When you are communicating to your team, you need to think about what they hear, not just what you mean. What you THINK you are saying, and what you are ACTUALLY saying, may be two different things. All too often, we know in our minds what we really mean, but that does not get communicated to others around us, and since they aren’t mindreaders, then miscommunication happens. Guess what? That’s not good.
A recent article pointed out the problems of poor communication in the workplace. (don’t let the article’s title fool you; though it seems to be only about HR, that’s because it’s from an HR magazine, but the concepts still apply to everyone)
Research done about 10 years ago suggests the following pain points, and their associated costs in time. Figure out what percentage of an individual’s working time is wasted, and then take that as a percentage of their salary, and you begin to see the huge costs:
68% of respondents stated that they experience difficulty coordinating communications between team members, which affects a team’s ability to respond quickly to time sensitive customer requests. Further, they spend an average of 3.7 hours per week attempting to coordinate communications between team members, hindering a team’s efficiency in moving towards goals and deadlines.
Waiting for Information
68% of all respondents experience work delays while waiting for information from others that they have attempted to reach live multiple times using multiple methods. The average delay is 3.5 hours per week per knowledge worker. This is a considerable amount of time to spend before making progress on a par-ticular task, which could negatively affect critical business processes.
Unwanted Communications
Unwanted communications, including low-priority calls and voicemail, is the pain point most frequently experienced by the survey group. 77% of respondents cited spending two or more hours per week dealing with unwanted communications. These interruptions create distractions and disrupt workflow, leading to lower productivity and missed deadlines.
Customer Complaints
74% of all respondents stated that they spend, on average, 3.3 hours per week dealing with negative comments or complaints from customers, specifically because the customer was unable to reach them in a timely fashion. While an 8% loss in productivity is itself significant, the true cost of customer dissatisfaction is surely much greater.
Barriers to Collaboration
61% of respondents find difficulty in establishing collaboration sessions with colleagues. Further, they spend an average of 3.3 hours per week attempting to address issues of inaccessibility, or other communication-tool based lack of full collaboration with colleagues.
As noted, this study was done 10 years ago, so look around your workplace and ask yourself: have we overcome these problems in the last 10 years, or has our increasing reliance on personal devices made them even worse? It could go either way.
There’s a special challenge when working in a multi-lingual environment. Even if you’re all communicating in English, for example, if English is not everyone’s first language you need to be extra careful about your word choice and about avoiding mistakes. A typo in an email or text may still be understandable by someone with native language skills, but not so understandable by someone who studied the right way to speak rather than the wrong ways.
The point is, however you communicate with your team — by text, email, face-to-face speech, or smoke signals — you need to be careful to communicate what you really mean, and they need to know it’s ok to ask for clarification when they aren’t sure. Otherwise, you can cost yourself a lot of frustration, and maybe a lot of money, too.