Communications

4COMMUNICATING IN THE WORKPLACE

Communication is such a large part of your workday as a management accountant that you may not notice the many ways and how many times during the day you communicate. You stop a colleague in the hall to ask about the status of a project. You e-mail the draft of a report to a company manager in another city to review. The CFO asks you to join a meeting on developing a social media policy for the company. Throughout the day, you communicate with people inside and sometimes outside of your organisation. But that is just the beginning.

This chapter expands upon the list of the different forms of communication in chapter 3 and offers suggestions about how management accountants can communicate more effectively in the workplace.

FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION

In today’s world, people are increasingly using technology as a substitute for personal communication. More time is spent on e-mails, texting, web postings and social networks and less on conversing in person. ‘We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating,’ says a New York Times article. ‘And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.’¹

As methods of communication proliferate, more people are gravitating towards impersonal methods of contact. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, some 83% of American adults own cell phones, and almost three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages.² The Center asked those text users ...