Whichever way we look at it, communication is the key to everything in modern life. It affects our home and our work, our pasts, our presents and our futures. It is the means by which we influence, educate and share our lives on a daily basis.
Seemingly every week mankind develops newer, faster, slicker ways of reaching out to each other – who could have missed the hype around the launch of the most recent iPhone? How easy is it to send an instant message to the other side of the planet and know it will be read within seconds? Long gone are the days of mail coaches rumbling along the roads taking weeks to deliver their cargo. The cursor and pixel have completely replaced pen and ink.
For the modern HR professional, this is great news. Contracts, change communications, private documents and CVs are easily managed and dispatched with a minimum of fuss. Need to communicate with your 20,000 employees? Put it all on a snazzy PDF, click on the email group and off it goes into cyberspace. No sweat.
However, the danger underlying this great communicative power is that the human input at the front end is still absolutely essential – and that is where we have cause for some concern. It has been highlighted in the past week from studies by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – reported by the BBC – that young adult literacy within England is worryingly poor, ranking England 22nd out of a sample of 24 Asian and European countries.
As a society we find ourselves in increasing danger of only being able to communicate in text speak, slowly regressing to the days of Shakespeare where spelling, punctuation and grammar were changed and moved around according to the whim of the author. Many people rely upon their trusty spell checkers, but if pressed would struggle to be 100% sure that, when reviewing the words they have just written, there all definitaly spelt rite.
We mustn’t just accept this as a sign of the times: employers are beginning to get wise to this trend. In recent weeks I have heard of CVs being rejected by an organisation for errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar. In the world of HR, where applicants would be expected to put together legally-binding contracts, who can blame them? In a climate where an online job advertisement can currently attract upwards of 50 applications, candidates need to be 100% confident that they are not falling at the first hurdle by missing out on the most basic of criteria.
We have infinitely more power to communicate our message than our ancestors, but with that great power comes great responsibility. We need to remember the basics to make sure that the meaning of what we need to say is not lost. John Wildey, the man who recently found himself, with no previous training, having to land a plane when the pilot collapsed, owed his life to clear communication. The real danger is you won’t know you haven’t communicated clearly and effectively until you see the ground rushing up to meet you!
‘The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’ George Bernard Shaw
