Question

Mike is the Director of Human Resources for a 120-employee family-owned manufacturing firm. Mike has been quite busy the last year reforming the benefit offerings to comply with recent changes in healthcare laws. Given the many changes, Mike took the opportunity to completely overhaul the employee benefits program including replacing the old medical plans with three brand-new plans. Mike is preparing to tell employees about their new benefit offerings a few months prior to the benefits open-enrollment period. Given the number of employees, he decides to design a nicely formatted PowerPoint slide deck explaining the changes and to send this presentation via email to all employees. One day into the open-enrollment period, his inbox is flooded with over 50 emails from confused employees. Mike is puzzled, but realizes he may have made a mistake in communication.
Which of the following BEST describes the primary communication mistake he made?

A. Assuming that employees would understand the content of the PowerPoint slides
B. Failing to match the communication medium (or channel) with the intended outcome
C. Failing to develop core ideas that adhere to the rules of "sticky" communication
D. Forgetting to alert managers that the communication was "coming their way."

Answer 1

Answer:

A. Assuming that employees would understand the content of the PowerPoint slides

Explanation:

One of the most common mistakes that can be made is assuming that the receiver on the other end of the communication chain would understand quite well, what message, you as the sender, is passing across.

In the scenario cited in the question above, the new benefit offerings that have been developed after the overhauling, of which Mike has taken his time to explain in a power point presentation just few months before employees would be required to enroll for the program, must have been misunderstand by the employees. The multiple emails reveals that the employees do not really understand the content, and this comes as a surprised to Mike. We can infer that Mike must have made the mistake of assuming that the employees would understand the content of the PowerPoint slides.