Workplace Challenges Impacting Your Business

Part 1: Identify Two Professional Challenges

People face several professional challenges in their workplaces every day. In my place of work, the common professional challenges that we with our staff include communication, creativity, motivation, hierarchy, and collaboration in projects.

Communication

Our employees have difficulty using different kinds of written communication. Most of their written communications lack etiquette as they often convey the wrong tone through their choice of words, prioritization of urgency, writing in CAPS, and lack of courtesy. Some even accidentally send emails with spelling, typing, and grammatical mistakes to the management and clients. Workers who cannot communicate professionally have low efficiency in their roles. According to Dan (2016), poor communication negatively impacts the trust of the management on the employees' professional capability.

Creativity

Although it is difficult to be creative all the time, some of our employees perceive creativity as the preserve of some few people in the organization. This attitude is partly due to a misconception that is a natural capability that cannot be developed. As a result, some employees hardly endeavor to try anything outside of their routine duty and prescribed roles. Similarly, each time there is a problem to be solved; some of the junior staff sit back and wait for the concerned managers to decide on how to go about it.

Motivation

Workers' morale fluctuates depending on their experiences at the place of work. Some of our employees get demoralized very easily because they are frustrated. Some people expect to be recognized or rewarded for every excellent contribution they make to the organization. Unfortunately, yet we do not have a well set out plan to motivate the workforce continuously. Nonetheless, we expect all the workers always to meet their targets. When some workers are disgruntled due to lack of motivation, they can influence the attitudes of their colleagues.

Hierarchy

Workers complain that the organization has a tall hierarchy and many red tapes that limit them from accomplishing tasks efficiently in their roles. Our organizational culture provides clearly defined management procedures but does not promote autonomy. Therefore, most workers do not own their duties as decision making involves long series of briefings and seeking chain consent. The current bureaucracy slows down projects.

Collaboration in Projects

Some workers find it challenging to collaborate with their colleagues in accomplishing a project that requires teamwork. One of the things that hinder successful cooperation is having teammates who have annoying behaviors such as nagging, laziness, bullying, and procrastination (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010). Secondly, our organization promotes diversity in its workforce as one of the core values. Therefore, teams handling all projects are selected to represent diverse backgrounds. Moreover, people who lack the skills to operate in multicultural environments must find it difficult to collaborate in our workplace (Khanna, & Lee, 2011). Lastly, our workers are biased towards different methods of creativity, so they easily disagree on how to approach issues when working in teams.

Overcoming the five professional challenges requires asking the following critical questions:

• How can we overcome weaknesses in our written communication?
• Is it possible to enhance one's capability to be creative all the time?
• How should the company handle lack of motivation to boost employee morale?
• Why do the company workers find hierarchy a serious limitation to their efficiency?
• What is the best way to collaborate with coworkers who come from diverse backgrounds and have divergent thinking patterns?

The most robust and challenging questions for me of all these are:

• How can we overcome weaknesses in our written communication?
• Is it possible to enhance one's capability to be creative all the time?

The two questions challenge me the most because they relate to issues that are within an individual's power to change. While all the other three require either making changes in the company structure and operation or the contribution of others, weakness in written communication and creativity are challenges that workers can handle on their own. The can be perfected through skill acquisition and development. Evidence from studies show that as people practice creativity and innovation, their capabilities increase.

Part 3: Results Analysis

A mind map is an interesting way to record idea because it does not only allow organization of ideas but also enhances creativity. Mind maps play a crucial role in helping me clarify my professional challenges because it helps me to demonstrate connection between things (Wheeldon, 2011). Also, with mind maps, I could not leave out any crucial information in my illustration because it reminded me of whatever was missing. Therefore, I ended up with a concise but complete illustration.

I created my mind maps in a word processor. Organizing, and clarifying factors that need to be addressed to meet your professional challenge was a fantastic experience. As soon as I put down the central ideas, which were written communication and creativity, my mind ran into very many processes and points that they could be associated with. Interestingly, I got multiple ideas at once. Even after I had finished my mind maps, I was still able to integrate more thoughts that came to me without interfering with what I had already done. Moreover, the mind maps are (Willis, & Miertschin, 2006) a great way to summarize lengthy discussions and break down the two complex concepts of written communication and creativity. As such, I was able to clarify the solutions to the challenges easily and within a short period.

I don't think I would have learned as much about the professional challenges if I had not used this tool. The mind maps enabled me to get finer details about subjects because by looking at each idea that had written, I got other related ideas. By the time I reached the end of each branch, I had nearly exhausted all the relevant ideas in the components. It widened the scope of explanations beyond what is obvious.

Mind maps can be used in many other professional or work place applications. One of the areas where it can be applied is in the management of projects that require creativity. The tool builds creativity because, with it, one idea leads to the next one. Therefore it can help one exploit all the possibilities in a given situation. Mind maps can also be used in the workplace to develop strategic plans with well-organized activities and time plans (Puccio, Mance, & Murdock, 2010). Thirdly, mind maps can be used to make presentations about nearly all kinds of ideas. Also, mind maps can help workers to encode clear and precise messages when communicating in writing. Similarly, it enables the audiences of professional presentations and written communications to understand ideas fast and remember them for a longer time.

References

Dan Trommater, D. (2016, April 5). 10 Shockingly Common Workplace Challenges Impacting Your Business. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-shockingly-common-workplace-challenges-impacting-dan/

Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2010). The Cambridge handbook of creativity. Cambridge University Press.

Khanna, T. Song., J., & Lee, K.(2011). The paradox of Samsung's rise. Harvard Business Review, 89(7/8), 142-147.

Puccio, G. J., Mance, M., & Murdock, M. C. (2010). Creative leadership: Skills that drive change. Sage Publications.

Wheeldon, J. (2011). Is a picture worth a thousand words? Using mind maps to facilitate participant recall in qualitative research. The Qualitative Report, 16(2), 509.

Willis, C. L., & Miertschin, S. L. (2006). Mind maps as active learning tools. Journal of computing sciences in colleges, 21(4), 266-272.