Assignment 1: Fundamentals of Effective Communication in the Workplace
Name: Luis Marquez
Professor: Fred Brandt Date: 11/6/2015 Course Title: BUS 100

Effective communication skills are essential in the workplace. Some businesses invest in training their employees on how to effectively communicate, because effective communication skills go beyond conversations. Employees must know how to express business issues effectively when writing reports and emails. Understanding the benefits of effective communication helps businesses to develop a workforce that is able to communicate effectively with coworkers, customers, and suppliers and increase productivity.

Working in retail communication skills have to be a top priority, while working in management, I have to make sure that I can relay everything with my team. I get information from the corporate chain above me, and then I must relay this on to my employees under me, if this information isn’t transmitted properly then our business can’t thrive. During the holiday season we have a lot of procedures and a new set of rules that we must follow as a whole. Now being a manager it is my job to be sure each and every employee goes over the information sent to me. New procedures included certain items can only be sold in limited quantities per customer, we can only load a certain amount of money on a gift card per transaction, as well as new scams and shifty things to look out for. Working in retail you can get a lot of people attempting fraud.
I knew the communication between my employees and I was effective because they took to the information well. Everyone understood our new procedures, and effectively applied it to our crazy holiday rushes. We had one customer try to load $500 onto 3 gift cards, which is above our limit, now one of my employees was ready to just load it all, but then remembered our meeting so he was able to explain to the customer our procedure and the reason why he couldn’t load $500 onto the gift cards.
Another case where I was happy that the communication went through to my team was when we had some door busters for “Black Friday”. We had a limit 2 on an item, and we had customers who requested 3 to 4, my employee expressed to the customers that we have a limit on these items, one of these customers became belligerent as to why they could not purchase more than 2, but my employee understood our procedures, and methods and was able to calm the customer without any further incident.
Thirdly we had a customer attempting to fraud the company, this isn’t something I’d like to speak on, but it helps to show that effective communication is key in business. This customer was using a new service known as android pay, which pretty much lets you put a credit card debit card, or gift card onto your phone and it masks the actual account numbers so you can make purchases wirelessly. This person was having issues using their wireless purchase, and when we tried to look into it and remedy it for the customer, they kept on acting shifty and wanted to use multiple cards on their phone. Each card didn’t match the customer name on the previous card. So my employee kept the customer there and spoke to them in a manner that made them comfortable while they alerted the proper authorities, this saved us from losing money, and saved us from having a hostile situation.