Improving Business Communications

How you communicate with coworkers, management, clients, and other business professionals is as important as what you communicate. This article provides you with practical communication techniques you can use in any business setting to make your communications more effective so you can achieve your personal and business goals.

Business Communications Basics   
Communication skills. How many times have you heard that good communication skills are the key to successful business relationships? And just as often, have you wondered just what exactly this broad term refers to?

Don't worry; you're not alone. Not only can most people use a refresher course on the subject -- even those who have seemingly aced their careers can also usually identify an area that could stand some improvement. Think of the star financial analyst who can't spell, or the software engineer who barely speaks above a whisper.

Business communications is a broad topic that might seem obvious at first glance. Reading, writing, and talking -- what's so difficult about that?

But, as you will see here, there's more to it than that -- quite a bit more. For instance, are you aware of the impact your body language makes, even on the subconscious level? Believe it or not, body language "conversations" can run entirely counter to the spoken conversation going on! Think of the edge you could gain in your next important meeting if you knew how to harness the subliminal messages that are being exchanged through body language.

In fact, body language is such a broad topic in and of itself that entire books have been written about it. We can't explore it in detail here, but we'll cover a few important basics in the "Running Successful Meetings" section of this Knowledge File. You might be surprised by the big difference these tips can make.

Listening skills is another topic that might hold some surprises for you. The ability to be a good listener is regarded as one of the most important communication skills. Why? Because most people don't realize that it's just as important to show you are listening as it is to hear and understand what is being said. And since nearly 75 percent of Fortune 500 business executives rate the ability to listen as "extremely important," it's one of the easiest ways to make a good impression.

Another important and time-tested way to make an impression is with letter writing -- but whether it creates a good impression or not depends upon your writing skills. Remembering to pay attention to a few important points that can improve your letters, memos, and e-mail correspondence. In short, good communication skills can separate you from the crowd.

Now business communication basis are sorted out here, i am looking forward to reading more about successful business relationship, since i am suffering Office Politics and want to get more hints...

It seems to me that there is an urgent need to improve Enlish version of many Chinese corporate websites. Many sites were created by outsiders and corporate owners of these sites have no clue to verify accuracy.

Talking about business communication, English version of corporate websites need not only accurate translation of their products and services, but more importantly, different  and format to target potential foreign customers.

For instance, there are often a photo of "big shot" (General Manager or CEO) sitting behind desk (national banner in the front, too) with countless empty slogans in corporate introduction pages. It may work to a certain degree to the Chinese readers. But it offers no real substance but negative images to western audience. Potential foreign buyers want to know what you do, how long you have been doing it, how good you are, how many products you can offer, and etc.

In order to improve business communication, English version of business brochures, catlogues, and websites should be creative writing in English, not literal translation.

Is anyone with me or against this idea? welcome any input

Language is only for communication.

I concur. By filling their websites with irrelevant information, these companies are wasting their precious resources, or simply put, their cash is burned for nothing in return!

I know these seemingly ridiculous things all have reasons. But I will not discuss them. I only mention that keeping politically correct can be of paramount importance (overriding other concerns) in a company (particularly in China).

Skipping the politics and fast forwarding to the product pages, I feel that the webmaster needs to consider writing his products introduction in simple and clear Chinese, weeding out all unnecessary and abnormal expressions. Neat writing will be easy to read and translate. Although creative translation is appreciable, I am opposed to taking it one step further to become a general approach to translation. If web translation is a business, faithfulness will be the best point to sell.

When one has a neat product introduction page, the next is to feed it into a translation software. The result may be not as desirable, but often workable. It frees you from the daunting task of translating the bulk of the text. Now, you need only to edit the machine translated English sentences, making them readable. The amount of editing work depends on how complex the original Chinese text is and how good you want the final English text to be. It may surprise you that after proper editing, the software translation sometimes sounds better than a human translation. No kidding.