Communication at Work

In my work at the MD Small Business Development Center, I recall that there were countless challenges I faced in helping entrepreneurs achieve their goals. When it comes to about issues regarding communication however, I always think about my team of undergraduate interns. At the MD SBDC, senior staff members always relied heavily on the help of undergraduates for the majority of day-to-day tasks. In fact, this is where I started; as an undergraduate intern responsible for various tasks in the office. After graduating from college, I decided to continue working for the MD SBDC as a Junior Counselor. One of my new responsibilities in this position would be to manage a team of three undergraduate interns.

What a nightmare! As soon as I started in my new position, I immediately realized why my supervisor wanted me to manage the undergrad interns. Communication was horrible! In the first two or three weeks, I would only communicate with my interns when they were in the office (usually two or three days per week). Other than that, they would never answer their phones or return voicemails, and they rarely returned emails.

I quickly realized what was going on. The first part of the problem was that the interns felt no obligation to communicate after office hours. This is because each intern was only required to work 150 hours for the entire semester as required by their classes. Basically, once each one reached 10 hours for the week, they would completely put the internship on the backburner. This was a major problem because the interns would inevitably delay others by being unreachable. Additionally, senior staff members didn’t have the time or resources to babysit the interns. As a result, the interns were usually given extremely menial tasks; far more simplistic than what they were capable of accomplishing.

At any rate, my first task as a Junior Counselor was really to ‘babysit’ the interns by making sure they were always doing what they were supposed to be doing. I decided to take a slightly different route by introducing a new communication system. I came up with a simple reporting form for the interns. It simply was a way for each intern to record what he or she had accomplished that day, which clients they helped and how, and what they needed to do next. The genius part of this form was that I made it part of the interns’ final reporting system on which their grades depended.

Once instituted, the change was immediately apparent. There was no longer the familiar question of “What are the interns doing… are they actually working today?”. This simple change really facilitated more effective communication throughout the office. We were able to avoid redundancy, work more efficiently, and actually put undergrad interns to work on more challenging and significant tasks.