Planning refers to sufficient use of time, energy or talent as a resource at a person’s disposal relative to what is important. It deals with concepts like goals and success.
Planning is important in an organization as well as in an individual’s life for self worth, satisfaction, and for continuous strife to achieve requisite potential needed to succeed in life.
This paper explores why planning is the most important in emergency planning.
Planning may be perceived as attending, searching or paying attention to an environment in order to make sense of it and derive an outcome or a conclusion in terms of disaster management (Oliver, 2010).
Such a view on planning involve the result of contact with stimuli in the environment which causes an individual to attend to it either through mental activity, interpretation or communication (Hooijberg, Lane & Diverse, 2010).
This way, perception can be seen as an outcome of attending or as an attending process. At work place, these views help the employers and the employees to know how to perceive issues in their environment as well as how to understand each other.
There are several factors that may affect either an individual or group perception. To begin with, our perception can be influenced by the unique characteristics of the perceiver. One of the intrinsic characteristics of the perceiver is the mood.
The latter can affect how we perceive people, events or even situations in life (Oliver, 2010). For instance, individuals tend to behave and perceive differently when they are happy or depressed. Secondly, attitude is yet another driving factor that may affect the characteristics of the perceiver.
Some people have negative or positive attitude towards various gender roles. For example, while some believe that women can also perform male oriented jobs; there are those who may categorically differ with women’s ability to perform male-based tasks such as masonry.
Other personal characteristics include self-concept, motives, interest, cognitive structure and expectations (Monson, 2010). The other two broad factors that influence perception include characteristics of the situation as well as the characteristics of the target.
In terms of expectations, it is highly likely that our perception can be influenced by the kind of outcome that we expect from a given situation. Research findings on this area have found that it is quite cumbersome to see others in an accurate way unless you know yourself well.
In addition, the characteristics seen in others are likely to be one’s own intrinsic behavioral patterns. Finally, it is possible to see (or perceive) positive characteristics in other people once an individual has positively accepted him or herself.
Whatever is being observed can also be affected by the characteristics of the target situation or person. One such example is the external looks or physical appearance of an individual.
People who are attractive are likely to be perceived in a favorable way compared to those who are unattractive either by the way they dress or generally appear. Moreover, size, sound and motion associated with the target also affect how we see things around us.
Communication
Communication is also an important part of planning at workplace since it is important as it involves exchanging bits of information between two or more parties.
Communication of information can be through various forms of mass communication, through spoken words between groups of people or individuals or it can be through written materials (Hooijberg, Lane & Diverse, 2010).
In this regard, it is important to point out that communication is an important tool in an organization as it ensures maintenance of personal relationships as well as the aspect of ensuring efficient transmission of messages.
Therefore, everything that a business or an organization does is controlled by communication. Communication can be verbal or non-verbal.
For instance, facial expressions, gestures and body postures can be actual communication existing between two individuals without them actually talking.
Non-verbal communication can be more genuine and extremely powerful than actual talking (Monson, 2010).
References
Hooijberg, R., Lane, N. & Diverse, A. (2010). Leader effectiveness and integrity: wishful thinking? International Journal of Organizational Analysis 18 (1): 59-75. Oliver, A. (2010). Culture Change From the Top. Professional 55(10) : 21- 22.