Interpersonal Communication Case Study

1. Create a 2 -3 page reflective development paper answering the following questions:
A. In what way(s) is communicating with someone from another generation different from communicating with a member from your own generation?
In workplace everybody comes together in efforts toward some organizational goals, they bring their individual cultural, moral beliefs and ethical principle. Workplace is becoming more and more diverse generationally, it is important to understand how generational gap impact communication.
Our generation (Gen Y) loves teamwork and works cooperatively towards goal. We juggle many projects at a time, whereas older generation focuses at one project at a time. Differences in working style creates misunderstanding. Other

Our generation can learn from multi ways like book, powerpoint, internet whereas other generation people might learn only through book, newspaper or internet but one at a time. So, it is easy to communicate with your own generation as you will have the same learning style. Whereas when you communicate with different generation about the things that you learned through internet, video or PowerPoint then they might not understand as they mostly learn through books.
While Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers prefer phone communication and face-to-face business transactions, Generation Y-ers prefer to communicate via blogs, IMs, text messages and emails. Gen Y sees this type of communication as effective and efficient, while the older generation sees this as lazy and potentially harmful to business.

B. How do we bridge the gap between the generations in the workplace?
Each generation has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses and it is the managers’ jobs to identify those points and find ways to get the most out of their employees.
First of all understanding the generational differences of all employees and making a list of which employee falls under which generation.
Matures
They are conservative and cannot juggle many projects at one time. For this category people you have to assign them a single task work. And prefer to make face-to-face or written communication.
Baby

So you have to choose these employee to handle the task that needs overtime. When you have to communicate with these category people then you don’t have to think about the time as they fall in “call me anytime” category.
Generation X:
They are the freedom lover and direct. They want the result immediately. They want structure and direction on the task given to them. You have to give them the task which need immediate results and a leader as they love to be a leader. They try to maintain their work and life balance. Do not try to call them after work time.
Generation Y:
These generation people feel more pressure than their older colleagues as they don’t prefer to spend more time in the workplace. They can juggle many projects at one time as they are skilled multitasking. So, you have to choose these category people to handle multitasking work. They stay focused in the team work so better to choose these people in teamwork.
As a common solution, companies should concentrate more on issues of ethical culture during the orientation of new employees, which should mitigate their feeling of not knowing much about how to act within the culture of their