The Business Communication course has helped me a lot to overcome my fear of working in a real world business. I was very pessimistic about my ability as an employee because the working environment is getting more and more competitive and harsher. That was the reason made me feel so unconfident at the first place. However, with all experiences I have learnt so far, I am now able to blend in any situation quickly and easily as what I have done in the Marketing Department of Star Industries Company.
I have taught to dress nicely in formal, competitive work place which I had never stood in the same position before. In the past, some of the courses, for example Business Framework and Research report proposal, it required me to go interview people in some companies and I had to admit that I dressed like a fool in front of their eyes. However, I realized that it was not really difficult after having true experience through this course. From the first moment of the Business Communication class, I was strongly impressed by the way the lecturer told us to dress politely like a real employee at work; I was taught to wear trousers or slacks, shirt need to be bottomed up and no open toed shoes and sandals, and it had to maintain the same for the whole course. At the beginning I thought like I returned to my time of high school when all students had to wear uniform to class, and since I was at RMIT I have felt very comfortable because I could dress freely. Thus, when I was told how to dress, it was kind of an unwilling thought ran through my head. However, by this time – at the end of the course I feel thankful for what my lecturer forced me to do. I am about to end the Bachelor program in couple semesters thus start learning to be an actual employee is very important so I will not lose in new environment. Hence, begin with very simple thing like clothes will help me step by step familiarize myself with forward future. I reckon my weakness is about communication that I am quite nervous when communicated with strange people; this course was not only about the appearance but also guided me how to write a formal e-mail as well as behave in a good manner in the workplace. I have significantly developed my ability to write a formal email which I never done well before. My result for the email assignment was quite high which indicated that the fearfulness could be eliminated by well training. Unlike other courses required only to work as a team, this course asked me to work in a department and also work with other departments in a company, that why I had to communicate as much as possible to achieve the goals of this course. This makes me feel better off as I could communicate with other people well.
Learning from the lecturer is the easiest way to do as she always willing to be there to teach us everything, hence if we want to be a good learner we should learn the basic and needed things from the one who close to us. The lecturer was very strict on each of our paper work, not only about content of the text but also she concerned more about spelling and grammar. After the course, I found myself become more carefully when writing an assignment; as a result my grammar is better also. Behind that I learnt many other things from the lecturer such as being punctual, serious attitude in work. She also taught us to manage time technically which will be the first thing I try to apply for my recent routine. I was shocked when she shown me how much time I was wasting in a week. Normal people sleep eight hours a day, plus another eight hours doing house work, travelling etc (as she count), and there are eight hours left for me to study. However, I usually use up about five hours for entertaining and only three hours for studying. Having learned about that, I now question myself how could I waste my time in these worthless things. As a next step, I need to re-schedule my time to make it more efficiently and avoid spare time.
Thirdly, I had have experienced a whole new level of teamwork in this course. Unlike what I had learnt before this time I had a chance to work with all employees and the CEO as in a company, thus I had the idea of how things flow in a real firm. Through doing the report, I understand that when it has a trouble in a company, not one department is responsible for the situation but all parts of the company should take the risk and think about what they have done as well as its effects on current issue. So even it was small, the same mistake will never occur again. Besides, as in a role of a team leader, I learnt the way to lead my teammates work together and to make it run fluently. For example, instead of dividing work for members in hurry, I spent a bit more time to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. One of my teammate was not good at writing as the others so I assigned a job of researching and synthesizing findings for her, so the others had available resources to write. From that, the result was better and responsibility for the task of a member was higher. According to Johnson, D., Johnson, R.& Holubec, E. (1998), positive interdependence connects students together so a group will not achieve succeed if its members are not successful.
That was the most interesting and well organized course I have ever had. After 3 months working with my teammates as well as other students in the class I have a clearer vision of how a company works and gained more experiences to deal with trouble. Additionally, the lecturer with her serious and strict manner at work had inspired me to learn and try to rearrange my schedule in order to use time wisely. Another useful thing that I learnt in the course was team working skill and become an effective leader. However, the Working Communication text book seemed to be useless as I have rarely used it. It’s containing maybe worthiness but it is not really a useful studying tool.
REFERENCE
Johnson, D., Johnson, R.& Holubec, E. 1998. Cooperation in the classroom. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, viewed 13th May 16, 2010, < http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/temp/assessment.html>
Showing posts with label Reflective Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reflective Writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
An example of course reflection writing
This is the end of my 12-week-employment at Star Industries (SI). Finally, I have just finished my internship program at this prestigious window and door making company in the role of Human Resources General Manager. Now, I am not a manager anymore.
As far as I can remember, when entering in Human Resource Department (HRD), I felt a little bit nervous in that I had not made acquaintance with my team members before. Amazingly, I was the only man in this department. After getting to know each other, I felt better and a tiny bit surprised later because four other HR newly employed women elected me as a leader or a general manager of HRD although it was not my first time to be in a position of a team leader.
As a member of SI, I had to follow strict dress-code rules, which required very formal outfits to be dressed (button-up shirt, trousers, and shoes). At first, I felt rather stiff and uncomfortable in that never before had I dressed formally like that. I asked myself why I felt in this way. Upon reflection, I have learnt that it is business etiquette, every businessperson or company staff always follows this formal dress-code. Dressing formally also indicates I am a professional employee working in a corporate environment. From my experience, I learn that if I do not follow the rules regarding dress-code stated in the employment offer, I will be penalized. Therefore, in my future career, being in the position of a white-collar staff, I believe that dressing formally creates respect in that the way I dress will affect and imply my job position and illustrates that I am taking the job seriously.
For our routine communication in the company, it is popular to use email to communicate news or informative messages across or inside the department. My problem was that I could not know how to convey bad news to my targeted audience. First, I had a task to inform one staff member who was frequently late at work that he could be sacked. However, I failed to achieve my communication objective when just typing few words to ask him to come to see me, without talking about the exact date and time and even I did not know how to use subject line effectively. After having some training sessions with my Chief Executive Officer (CEO), I comprehend that an effective bad news email should be clear, precise, appropriate in the level of formality, and specific. Additionally, for bad news information, I have to use what I call, Kiss Kick Kiss method, and ‘buffer’ in order not to make people feel disappointed and frustrated. Since this experience, I planned to change because I was aware of my limitation. Indeed, when I came up with the situation of the company’s seal supplier who provided deficient seals for window making process, I knew how to communicate this bad news effectively without deteriorating the relationship between the seal supplier and the company. This formal learning on writing effective bad news email from my CEO’s sessions will benefit me a lot for my communication skill in my future career in the human relations industry, especially when conveying negative messages to my clients or my colleagues and still remaining sincere and firm relationship.
Conflict sometimes occurred when I, my staff, and other departments were discussing about company problems that contributed to the negative situation with the big order of customer X. I realized that the conflict between my department and finance department was attributed to the discord with respect to goal incompatibility. The Finance Manager and I actually had a disagreement on the decisions made because of different objectives in both departments. The Finance Department (FD) failed to approve a budget of $20,000 to run HR activities because FD wanted to cut costs. However, I wanted more budgets to open more training workshops for workers. Conflict occurred and eventually, I could not hold HR activities effectively because of lacking budget, thus to cause the window deficiency in the customer X’s order. I was quite frustrated when my efforts to strengthen my department performance and to run sufficient training classes could not turn into reality owing to the communication problems and conflict handling styles of both Finance Manager and myself. Upon reflection, I believe that our decision-making process failed to incorporate the mutual goals in each department. After learning a model of styles to handle conflict (Thomas, cited in Daft et al, 2010), I appreciated that both the Finance Manager and I had avoiding style, which reflected neither assertiveness nor cooperation. Based on my experience, now I understand that in order to be compatible in terms of goal congruence, I should apply collaborating style, which reflects a high degree of both assertiveness and cooperation in order to avoid goal incongruence. To be specific, in my future career, so as to make decisions, I have to collaborate and inform other departments in advance about my decisions and try to compromise any benefits and costs associated with these decisions. By doing that, I believe, to a certain extent, I can avoid conflict and goal incompatibility.
Composing a business report to communicate informative messages to the whole company is also an interesting and challenging part of my responsibilities. At first, my HR staff and I found it quite difficult to discover any issues related to our department and their findings. However, through careful research by releasing surveys and statistics about employee satisfaction to measure how satisfied the employees were, my staff, and I had better understanding regarding what issues involved in our department that contributed directly to the problem with customer X. After identifying the main issues, I asked myself how to come up with resolutions and recommendations for those. Meetings between HR members were held. By undertaking research on the Internet and reading relevant books, eventually, we were able to come up with recommendations for our findings. Completing the business report will benefit me a lot in my future career in the human relations industry. Now I have the ability to utilize and issue polls and surveys in order to gauge the clients’ and employees’ satisfaction. This, I think, is quite an important soft skill that consequently facilitates me a lot in my future job.
REFERENCE:
Daft, R L, Lussier R N, Achua C F, Dubrin, A J, Bratton J, Grint, K, Nelson, D L, 2010, Leadership and Management for RMIT university, 1st edn, Cengage Learning Australia Pty Limited
As far as I can remember, when entering in Human Resource Department (HRD), I felt a little bit nervous in that I had not made acquaintance with my team members before. Amazingly, I was the only man in this department. After getting to know each other, I felt better and a tiny bit surprised later because four other HR newly employed women elected me as a leader or a general manager of HRD although it was not my first time to be in a position of a team leader.
As a member of SI, I had to follow strict dress-code rules, which required very formal outfits to be dressed (button-up shirt, trousers, and shoes). At first, I felt rather stiff and uncomfortable in that never before had I dressed formally like that. I asked myself why I felt in this way. Upon reflection, I have learnt that it is business etiquette, every businessperson or company staff always follows this formal dress-code. Dressing formally also indicates I am a professional employee working in a corporate environment. From my experience, I learn that if I do not follow the rules regarding dress-code stated in the employment offer, I will be penalized. Therefore, in my future career, being in the position of a white-collar staff, I believe that dressing formally creates respect in that the way I dress will affect and imply my job position and illustrates that I am taking the job seriously.
For our routine communication in the company, it is popular to use email to communicate news or informative messages across or inside the department. My problem was that I could not know how to convey bad news to my targeted audience. First, I had a task to inform one staff member who was frequently late at work that he could be sacked. However, I failed to achieve my communication objective when just typing few words to ask him to come to see me, without talking about the exact date and time and even I did not know how to use subject line effectively. After having some training sessions with my Chief Executive Officer (CEO), I comprehend that an effective bad news email should be clear, precise, appropriate in the level of formality, and specific. Additionally, for bad news information, I have to use what I call, Kiss Kick Kiss method, and ‘buffer’ in order not to make people feel disappointed and frustrated. Since this experience, I planned to change because I was aware of my limitation. Indeed, when I came up with the situation of the company’s seal supplier who provided deficient seals for window making process, I knew how to communicate this bad news effectively without deteriorating the relationship between the seal supplier and the company. This formal learning on writing effective bad news email from my CEO’s sessions will benefit me a lot for my communication skill in my future career in the human relations industry, especially when conveying negative messages to my clients or my colleagues and still remaining sincere and firm relationship.
Conflict sometimes occurred when I, my staff, and other departments were discussing about company problems that contributed to the negative situation with the big order of customer X. I realized that the conflict between my department and finance department was attributed to the discord with respect to goal incompatibility. The Finance Manager and I actually had a disagreement on the decisions made because of different objectives in both departments. The Finance Department (FD) failed to approve a budget of $20,000 to run HR activities because FD wanted to cut costs. However, I wanted more budgets to open more training workshops for workers. Conflict occurred and eventually, I could not hold HR activities effectively because of lacking budget, thus to cause the window deficiency in the customer X’s order. I was quite frustrated when my efforts to strengthen my department performance and to run sufficient training classes could not turn into reality owing to the communication problems and conflict handling styles of both Finance Manager and myself. Upon reflection, I believe that our decision-making process failed to incorporate the mutual goals in each department. After learning a model of styles to handle conflict (Thomas, cited in Daft et al, 2010), I appreciated that both the Finance Manager and I had avoiding style, which reflected neither assertiveness nor cooperation. Based on my experience, now I understand that in order to be compatible in terms of goal congruence, I should apply collaborating style, which reflects a high degree of both assertiveness and cooperation in order to avoid goal incongruence. To be specific, in my future career, so as to make decisions, I have to collaborate and inform other departments in advance about my decisions and try to compromise any benefits and costs associated with these decisions. By doing that, I believe, to a certain extent, I can avoid conflict and goal incompatibility.
Composing a business report to communicate informative messages to the whole company is also an interesting and challenging part of my responsibilities. At first, my HR staff and I found it quite difficult to discover any issues related to our department and their findings. However, through careful research by releasing surveys and statistics about employee satisfaction to measure how satisfied the employees were, my staff, and I had better understanding regarding what issues involved in our department that contributed directly to the problem with customer X. After identifying the main issues, I asked myself how to come up with resolutions and recommendations for those. Meetings between HR members were held. By undertaking research on the Internet and reading relevant books, eventually, we were able to come up with recommendations for our findings. Completing the business report will benefit me a lot in my future career in the human relations industry. Now I have the ability to utilize and issue polls and surveys in order to gauge the clients’ and employees’ satisfaction. This, I think, is quite an important soft skill that consequently facilitates me a lot in my future job.
REFERENCE:
Daft, R L, Lussier R N, Achua C F, Dubrin, A J, Bratton J, Grint, K, Nelson, D L, 2010, Leadership and Management for RMIT university, 1st edn, Cengage Learning Australia Pty Limited
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