This assessment provides an opportunity for you to gain knowledge of, and develop skills in, the use of 'critical reflection' in learning. To complete this assessment you will need to draw upon content included in Topics 1-7 of the Study Guide.

This assessment requires you to write a paper that critically reflects on a recent communication experience in your workplace, university or school. You have to choose a particular communication situation where there were some communication difficulties. This could have occurred during a meeting or an exchange with a colleague, customer or client.

You are required to critically reflect on your own communication style (both verbal and nonverbal) throughout your paper and you should draw upon academic literature (including your textbook, readings and study guide) to support your arguments. The expectation is that your paper will be well written, clearly structured and without errors.

Please include the following content:

1. An introduction
2. A brief outline of the situation
3. A critical discussion of the following – your impact on the other person(s) and their impact on you, the extent to which personal values or belief systems impacted on the effectiveness of the communication, and barriers to effective communication
4. A reflection on how you could communicate more effectively in the future and some strategies you could employ to achieve this
5. A conclusion
6. A reference list including all of the relevant sources cited in your paper (6 academic sources using Harvard style).
7. BEFORE THE DUE DATE submit your draft to the Turnitin Assessment 2 site in MySCU and read the report generated by Turnitin, carefully considering why sections of your work have been highlighted and whether you need to edit these sections
8. Edit or revise your work if necessary
9. Write a 100-word reflection on your referencing, addressing any issues you experienced or which the Turnitin report highlighted, and how you overcame these and/or what you learned from this exercise
10. Copy and paste the Turnitin Originality Report (that is, just the section that lists the percentages) at the very end of the final version of your Assessment 2 (after your reflection on your referencing, which should appear after your reference list
11. Submit your complete final Assessment 2 document to the Turnitin site in MySCU by the due date and time

Please note: it is appropriate to use the first person ('I') when writing this paper as it involves personal reflection

Communication often plays the role of a key contributor to success and efficiency in organisational operations. Accordingly, need for effective communication cannot be undermined or ignored outright as in order to effectively collaborate as a team or as stakeholders of an entity, being able to understand the others clearly is important (Roberts et al. 2014). After gaining experience of working in numerous different types of team-work scenarios, critically reflecting back on such scenarios provides a lesson to learn from mistakes that involved ineffective communication while also strengthening views on need for effective communication. In this reflective essay, I will recall a prominent workplace experience that first revealed to me the sheer importance of effective communication while also understanding how barriers to communication can easily lead to disruption of organisational communication and efficiency. After recognizing an incident of communication failure, I will also note how I would tackle a similar situation differently now or engage in deployment of problem prevention measures in communication. 

Rosenhauer (2008) explains the need for effective and clear communication in an organisation by stating that clarity in communication is the factor that brings together all the relevant parties in an organisation to work towards the same goal by understanding the requirements clearly. In a large-scale organisation, a formal communication can span across different departments and dozens of people; therefore, if the communication is unclear or gets changed at any point in the communication chain then all the people receiving message afterwards are getting inaccurate information. Inaccurate communication or lack of proper communication can easily lead to major issues in a transaction whether the transaction is between a salesman with a customer or between team-members working on a project. I observed such an incident in my workplace while working on a business project of develop a commercial retail website for a customer. In the project, our team had a total of five members and a friend of mine served as the leader of the team as well as fulfilling the role of leads manager for the team. As part of work-related responsibilities, I was given the task of writing blogs for a section of the website while another member A was the one interacting with the customer to show the customer design options for the website. One day, I sent blog pages to the website developer, and she responded back by saying that the blog section was removed from project on request of the client a week ago. Apparently, what had happened was that the client indeed has instructions to remove blog section from the website to team member A, who was showing website design to the customer. Becoming aware of the change in order, member A updated team leader about the change in order. At this point, team leader did not inform me assuming that the member A would have already informed me. Due to this failure in chain of command, I spent a week working on a section of the website that was not needed. Ultimately, this inefficiency in communication resulted in loss of company resources and time while also upsetting the morale within the team.

(Some parts of the solution has been blurred due to privacy protection policy)