Subject – Effective Business Communications

Task Description

Assessment type: Individual written assessment.
Weighting: This assessment accounts for 20% of your final grade.
Due date: The assessment is due in Week 5 Wednesday 08th August 2018 at 11:55 PM AEST. There is a late deduction of one point per day after the due date.
Length: The assessment must be between 1000-1500 words in length. Two points will be deducted for assessments that are over or under by 200 words.
Cover sheet: The assessment must include a cover page that contains your name, student number, resident campus, assessment title, and lecturer and/or tutor.
Style: The assessment must be single-spaced, 11 Point; Times New Roman.
References: The assessment must include 5 academic references. You must use the APA reference style.
Other: This assessment is aimed to assess your written communication skills. Students who do not perform well will be highly recommended to consider training with Academic Learning Centre (ALC). The assessment is aimed to ensure that you have an advanced level of writing skills before you proceed into other units in the postgraduate course. The assessment will also assess the integrity of your work. Given all students will do the same assessment, plagiarism will be monitored to ensure that your submitted work is original and not purchased or copied from other students. Where assessments are found to be similar, penalties may apply in accord with University policy.
Task description: In this task, you will write a memo in response to the case study provided below. The memo must be logically structured, free of grammatical errors, professionally styled; in addition, follow the writing conventions for memos as discussed in the lecture and supporting material.
Case study: You are the CEO of Data Solutions, which is a medium sized company that sells data management software. The company is based in Brisbane and has offices in both Melbourne and Sydney. You have become aware that although the external marketing and promotions communications are effective there is a problem with the internal communication. There are three primary general problems:

1. Decisions made at the executive level are not being communicated clearly and in a timely manner to the employees.
2. For the most part supervisors and employees do not work in the same offices. Due to this situation, the supervisor to employee communication is ineffective.
3. Emails are being sent out that are unprofessional.

With these problems in mind, you undertake research in order to understand these problems more specifically and come up with logical and practical recommendations to solve these problems. As you refine your knowledge of these problems you narrow each one down to one specific issue. So for example for problem one, the issue could be that the employees do not understand why decisions are being made. For problem two, the issue could be that employees do not feel comfortable seeking work-related feedback from their supervisors. As you develop your recommendations you make sure that you clearly link the problems to the solutions (as articulated within the recommendations). Having this information you now write a memo to all of the members of the organization. You will write the memo based upon the following structure.
1) Opening

1. a) To:
2. b) From:
3. c) Date:
4. d) Subject:

2) Objectives and background

1. a) Describe the communication audit process
2. b) Specific purpose
3. c) General purpose

3) Problems

1. a) Problem one—quantitative and qualitative significance
2. b) Problem two—quantitative and qualitative significance
3. c) Problem three—quantitative and qualitative significance

4) Action steps to solve the problems

1. a) Problem one
2. b) Problem two
3. c) Problem three

5) Closing

1. a) Briefly outline a synopsis of the memo
2. b) Explain the benefit of compliance to the employee and/or organisation.
3. c) Offer assistance and provide contact details

6) References—APA style.