In my previous article I’ve  presented certain things about our posture, but I will continue with information about social distance, about facial expressions, about gestures, eye contact and on many other elements very important for business nonverbal communication.

Spatial distance in nonverbal communication: young managers want to know how to communicate their status, their power and control.

Sales men want to communicate the sincerity and the belief in commodities they might sale.

Those who go to interviews want to express their competence, their efficiency and their experience. The idea is that all of us want to learn to “read people as open books”, to see what it’s beyond verbal messages and why not, we want to control our nonverbal behavior for communicating more effectively.

In the above lines, you saw what the importance of body posture is but also the spatial distance speaks volumes about our business nonverbal communication.  Speakers that sit very close to their listeners, with his hands on listener’s shoulders and the eyes focused directly on those who listen, communicate differently than a speaker that sits in a corner with crossed arms and his eyes on the floor.

Similarly, an office of a manager person, placed upstairs, with huge windows, a private bar, with leather sofas, communicate in a way his social status than a few square feet of space packed the rest his team.

Spatial communication is called also proxemics, by Edward T. Hall, who was the first person that has studied the need for space among the man (60 years) and identified four regional distances:

1) The intimate (and delineates the most important area between 15 and 46 cm away from your body, where enter only that close emotionally to us: boyfriend or a husband / wife, parents, children, brothers, sisters),

2) personal area (between 46 and 122 cm, which is distance to where we are towards people that we get in it at parties, meetings, ceremonies, business meetings),

3) Social area (between 122 and 360 cm, which is the distance that we keep from those who do not know too well yet),

4) Public area (360 cm).

Social distance is that distance where are devolving the most common personal interactions, transactions, business, formal, natural. Most times, layout office furniture takes into account whether this distance and the way that we have common area furniture in a range of cultural and psychological characteristics of those who use them.

Here's an example: a company president complained that people in his team are not open to him and they don’t come in his office to communicate information within the company. How do you think he have arranged his office? All windows were inside the company, he had blinds that were always drawn, had a stately desk and a chair as portly as his office. One of the suggestions I’ve made for open channel of communication with those around him was to eliminate blinds and then to include a round table inside the office, to invite there to talk anyone who want to communicate with him. Leaving office and imposing round table taking place (most appropriate for maintaining an equal footing), he almost involuntarily made the first step towards opening the communication channel.