1.4 What Is Business Communication?

We’ve defined communication as the sending and interpreting of information in a particular context. With only a slight modification we can also define business communication. Business communication is the sending and interpreting of information in a business-related context. There are many business-related contexts, so that category is pretty broad. We won’t include things like how customers react to advertisements on social media, because our focus is on how business professionals themselves can communicate successfully. But that’s still a broad category, and that’s how we want it. As this course will show, all of our actions as professionals can count as communication, and making sure we’re communicating the right messages is essential to success in any role in our organizations.

Business communication is about learning and mastering the rules that lead to successful communication in a business context. What makes for a great job interview, for example? That will require communication of a very particular kind. What about a good presentation at a board meeting? A successful salary negotiation? A positive instance of conflict resolution? All these circumstances and many others call for expertise and skill with communicating in a business context. We’ll be gaining that expertise and developing that skill in this course.

The Purpose of Business Communication

Every case of communication has a particular purpose. The immediate purpose is to send or interpret a message, but since all communication takes place within a larger context, each case of communication supports larger purposes as well. Justin and Kaya have the immediate purpose of resolving their misunderstanding from the weekend, but they also want to help their team grow their account, which in the end will make their firm more successful.

Or imagine another business communication task: informing your organization’s employees about a harassment training seminar. Suppose the organization has contracted with an outside company to run the seminars. You work in human resources, and your job is to tell the employees about the seminars and sign them up for one of three seminar times. Your direct purpose is to put their names on a list and get them into a room at a specific time, but the real goal of your communication is to improve your workplace culture and make people feel safer and more comfortable at work. That purpose, in turn, contributes to still other purposes.

The larger purposes behind our communication activities come from our job descriptions, our industry, our company, and so on. There is something that unites all these purposes, however: they all contribute both to our own success, and to the success of our organizations. In fact, it isn’t an exaggeration to say that the ultimate purpose of business communication is to drive the success of individual professionals as well as of companies. Modern business practices are more collaborative than ever—in most fields and in most positions, the days of being able to show up to an office and work a full day mostly by yourself are long gone.

Instead, employers demand the ability to work in teams and to flexibly adapt strategies to fast-changing market conditions. More than anything, these skills require communication: can you grasp the essential features of a new product or new customer base to share with your firm’s marketing team? Can you persuade operations that the lighting on the showroom floor isn’t just a facilities issue, but also makes a difference to sales? Can you deliver a graceful and engaging presentation, custom built for a new potential client, to explain why the greater cost—which you have no control over—is worth the money? And after you’ve done all this, can you ask your manager for a well-deserved raise as a reward for your communication skills?

If you can, the benefits to you and your organization will be enormous. You’ll accomplish not only the more immediate purposes of your communications but the larger ones as well, and you’ll refine skills that are constantly in demand and that, thanks now to the internet and other facts of the contemporary business world, will never lose their relevance.

As we learn how to carry out these purposes, we’ll discover that our success in business communication depends primarily on how well we are able to select a communication method appropriate to a particular circumstance. With so many ways to share information, we can’t expect one way to be the best all the time. The best method is not the one we like the most or are most proficient at, but the one that best carries our intended meaning and best delivers it to an audience whose needs and preferences we’re already familiar with.

Since audiences and needs can change, we’ll focus much of our course on how to discern the factors that help us select the correct communication method, given what we know about our situation. We’ll then be able to clearly define the purpose of our communication and understand why the method we’ve chosen, rather than some other one, is right for our task.

The purpose of business communication is business success. So how do we get there? What are our tools? Let’s take a look at those next.

The Means of Business Communication

If the purpose of business communication is what we want to accomplish when we communicate, then the means are how we do it. And we’ve never had more ways to send messages: social media, internet ads, billboards, press releases, intraoffice memos, Slack channels, and meetings are all now totally viable ways of sharing information; and that’s not even close to a complete list. The means and methods seem boundless.

In this course we’ll look at the most common and useful means to master for business communication. In the next section, for example, we’ll examine some common business documents and how they’re used, with advice about when they’re the right choice for what you want to share. But among those details we should take care not to lose the overarching point, perhaps the most important thing we could learn about business communication: that everything is communication.

Everything is communication. This saying doesn’t mean that every activity we perform is a communication activity, or that communication is the only thing that matters in business. What the saying means is that everything we do sends a message, whether we intend to or not. In life and certainly in business, we’re always communicating information; we’re always sending signals, and other people may always be interpreting those signals. Even when the message we’re sending is as simple as “I’m choosing to work on this task, rather than that one,” we cannot help but communicate to others something about our priorities and goals.

Let’s elaborate on the idea that everything is communication by returning to the example of Justin and Kaya, from the start of this topic. The obvious examples of communication in that story come from what Justin and Kaya say to each other. Less obvious but still clear examples of communication include Kaya’s refusal to apologize, her compliments about the Justin’s work after her refusal, and Justin’s body language when he leaves Kaya’s office. With all of these actions Justin and Kaya are sending unmistakable messages to each other, and most people won’t have any trouble picking them up. Everything is communication—and with everything they’re doing, they’re communicating information to others.

The story also contains much less noticeable cases of communication, however, and it’s in those cases that we see the value of the idea that everything is communication. Consider the following parts of the story, and think about what message each would be sending, positive or negative, if they took place in a real office:

• The messy kitchen. The office kitchen was a mess when Justin went to prepare lunch, so whoever ate before him left it that way and didn’t clean up.

• The locked door. Justin arrived to Kaya’s office on time and tried to go on, but she had locked the door.

• The circular table. Kaya chose to meet with Justin at a circular table in the corner of her office, rather than from behind her desk, so that they’d both be sitting at the same table.

• The cubicles. Justin works at a cubicle in a large office, and has at least one other coworker, Jerry, who works in one too.

Each of these parts of the story occurs within a certain context and tells us about that context and the people working in it. Take Kaya’s locked door. She’s got an office and so can shut her door, and leaving the door closed is one thing, since she might be trying to concentrate or have a video call. But what is she telling people by locking her door? The message is something like, “I’ll see you when I’m ready, and not before.” Anyone trying to speak to her in person about something would receive this message loud and clear, and they would understand that she doesn’t wish to be bothered for almost anything.

The locked door sends a fairly negative message. But now take the circular table in Kaya’s office. She could meet with Justin while sitting behind her desk, and that would send a message—of her superiority, almost as though she sits in judgment. But Kaya doesn’t do that. Instead she meets at a table where they both sit together without a massive barrier between them. Although Kaya may make some mistakes in the resulting conversation, she sends a positive, welcoming message in the way she arranges the space in which communication will happen.

From this short story, we were able to extract four examples of business communication that have nothing at all to do with spoken or written language. And we may not have covered them all! Factors like these are often in the background, but they’re still there; and without words they communicate just as clearly as if we’d printed the messages and hung them on posters over the doorway.

In this course we’ll have many chances to examine particular means of business communication, like emails, job interviews, and all-hands meetings. We’ll study the rules that govern their use and that can lead to success. But these particular means are only part of a much wider network of human communication where everything, at least potentially, can become a means to deliver a message. Everything—from how we talk, to who sits where, to the furniture, to the free drinks in the fridge—communicates a message about our relationships, values, and priorities.

Everything is communication. It might scare us at first, but we’ll learn that the idea can become empowering when we take control of how we communicate and what information we’re choosing to send. With business communication, we’re in the driver’s seat, and we get to make all the most important choices for what our actions say about us and how they do it.