For any organisation, effective communication is essential to your team, division and organisation's productiveness and success.
So, why is poor communication so common? We tend think about poor communication as a momentary setback. However, poor communication disrupts business on a fundamental level.
The five big costs of communication failure in the workplace:
1. Failure of focus: In an organisation where communication is not prioritised, meetings are inefficient and ineffective, little gets accomplished and so more meetings get scheduled, leaving team members feeling overbooked, under-informed and potentially unhappy.
2. Lack of purpose: The inability to communicate well on a daily basis can be symptomatic of a larger communication disruption. If an organisation can’t communicate its vision, then employees may be lacking direction and purpose.
3. Loss of innovation: When it comes to advancing new ideas within an organisation, ineffective communication between employees has an accumulative effect, across multiple projects, resulting in an organisation that is stagnating.
4. Plunge in morale: Unhappy employees spells reduced engagement, which we know affects organisations in costly areas like productivity and retention.
5. Loss of credibility: Without effective communication both individuals and organisations face a loss in credibility. For individuals, your ability to effectively accomplish your goals is effected. For organisations everything from sales growth to reputation is at stake.
What is the solution?
Organisations who proactively seek to equip their employees' with advanced communication skills have found that in doing so they not only support individual's success within the organisation, but the organisation's success as a whole.
Planning to address specific communication challenges within an organisation requires change. An assessment of the difficulty and degree of change required, as well as what obstacles are faced in implementing that change. Navigating times of change and addressing specific challenges like communication can be difficult, but it's a common issue that so many organisations have overcome, and it need not be so costly.