If 55% of the impact of a communication is determined by the visual aspects, how do staff members who work with our customers on the phone build trust and confidence in our products and services?  Only 7% of the impact of their communication  is the actual words, the content or the verbal message. Yet that is what we spend so much time carefully crafting!  

For phone personnel that makes that 38% impact of voice quality very, very important. Voice quality includes tone, softness or loudness, accents, grammar, volume, tempo, rhythm, inflections–in other words how we say it.  These figures come from a study done in 1983 by Dr. Albert Mehrabian of UCLA.  

It makes sense to spend some of our training time for 

[Read more →]

Tags: Communication, Management Skills, New Employees, Performance Expectations, Training, Coaching by Norma Smith Davis
1 Comment »

From a new employee’s perspective your organization might resemble Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice fell down a hole and encountered a world with strange new rules and an assortment of weird characters. 

Does your work place have any characters like these from Wonderland?   

·      The White Rabbit always running around stressed and harried saying things like, “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date, no time to say hello, goodbye, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late”.

·      The Queen of Hearts, the ruler in Wonderland.  She is severe, dominating, childishly cruel and always screaming and yelling at her subjects, “Off with their heads!”

·      The King of Hearts who is ineffectual, but often quotes the rules. He does however undo some of the Queen’s cruel sentences. 

·      The Cheshire Cat who

[Read more →]

Tags: New Employees by Norma Smith Davis
No Comments »