Employee Attributes

Task 1

Rainbow Light is a small charity that supports clients who have problems with their sight and need help in using ICT. Rainbow Light employs 5 full time staff but relies on volunteers to carry out a lot of the work with clients. Some volunteers help to create ‘talking books’ which are saved on CD and then loaned to clients. Others visit the clients and show them how to load and listen to the CDs.

The managers’ role involves managing a team of volunteers, recruiting new volunteers, keeping staff up to date with IT and ensuring that staffs are able to communicate with clients using IT. She maintains a database of clients and a schedule for volunteers.
Members of staff and volunteers are responsible to the Manager of Rainbow Light.
This is why it is important for the Rainbow charity’s members of staff to understand the personal qualities required to meet the job specification.

Specific

You will need a certain qualification like BTEC National Diploma.
If employed here we would like you to install software and hardware into the computer you will be using. With the software we would like you to put a Narrator in Microsoft Word books and documents, make copies of the saved books and documents that you have added to the Narrator. On the 3/6/2013 we would like you to demonstrate to the clients how to use the software that you have install into your book and document. You will need to keep a note of your day with your clients, put it in your database with the clients contact details, keep your volunteer’s details and have it updated at the end of every month. You will need to keep a record of the book that you lend to you clients. Use the blog to keep us informed of your work and keeps your information updated.

General

 As a Team player we would like our staff to be open-minded with people, to share and receive information and to find a way to reach an agreement about decisions that have to be made.
It is important to be able to work well with others when working in a team and to know when to ask them questions for example, if they want you to read or set up software.

Audience
Use of Technology
Change of intonation
Question and Answer





Task 2

Interpersonal skills

For communication to happen, you will need the minimum of two people to be involved. A person expresses a message through words, this is a life skill that we use every day to communicate and interact with other people, both individually and in groups. Interpersonal skills include not only how we communicate with others, but also our confidence and our ability to listen and understand. Problem solving, decision making and personal management skills are also considered interpersonal skills.



General

It is important that you have good communication skill because in a job you will be working with others as part of a team. You may need to show people how to do things. Clients may be dependant on you to lead them through their work

The Training day is about the Effective Communication skills. The topics will include such things as General Communication, Internal skills and how to communicate in writing.
We will address Barriers to Communication and how to reduce the Impact of Barriers.
With general communication skills we are trying to modulate the voice to help people that would have bad hearing or eye sight. We have trained staff who can correct the software and check there accuracy of information before giving it out to people who can use the computer to help themselves.

The Interpersonal skills that you will need are communication skills to enable you to converse with the people your are helping. Listening skills because you need to listen to what the person is saying to you so you know what you can do to help.  Being able to work in a group, is important as the Rainbow Charity also run group sessions for clients and you will need to be able to relate to more than one person at a time.

With Communicate in writing you need to write specific information because this structure will help you to express yourself more clearly to the person you are helping on a one to one basis. Writing in a style that is appropriate to the person you are helping. Providing only the information and detail they will need. Using the recommend size of the print they will require. You will need to have a checklist for the person you are helping and a layout that is clear and easy to follow for you if you need to read it for the client.


Task 3

Barriers to Communication

Cultural Barriers include adapting to the behaviour of a group’s Religious beliefs, Body language or Social habits. An example of Cultural Barriers in a business may relate to the company’s Customer preference for Packaging.

General

Language

Barriers Communication is interacting with those who can speak other languages, I helps to be aware of some common barriers chat.
You can overcome cultural barriers by respecting other people’s body language when you are talking, try and stand tall and be confident and smile. To overcome cultural barriers in the business situation you need to start by looking at what the person requires. Once you know what you should be doing or promoting, it is easier to make a plan to change the current situation and overcome barriers.

Interpersonal barriers

Verbal communication

When it come to verbal communication if there are any barriers they could be quite hard to over come. The barriers would be disabilities such a hearing disability’s or some sort of disability that means that the person might not understand what you are trying to say. Ways around this would be to try and put it in the most simple of terms. To get around people with hearing difficulties one way would be to learn sing language or if the person knows how to lip read you may just need to speak more slowly and will not need sing language.  It neither of these is an option you might have to write it down.

Another barrier could be that the person just does not understand what you are trying to say because of lack of knowledge e.g. if you are talking to someone about n advanced level subject and they don’t know what any of it means. The language is too complicated for them. A way around this would be to try and put it into simpler terms that they understand. Explaining what some things mean could help them understand and going over things they didn’t understand.

Written communication
 

E mails

When it comes to emails there is formal and informal way to communicate. With each come different kinds of barriers. In formal e-mails there could be difficulty understanding someone’s use of slang words. An easy way to get round this would be to email them back asking them not to use slang or ask them what it means. With informal emailing there tends to be a lot of abbreviations used e.g. nab means no bother or try means talk to you later, which no everyone will understand.

Formal e- mailing is different as there should be no slang words or abbreviations. There may be long and confusing words or phrases used and it’s fixed the same way as the slang, just to e-mail them back asking them to explain themselves.

There are also problems if a user or business is trying to send an e mail to lots of people and it fails to send. This is a very big problem as it won’t tell you it has failed to send for sometime after it has been sent.  A way to get around this would be to resend it but this can be time consuming as the user has to write it again. It tells them that it has failed to send then they will have to keep trying to resend the email till it eventually does send. Another problem with sending emails is that they are limited to how much you can send. There are only a limited number of users you can send to through an email. A way round this is to send it in multiple e-mails but this is also time consuming and annoying to do.