The Communication Process

There are many kinds of communication—formal, informal, coaching/counseling, and nonverbal—but they all follow the same fundamental process. Communication is the process of transmitting information from one person or place to another.

The communication process begins when a sender thinks of a message he or she wants to convey to another person. Encoding means putting a message into a written, verbal, or symbolic form that can be recognized and understood by the receiver. The sender then transmits the message via communication channels.

With some communication channels such as the telephone and face-to-face communication, the sender receives immediate feedback, whereas with others such as email (or text messages and file attachments), voice mail, memos, and letters, the sender must wait for the receiver to respond. Decoding is the process by which the receiver translates the verbal or symbolic form of the message into an understood message.

Feedback to sender is a return message to the sender that indicates the receiver’s understanding of the message (of what the receiver was supposed to know, to do, or not to do). Noise is anything that interferes with the transmission of the intended message.

Jargon, which is vocabulary particular to a profession or group, is another form of noise that interferes with communication in the workplace.