communities meet their business needs. He specializes in selecting, defining and enforcing a consistent, uniform set of products, vendors, methodologies and standards throughout the IT organization. His current role has given him the opportunity to develop creative ideas to realize significant cost and head count savings whilst still maintaining good service levels to build on this experience.