Reengineering effective communication between management and employees : a case of the energy department at City of Ekurhuleni

Abstract: City of Ekurhuleni (CoE), one of the metropolitan municipalities in Gauteng has a vision of creating a smart, creative and developmental city. Fundamental to achieving this vision is effective communication, which has been impeded by a number of factors. Effective communication can help an organisation to build solid foundation within its most important resources: human resources. This in turn can improve trust between management and employees, improve mutual respect and better understanding in the organisation, create an environment fertile for learning and development and achieve set goals as a team. This study therefore sets to explore the communication barriers in the energy department of the CoE, which is one of the four largest metropolitan municipalities in South Africa. The study seeks to generate an understanding of barriers of communication from the perspective and experience of both workers and managers and the intersection of these viewpoints. Effective communication is an essential ingredient to organisational success. Yet there often exists a multiplicity of barriers of communication that collectively work to impede effective exchange of information and mutual understanding between parties of a communication exchange – managerial leadership and operational level employees, and indeed within each of the two groups above. Using a qualitative method of enquiry, the current study found that communication in the energy department of the CoE is viewed as very important, and hence the majority of managers sees communication as partially effective, middle managers and lower level employees sees communication as ineffective. Importantly none of the lower level employees sees it as effective due to issue of access to communication resources and barriers such as gender and language amongst others.M.Tech. (Operations Management