Introduction
Communication barriers lead to challenges in a corporation that is trying to establish a diverse workplace and when United States organizations hire employees with diverse cultural backgrounds. Globalization has forced organizations to recruit staff from different cultural backgrounds.
An organization can hardly exploit global market without a diverse workforce. Hence, even though diversity causes communication barriers, organizations cannot succeed without it. Therefore, they ought to rise above communication barriers caused by diversity and promote cooperation among workers (Nagda, 2006).
Diversity is a major obstacle to communication in the Florida Department of Health. Organizational leaders and personnel encounter challenges when communicating with one another. Communication barrier affects employees’ productivity and overall organizational profit.
For instance, it is hard for employees to complete their projects on time due to communication breakdown. Besides, a majority of employees are prone to stereotyping. Consequently, they interpret messages based on their skills and knowledge, and therefore fail to meet managers’ expectations.
This paper will discuss diversity issues related to communication barriers in the Florida Department of Health.
Diversity Issues
One of the diversity issues that contribute to communication barriers in the Florida Department of Health is employees’ predisposition to believe in similarity and disregard divergence. Staff members are supposed to think global and act local.
It implies that workers ought to discharge their services in line with local demands and not based on global experiences. In most cases, employees do not consider cultural factors when discharging their duties. They tend to generalize situations and overlook cultural inclinations of different target groups.
According to Nagda (2006), the majority of employees do not consider laws, feelings, and behaviors of communities when discharging their duties. For Nagda (2006), many workers do not like dealing with differences. The predisposition to assume similarity is prevalent in the Florida Department of Health.
One of the roles of the department is to educate the public on the correct nutrition to promote healthy living. Not all people in Florida eat the same type of food. Different cultures prefer diverse diets. However, employees in the Florida Department of Health overlook the issue of cultural diversity when preparing their nutrition programs.
As a result, they encounter language barriers as they try to teach some communities about food varieties that they have never come across.
Some cultures pay attention to the circumstance of communication. Nagda (2006) argues that such cultures focus more on non-verbal cues than verbal communication. Hence, it is imperative for people to consider verbal and non-verbal cues when communicating. Some people deduce meanings from gestures during communication.
The Florida Department of Health has staff from diverse cultural backgrounds. Besides, its personnel interact with people from different ethnic backgrounds. At times, it is hard for staff members to relay important message due to language and cultural barriers.
The Florida Department of Health is responsible for teaching the public how to respond to emergency cases. At times, it is hard for the public to grasp ideas, especially in cases where it is hard to use non-verbal communication. In other cases, staff members use non-verbal cues that are misunderstood and end up conveying wrong information.
Presently, the majority of immigrants and minority groups in Florida do not have adequate skills in emergency preparedness as cultural diversity poses a significant challenge in communication.
Other diversity concerns that are associated with communication hurdles include stereotype and biasness. Nagda (2006) posits, “Stereotypes are stumbling blocks for communicators because they interfere with objective viewing of stimuli” (p. 554).
Nagda (2006) argues that effective communication depends on the ability of listeners to decipher stimuli. In most cases, organizational leaders and workers are too much engrossed into their cultures. Therefore, everything they do or say is interpreted according to their cultural practices.
In the Florida Department of Health, some workers fail to comprehend and react to communications due to stereotyping. The majority of the group leaders are Americans. Conventionally, Americans are believed not to emphasize on non-verbal communication (Schouten & Meeuwesen, 2006).
Hence, whenever group leaders use gestures to relay critical information, some employees do not take the gestures seriously. For instance, when leaders are teaching about women’s health, they use numerous non-verbal cues to describe female anatomy.
However, many employees do not learn from the non-verbal cues since they do not consider them to be of significant value. Indeed, it is hard for the Florida Department of Health to enhance women’s health due to inadequate skills among the staff members.
Staff members are unable to train women in cervical abnormalities due to lack of sufficient skills. Such a sensitive training is facilitated through demonstrations, which the majority of employees tend to overlook due to stereotyping and preconception.
Schouten and Meeuwesen (2006) argue that stereotyping limits effective communication among employees. They allege that even if a person hails from a particular cultural background it does not mean that s/he observes everything that the culture values.
Thus, it is important to pay attention to what a person is saying or doing without considering his/her cultural background. Schouten and Meeuwesen (2006) allege that the primary mistake, which many people commit, is failure to acknowledge that regional diversity plays an active role in communication.
For instance, two people may come from Asia but have diverse cultures. It all depends on the region from which one comes. The same case applies in the United States.
In Florida, people behave differently according to their counties. Failure to consider county differences leads to the Florida Department of Health using a general approach to serve all people. The department uses English to educate people how to deal with asthma cases.
Even though the department translates some teaching materials to local languages, it is unable to bring out the meanings of certain words. Moreover, the department does not use cultural filter when communicating with people within a county, therefore making it hard for communities to understand what is being taught.
Another factor that limits communication in a diverse workforce is the propensity to prejudice what is communicated (Schouten & Meeuwesen, 2006). Employees tend to endorse or reject an individual’s assertion and actions instead of analyzing the thoughts and feelings of a person from his/her perspective.
Employees do not approach communication with an open mind. Schouten and Meeuwesen (2006) argue that prejudice affects effective communication. They claim that people who value their culture more than others suffer from ethnocentrism. They use their culture to interpret every communication.
Therefore, they are likely to undermine another person’s opinion if it does not match with their cultural beliefs. Ethnocentrism causes cultural prejudice, which inhibits communication within institutions. The Florida Department of Health is unable to provide health services, particularly in South Florida due to mistrust and prejudice.
The majority of immigrants and minority groups in South Florida prefer traditional healers. Hence, whenever the department tries to teach them how to deal with communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS, they evaluate the teachings based on traditional healers’ recommendations.
In most cases, communities in this region do not trust what the Florida Department of Health teaches. Mistrust and prejudice hamper communication between staff from the Florida Department of Health and communities in South Florida.
Conclusion
Despite the numerous benefits of diversity to an organization, it stalls effective communication. Employees tend to overlook cultural diversity when discharging their duties. Consequently, it becomes hard to relate to communities that are culture-sensitive. Some cultures are sensitive to the context of communication.
They analyze verbal and non-verbal cues that a communicator uses. Therefore, it is vital to use comprehensible signs when communicating. One of the diversity issues that affect the Florida Department of Health is stereotyping. Employees treat each other based on their cultural backgrounds.
Hence, they overlook some cultural aspects when communicating. Besides, employees from the Florida Department of Health tend to prejudice every communication. The majority of workers are ethnocentric.
Hence, they evaluate each communication based on their culture. Consequently, they ignore messages that do not match with their cultural beliefs.
References
Nagda, B. (2006). Breaking barriers, crossing borders, building bridges: Communication process in intergroup dialogs. Journal of Social Issues, 62(3), 553-576.
Schouten, B., & Meeuwesen, L. (2006). Cultural differences in medical communication: A review of the literature. Patient Education and Counseling, 64(3), 21-34.