Nonverbal Communication in Business

Communication is an essential day-to-day component in business. Act of imparting or interchanging thoughts, opinions, or information without the use of spoken words are considered nonverbal communications in business.

How important is nonverbal communication in business communication from a person’s point of view and a business entity point of view?

Nonverbal Communication in Business

Nonverbal communication in business is used in marketing research as a key variable to determine consumers’ attitudes, values, and beliefs regarding a certain product or service.

For example, an observer watching a focus group will pay special attention to the nonverbal cues of group interaction, such as body language, facial expressions, and eye contact, to identify group members’ true feelings about an issue.

The most common element in nonverbal communication in business are
* eye contact
* gestures
* movement
* posture
* position
* personal space
* paralanguage
* expression
* gesture
* touch
* locomotion
* pacing
* adornment
* context
* physiologic responses, and
* written communication (such as proper business letter format and sample letter of cancellation of business contract)

Why nonverbal communication in business is important ? Because people can lie, misrepresent or mislead you with their words.

However, since nonverbal language represents over 50% of our total message, mastering the language of non verbal communication will have an impact on our outcomes, because the nonverbal message will always be more a more accurate representation of the person’s feelings, attitudes or beliefs.

The New Nonverbal Communication in Business

With the advance of technology and a more competitive business environment in today’s world, from a general point of view, nonverbal communication in business could add in the business activities that involves the communication between the business and the public.

3 major nonverbal communication in business that involves the entire business entity and the public are:

1. Social Media Network
With the popular and widely used social media network such as facebook and twitter, businesses can now communicate direct with their customers, fans and even the public leveraging the convenience of the internet and the low cost of maintaining the communication channel.

2. Advertising and Promotion
Conventional advertising and promotion channel is a one way medium. However, the internet and rich media experience that is coming into both the internet and the mobile medium will enable businesses to communicate with their customer, DIRECTLY. Through some innovative promotional activities such as sms survey (reply sms and get paid method etc), businesses can communicate with their customer with a few short messages or even interactive multimedia messages, gathering the overall feedback and response from the mass market.

3. Corporate Social Responsibilities
With involvements in corporate social responsibilities projects such as helping the disabled or caring for the environment etc social responsible activities, businesses can convey the message to their customers about the things the business does care, other than profit making itself. By receiving supportive feedback and involvement from the customer in these CSR related activities of projects, buisnesses are able to interact and get more valuable and personal feed back from the customers or the public. This is another win-win situation brought by CSR form of nonverbal communications in business.

As a summary, we had looked at nonverbal communication in business from a business person point of view and a business as an entity point of view.

It could be summarized that nonverbal communication in business is the communication without the use of spoken language, which includes gestures, facial expressions, and body language, as well as unspoken understandings and presuppositions, and cultural and environmental conditions that may affect any encounter between people.

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