Final Project Submission: Summary of Findings

Milestone Three: Building Common Ground

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Building Open Ground: Open-ended Questions

Open-ended is essential in eliciting information from a person. In this section, some of the open-ended questions that were used by the interviewer to get information will be analyzed. To begin with, the open-ended questions that were used were essential in obtaining information. Through the use of open-ended questions, a person answers a question using any information that is fit to be an answer. That indicates that more information is elicited from the use of open-ended questions rather than closed questions.

One of the instances that the interviewer uses open-ended questions is during the interview with Kareem. The interviewer asks Kareem, “What about Thomas? Did he ever give you any feedback?. The use of open-ended questions enables Kareem to express himself about his interaction with Thomas and the observations that he made. He indicates that Thomas is focused on the customer service reps and he is always watching them. He indicated that Thomas focused on the productivity of the employees and his inability to increase his number of calls due to the many breaks that he took throughout the day.

Building Common Ground: Summarized Key Ideas

In this section, the areas in which the interviewer summarized the key ideas thus describing the significance of each occurrence in the communication in the interview will be identified. One of the instances that the interviewer summarizes information is during the interview with Thomas. When the interviewer asks Thomas about Kareem, he does not recall who Kareem was. Thus, the interviewer summarizes information about Kareem that would enable Thomas to recall who he was. He indicates that Kareem was an employee that worked in the call center for eight months and he was terminated three weeks before the interview and he had hired an attorney to sue Thomas for wrongful termination based on religious discrimination.

At the beginning of each interview, the ER rep also summarizes what the interview is about to all the interviewees. He thanks each of them for availing themselves of the interview and expresses his expectations of maintaining the information confidential and receiving truthful information.

Building Common Ground: Impact and Intent

The impact of Kareem’s actions was at odds with his intent. According to Kareem, he loved his job and he did it to the best that he could. That is evident due to the good customer relationships that he had with the customers that called him. He cared about his customers and ensuring that all their issues were solved amicably. Kareem indicates that. “I really loved my job and thought I was doing a good job; I was really caught off-guard.” That shows that he had pure intentions in his job. Kareem also indicated that he was a Muslim and as a Muslim one is required to pray severally during the day. He indicates that he should pray five times as it is part of his faith. Thus, since he did not want any special treatment or did not want to be questioned by anyone, he would sneak and go and pray.

Kareem’s behavior had an impact on his productivity. Due to the many breaks that he took, the number of calls that he received reduced significantly. That is because one needs to devote more time to take more calls. However, he did not have an intention to have his calls reduce as they did as he was working hard at the same time balancing with his faith requirements.

Building Common Ground: Practices

Several methods may be used to rebuild the trust in the department. One of the ways that may be used to rebuild trust and also promote conflict resolution in the department is promoting effective communication. It is evident that the communication practices in the department are poor. Through the promotion of effective communication, the challenges that are faced in the department will be aired out thus enabling effective mitigation strategies to be formulated (Katz et al., 2020). Thus, the heads of the departments should speak to the employees if they identify any activities that are not going as desired and vice versa.

The departments should also formulate effective policies and procedures that should be followed by all the employees. Thus, at the time of the recruitment, the employees should be asked to go through the policies and procedures to ensure that they will fit into the working environment at the department (Rubenstein, 2018). That will minimize the conflict that is witnessed in the department as well as promotes the desired level of productivity. The conflicts identified in the department should not be ignored. If any conflict is identified, it should be dealt with to ensure that there are not unknown future consequences.

References

Katz, N. H., Lawyer, J. W., Sweedler, M., Tokar, P., & Sossa, K. J. (2020). Communication and conflict resolution skills. Kendall Hunt Publishing.

Rubenstein, R. E. (2018). Conflict resolution and the structural sources of conflict. In Conflict Resolution: Dynamics, Process and Structure (pp. 173-195). Routledge.