Food-Service-Manual-for-Health-Care-Institutions

cause miscommunication of even the simplest facts in the communication process, and as messages
increase in complexity, the potential for miscommunication increases. Communication
barriers can be divided into four broad categories: environmental, experiential, behavioral, and
cultural.
Barriers Due to the Environment
An obvious distracter in the communication process is an environmental interference that distorts
or breaks the information flow between sender and receiver. Two types of environmental
barriers exist: physical (or mechanical) and operational.
Examples of physical or mechanical environmental barriers are broken connectors or static
on telephone lines, conversations interrupted by ringing phones or knocks on office doors, or
loud laughter that disrupts a meeting. Operational barriers have to do with system breakdowns.
Examples are letters that are lost in the mail, misplacement of a critical memo due to
an inadequate filing system, or loss of data due to a programming error.
A food service manager whose office is near a cafeteria entrance can anticipate certain
physical environmental barriers (such as noise). Therefore, the manager should schedule a oneon-one,
manager–employee conference in a private conference room. Otherwise, it could be
difficult for the sender (the manager) to communicate the message (the consequences of a specific
inappropriate behavior and what must be done to change it) to the receiver (the employee)
because the medium (the sender’s voice) might be drowned out by the cafeteria’s noise. Unless
the message is conveyed and received accurately and without distraction, feedback can be virtually
impossible.
Managers cannot anticipate all environmental distracters. In a situation where a patient
with diabetes was given the wrong meal tray, the manager’s responsibility is to recognize the
probability of an operational environmental barrier. The manager should then investigate the
food service department’s information systems to discover the reason for the miscommunication
of patient tray information.
Barriers Due to Experience or Personal Perception
In Chapter 1, the increasing cultural diversity of the workforce and the effect this has on daily
management functions and service operations were noted. In the communication process, both
sender and receiver are products not only of life experiences but also of accumulative cultural
experiences. Collectively, these experiences define their personal perception in terms of who
they are, how they feel about themselves, and how accepting they are of similarities and differences
in customers, peers, coworkers, superiors, and subordinates. Words, actions, and situations
are perceived by different people and groups and who may act differently to the same
message.
Personal bias can create barriers to communication. For example, a cook asked to clean
up a spill on the floor during lunch meal preparation to prevent someone from falling might
interpret the request as a waste of time, even a form of punishment if the cook perceives the
job of a cleaning technician to be less important than his or her own.
In the situation described above, the same message also might be received negatively if the
cook is already busy preparing meatloaf. In addition to being influenced by personal outlook,
messages and their interpretation can be affected by the circumstances of the moment.
Pressures and stressors—those imposed by the work environment and those that are the result
of personal perception—can affect all five elements of the communication process. Therefore,
managers must be in touch not only with their own stress levels but also with those of others
with whom they come in contact.
Savvy managers make every effort to suspend judgments that are based on differences in
appearance or use of language, for example. Otherwise, they risk a loss of opportunity that may
be conveyed in information exchanges. A menu planner’s suggestion to incorporate more ethnic
entrees into patients’ menus can be seen as a business opportunity because these managers are
Communication
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