1.3 Part of my role in the workplace is to improve and grow the business and to do this i have implemented some changes as to how its run, unfortunately that comes with barriers from predominantly a female environment. This in turn caused a barrier between myself and the staff as they felt it seemed like they didn’t trust me and would not speak to me for the first few weeks. From this i felt that some female members of staff didn’t like either the changes or taking what i had to say on board so firstly i had to break the communication barrier and by doing this i would talk to them by using lay mans terms as opposed to professional terminology which also worked both ways. This made it easier for all parties involved and i felt that we were all as one instead of me being the manager and from that the male/female divide was broken. When some changes came into effect there was some resistance to change and ill feeling was shown but i avoided this by sitting them down 1 by 1 to explain my thoughts and where we were trying to take the company. I also found barriers with service users as i was inexperienced with elderly people and found as they were either losing their hearing/sight or both that what i was saying had to be said louder slower and clearer and not how i would normally speak. I also had to make sure that i didn’t upset or cause offence to persons from different backgrounds and respect their culture. This is another reason why i went out to the service users to introduce myself as explained in 1.1. Another issue was communication between the management as i am the newbie other managers it seemed thought i needed to not know but by constant insistence and asking questions i am now in the loop more and am getting an idea of who is who and what personalities have each carer/service user.