Effective Team communication is the backbone and foundation of every human interaction.
Our pre-historic ancestors boosted their collective hunting and surviving capacity by living together in small communities.
Had it not been for effective team communication, perhaps we would still have been on four legs.
Narrowing our perspective to business organizations, effective team communication is one of the paramount pillars of any successful and healthy organization.
But what exactly is team communication?
All forms of discussions, exchanges and contact between your team is called team communication.
As a leader or manager, you must know when to communicate, what to communicate, how to communicate and with whom to communicate.
These four questions round up the scope for effective team communication.
The content, as well as the context of the communication, make it effective. You should know the art of saying the right things to the right person at the right time.
An organization that homes effective team communication is one where the employees can speak their mind and feel no workplace pressure.
Evolution of Communication: A Timeline
- We went from the oldest form of symbols used for communication that is Cave paintings (The oldest cave painting was discovered inside Chauvet Cave in France around 30,000 B.C.) to Smoke signals which were primarily used in sending messages in China.
- In between, we also took a helping hand from Carrier Pigeons. Over 2,000 years ago, the ancient Romans used pigeons as primary messengers between military men.
- As construction became man’s most precious hobby, we went on to develop a Postal Systems, these were prevalent in Persia, China, India, Egypt.
- After growing fond of culture, man invented the first medium of mass communication- Newspaper. (The German-language publication of Johann Carolus in Strasbourg in 1605 was the first newspaper.)
- Radio was next, In the 1830s, various scientists, such as Maxwell and Hughes studied on wireless telegraphy which developed the theory of electromagnetism. In 1888, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz discovered “Hertzian waves”, named after him. In 1893, Tesla started using wireless power as a form of transmitting content. In the early 20th century, radio broadcasting began.
- Telegraph communication followed. Started after Samuel Morse invented the Morse code which encoded the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The Morse code transmitted messages through a series of clicks, tones, and lights. In 1830, Morse integrated the Morse code in telegraphy technology that revolutionized-the-long-distance communication.
- One after the other Telephones and Televisions followed.
- Along with telephones, television started to become a mode of indirect communication to the mass audience. The television was not just invented by a single person, but developed through the efforts of various brilliant people.
- In the late 1970s we came into time of the Internet. After the creation of computers in the 1950s, the ARPANET, which was the early predecessor of the internet was developed. The term “internet” first emerged in 1973. The first internet service provider was the Telenet. In 1983, the domain system started. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, introduced the World Wide Web (www) which definitely started the modern internet.
- Text Messages were the hippest mode of communication in the late 90s and early 2000s. Now, SMS has evolved in which over 9 trillion SMS are sent every year.
- The latest mode of communication in the digital era is the use of Social Media. In 2004, Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg. Today, the Messenger is one of the most widely used messaging apps. There are more than two billion Facebook users worldwide. In 2005, YouTube became the first-ever popular video hosting social media site. In 2006, Twitter began to dominate the social media scene. Other social media platforms have followed.
Indeed, communication has gone through a lot of stages before it became so convenient and efficient today. Source: MobileCon
Today, the Internet era has paved the way to innumerable means of communication.
Technology has indeed redefined communication. People no longer have to wait for years, months, weeks, and days to receive information or message.
Today, texts, e-mails, tweets, and personal messages can reach the recipient in just a matter of seconds.
But as the law of nature, to these scientific advancements and progress, there are many pros too. Like inefficient and costly team communication. ,
The history of workplace communication.
“From the days of Memos to The time of Emails.”
‘Memo‘ is short for the word memorandum, which in Latin means, ‘to be remembered.’ “On the contrary, the invention of the memo entailed a deliberate forgetting of rhetoric, an act of oblivion.
The memorandum was not an evolution of the business letter, but a new genre of writing.
The term ‘memorandum’ in this new generic sense began to be used in the later 1870s and early 1880s, although it did not become common until the 1920s, by which time the form of the memo was in widespread use.
Memos were meant for internal use, so they were shorter, informal messages, and the use of jargon was acceptable.”, says John Guillory.
A few decades ago, computers were the next big thing in the field of workplace communication.
Then came the internet, and revolutionized the way we communicated within the office.
It made the communication easier and quicker. The Internet gave us the power to reach to anyone, who is anywhere in the world.
With Ray Tomlinson inventing Email universally for ARPANET in 1971, things took a rather drastic turn. Emails became the most convenient mode of communication.
Talking of today, according to Internet Live Stats Almost 2.8 million emails are sent every second.
Conclusively
At such times, being flexible and constantly adapting to the new challenge posed to us by each passing day is the only way of life we are going to know for a long time.
Online meetings and Team Communication tools are very much the new norms. It’s time we embrace them so that we can adapt better to this latest mode of communication.
