Development Cooperation Handbook/Guidelines/How to establish a healthy communication climate

Communication Climate is the atmosphere of a team or an organization. More specifically, climate is the atmosphere of supportiveness or defensiveness that people feel within an organization.

According to communication scholar, W. Charles Redding the communication climate in any organization is composed of five components. You can create a positive organizational and communication climate through:


 * Supportiveness: To build a supportive communication climate you need to send messages that acknowledge effort, creativity, and teamwork. A supportive communication climate allows for a better exchange of information and a more positive work environment.
 * Participative Decision Making: To create a positive communication climate you need to engage people in the decision making process. You can do this by having employees participate in identifying and solving problems that affect them and their working conditions.  Participative decision-making means that you assist your employees in setting standards and goals for the work they do.
 * Trust: Before there can be effective employee communication, there must be a climate of trust (the feeling that another’s motives are what he or she says they are). An employee trusts in superiors when they have confidence in the superior’s intentions and motives, when the superior has proven to keep his or her word, when they are sincere not only in their dealings with themselves but with other people, and when the employees are not afraid that they will be met with retaliation for supplying negative information. . See Building a Climate of Trust ; Communicating Credibility; Behaviors that Endanger Trust; Factors that may block the flow of information
 * Openness: Openness refers to the candid disclosure of information, particularly negative information and the sharing of feelings and opinions regarding the organization and its activities. Open communication in terms of expressing your ideas and feelings through verbal channels in organizations has led to higher production and better performance within the organization. However, simply “showing” feelings and not discussing them openly, is viewed as dysfunctional and can be very counter productive. See Encouraging Openness
 * Emphasis on High Quality Goals: Placing importance on high quality and high performance goals has to do with the content of the communication that you have with your employees. Such an emphasis is the most important focus of the content of your messages to your employees.  It is not enough to be a nice manager and create a nice environment in which to communicate and work.  You must also communicate a sense of challenge to your employees.

Another important elements of the communication climate are
 * the organization leading ethics
 * the approach towards employee empowerment, that is a necessary element of organizational learning and a prerequisite to an organization becoming a learning organization. learning organization"

---

A basic assumption of this manual is that the best managerial style for a development aid organization is of designing and managing itself and its culture in such a way as to make itself : The combination of these three factors the nurturing of a communication climate such as to work strategically, collaboratively and cost-effectively, being innovative and accountable.
 * a projectized organization;
 * a learning organization
 * an employee empowering organization.