Communication is oxygen for any organization. Without it, day-to-day tasks are harder to coordinate. Misunderstandings also flare up often when teammates aren’t clear about their needs or expectations. Ultimately, a lack of communication in the workplace derails productivity, causes goals misalignment, and severs employee engagement.
According to Grammarly’s 2022 State of Business Communication Report, businesses lose an estimated 7.47 hours per employee per week due to poor communication. The report says: “For the average full-time knowledge worker on their team, who makes an estimated salary of $66,976, the wasted 7.47 hours each week amounts to a sunk cost of $12,506 per employee per year.”
When communication gaps appear, isolated teams often don’t spot the growing fissures until major breakdowns erupt across the organization. But by establishing intentional channels early and addressing issues promptly, leaders can preserve alignment and morale even as companies scale rapidly. In this article, we will explore common consequences of poor workplace communication. We’ll also talk about how to enhance transparency and cohesion across teams.
The Consequences of Lack of Communication in the Workplace
Communication gaps in a workplace undermine its success. Here’s a closer look at some of the common repercussions and how to address them.
Breakdown in Team Collaboration
Bringing ideas together, coordinating on tasks, and sharing information results in better outputs. If team members don’t communicate well, it’s easy for them to forget the main goals and how their work fits into the bigger plan. Workers tend to develop tunnel vision and focus on their own objectives and KPIs without thinking of everyone else’s.
When silos emerge, vital context falls through the cracks. This causes ambiguities, duplicated work, and breakdowns in critical hand-offs between groups. Consider a technology company where the customer support team operates in isolation from the software development team. The customer support team receives numerous queries about a specific software feature that seems to be causing issues for users. However, due to the lack of communication between the teams, the vital context about recent software updates, bug fixes, and anticipated user concerns falls through the cracks.
As a result, the customer support team responds to these queries with outdated information or incomplete solutions, leading to ambiguities and frustration among users. Simultaneously, the software development team is unaware of the recurring issues reported by customers, as there is no feedback loop in place.
This lack of collaboration results in duplicated work, as the customer support team may document and escalate issues that have already been addressed by the development team. When it’s time to release a new software update, there’s a breakdown in the critical hand-off between the teams, as the customer support team is not adequately informed about the changes.
How to Prevent Collaboration Breakdown
- Implement a rotating team member program where employees spend set periods working in different departments. These cross-functional exposures shatter barriers and build relationships.
- Foster a culture of information sharing by designating or building a digital space for housing documents related to collaborative projects. Whether via cloud storage, wikis, or project management software, centralized access ensures context reaches all players and prevents duplication of efforts.
Plummeting Employee Morale
Lack of communication in the workplace manifests in more than just process issues – it takes a real toll on people too. When employees feel out of the loop around company vision, challenges, and wins, uncertainty breeds. People start questioning their value and importance, negatively impacting engagement, motivation, job satisfaction, and trust in leadership.
For example, when objectives seem to shift without explanation or opportunities to offer input constantly, workers feel whiplashed rather than centered by a stable north star goal. Or opaque decision-making processes make them more like interchangeable cogs than valued collaborators.
Boosting Employee Morale
- Conduct regular pulse “morale check” surveys to solicit input across all company levels. Track trends over time, dig into gaps in satisfaction scores, and address underlying communication issues.
- Establish a peer-to-peer recognition program allowing employees to acknowledge teammates for achievements big and small publicly. This fosters a culture where accomplishments get visibility and appreciation.
Identifying Signs of Poor Communication in a Team
It’s critical to catch communication problems early before they spiral into major collaboration issues or goal misalignment across teams. Be on the lookout for these common red flags:
Siloed Workflows
When communication is poor, teams often operate in isolated bubbles rather than coordinating efforts across departments. Groups focus narrowly on their own tactical deliverables without visibility into the bigger picture.
For example, the product team might forge ahead to build a feature based on their roadmap without looping in other groups that need to support the launch. Sales enablement remains blindsided about how to position the new capability. Customer success scrambles to answer questions without training materials. What could have been an integrated rollout turns into a fragmented mess.
This kind of tunnel vision prioritizes an immediate team’s needs over broader organizational initiatives requiring cross-functional choreography. Misalignment stems from a lack of insight into downstream activities outside one’s immediate domain.
Preventing Siloed Teams
- Foster understanding and connections between groups through regular cross-departmental working sessions – don’t just collaborate with the usual suspects. Joint brainstorms, problem-solving workshops, lunch-and-learns, and more help teams develop empathy for challenges faced across the business.
- Consider rotating select members between departments for stints of a few months when possible. Short-term embedded assignments create bonds between teams, enrich perspectives, and prevent future misalignments down the road.
Misaligned Priorities
Another byproduct of poor communication are mismatched priorities and interpretations of success across different departments. Rather than laddering up to a unified vision, isolated groups can fail to calibrate around contradictory or incongruous measures of progress.
For example, the sales team might laser focus on increasing new business volume month-over-month, while the customer success team obsesses about preserving near perfect retention rates. Those objectives can clash without thoughtful coordination – progress stalls when teams row their oars in different directions.
Remedying Goal Misalignment
- Institute quarterly goal-setting and strategy workshops at the leadership level to thoughtfully cascade priorities into well-aligned objectives across the organization. Follow up these alignment summits with regular check-ins to ensure messaging permeates through the ranks.
- Complement top-down goal setting with increased transparency into OKRs across the business. A visual display of connections between team goals clarifies interdependencies and overarching initiatives for everyone.
Improve Communication in Your Workplace
Establishing healthy communication flows is no small feat, but it pays compounding dividends in the form of seamless collaboration, aligned priorities, engaged teams, innovation, and bottom lines.
So, are you ready to transform team communication at your company?
Effective communication is the foundation for success, yet it requires conscious effort to implement. Here are proven techniques to connect people, unify workflows, and align priorities across your startup or small business.
Assess Current Communication Gaps
Implementing impactful, long-lasting changes means deeply understanding current communication gaps and pain points. Examine qualitative and quantitative data across a few approaches:
- Conduct an anonymous 15-question company-wide survey to gather input around communication preferences, challenges, commonly used tools and more. Make sure it won’t take respondents longer than 5-7 minutes to complete the survey. Doing this will encourage high response rates. Promote it over a week through multiple channels like email, Slack, internal newsletters, and posters. Consider using a simple ranked scale to rate the effectiveness of existing communication methods. Leave space for open-ended feedback. Offer a small incentive by picking one randomly completed survey for a gift card.
- Conduct structured interviews with at least 6 team leaders across departments of varying sizes and functions. Standardize the line of questioning but encourage open dialog beyond the script as well. Inquire about estimated weekly hours spent in meetings, frequency of communication delays/bottlenecks impacting their team, tools they find most effective for coordination, places they see room for improvement and more. Document the 30-minute conversations with call summaries internally afterwards.
- Review project post-mortems and retrospectives from the past 6 months. Dig through notes and presentations for recurring themes around what communication methods led to alignment or misalignment during launches, campaigns and other cross-functional initiatives. Note if certain platforms, meeting rhythms or unclear leadership contributed to breakdowns.
- Analyze usage analytics across current admin-level reporting for enterprise communication platforms like email tools, chat tools, and conferencing accounts for at least a quarter. Where do you see spikes in adoption and interaction? How aligned is that with company-wide communication satisfaction scores, if those exist? What usage patterns indicate a mismatch between intent and actual staff traction?
Establish Clear Communication Channels
Strategically choose communication channels based on message and audience.
For company-wide announcements, email is optimal for broadly sharing news like new policies, event invites, personnel changes and wins. Ensure all company distribution lists are up to date.
When discussing confidential or sensitive topics, use private channels within collaboration hubs. Restricting access to key players rather than blasting this information on open email chains. For example, you could create a Slack channel allowing leadership to debate growth options.
Meanwhile, in collaboration and problem-solving, use chat and instant messaging. Maintain real-time (or near real-time) dialogue while looping in stakeholders via mentions.
Consider dedicated channels around mission-critical topics like product launches, marketing campaigns, and initiatives. This prevents key updates from being buried across disjointed email threads. For example, have #newpayrollapp channel for the team orchestrating an HR software rollout.
And don’t forget the “watercooler” channel for fun banter and camaraderie building. Humanizing interactions cultivate social bonds between coworkers.
Foster a Culture of Openness
Leaders should go beyond just infrastructure and actively cultivate norms around transparency in their startups. Make sure staff know managers have an open-door policy to discuss concerns one-on-one. Host no-agenda “Ask Me Anything” sessions that give employees the chance to have candid conversations with leadership.
Anonymity can also help lubricate feedback channels. Install an anonymous suggestion box for people to voice concerns judgement-free. Send periodic anonymous pulse surveys to gauge job satisfaction, communication effectiveness and other metrics.
Town hall-style meetings let leaders update staff and field questions in an open public setting on a regular basis, even if there are no hot issues. The consistency demonstrates a commitment to dialog.
Remedying lack of communication in the workplace is only half the battle. You also need to cultivate an environment where people feel psychologically safe to engage in transparent and constructive dialog. Here are some ideas:
Lead by Example
For a culture of openness to flourish, it must start from the top. Leadership needs to model the kinds of communication and transparency they want to see.
- Hold regular AMAs for employees to submit anonymous questions to leadership
- Send candid company-wide updates even during challenging times
- Admit mistakes publicly; analyze what went wrong
- Encourage constructive debate; avoid shutting down dissent
Create Safe Spaces
Employees will only open up if psychologically safe spaces exist for transparency without repercussions. In contrast, highly critical managers who get defensive about points for improvement will not inspire people to share what’s on their mind. Here are some things you can do to start building a safe space for employees to tell you what’s on their mind:
- Anonymize certain discussions on HR violation reporting ethics concerns through third-party managed hotlines
- Send quarterly anonymous pulse surveys gauging communication effectiveness
- Install secure physical/digital suggestion boxes for confidential input
Decentralize Access
Promote visibility by ensuring context reaches beyond the C-suite or the inner circle. It’s tough to lead people who don’t relate with your vision, so make an effort to make it more visible. Here are ways that top-level leaders can bring their vision to the company:
- Grant universal access to strategic documents beyond top-down summaries
- Record all hands, sales meetings, and the like, allowing asynchronous consumption
- Create internal wiki pages explaining key initiatives, products, policies, etc.
Listen Actively
One of the best things a manager can do for an employee is to listen to them. But active listening is a difficult skill to master. Often, business leaders find themselves hard pressed to really pay attention to the details. However, listening to your team will help them trust you more. Here are some ways you can help yourself develop active listening:
- Host skip-level meetings for managers to gather direct feedback from other teams
- Allow employees time to speak first at Q&As before leadership does
- Discuss decisions, not just final outcomes, to bring people along the journey
Incentivize Participation
Building a culture of communication will be easier if you reinforce it and reward teammates who actively work toward it. The first thing you can do is to acknowledge people’s courage when they do speak up, especially during turbulent times. It’s not always easy asserting oneself as an employee. So, it’s good to acknowledge it when people attempt to do so.
The goal is to create an ecosystem where people are intrinsically motivated to communicate openly, not coerced through directives alone.
Implement Regular Check-Ins
Schedule one-on-one and team-wide check-ins to enable multidirectional communication flows. Quick stand-up meetings at the start of each week or sprint give individuals a chance to update colleagues on progress, flag roadblocks, and realign on the next steps.
In addition, more in-depth reviews on a monthly or quarterly basis create space to discuss accomplishments, challenges, goals and professional development. This layered cadence of communication nurtures trust and supports workforce planning.
Utilize Technology for Enhanced Communication
With today’s digital collaboration tools, location becomes irrelevant. Lack of communication in the workplace cannot be blamed on teammates being distributed or location independent. Teams can communicate in real-time regardless of whether they are working in a shared office or distributed across the globe. Encourage employees to provide transparent workstream visibility via shared cloud documents and project management platforms.
Instant messaging enables quick questions without tedious email chains that disrupt focus. Consider deploying always-on video conferencing systems to connect distributed staff when possible.
Make Lack of Communication in the Workplace a Thing of the Past
Poor workplace communication inflicts severe consequences, from delayed projects due to misalignment all the way to disgruntled staff and high turnover resulting from opaque decision-making.
However, by prioritizing transparent leadership, implementing suggested communication channels, and incentivizing participation, organizations can transform dialog. When people feel empowered to speak freely without repercussions, information flows more rapidly. Teams self-synchronize with context. Strategies get refined through constructive debate. And employees feel valued through access, not just top-down proclamations.
Stay tuned for more on productivity and fostering transparent communication across your company. In upcoming articles, we’ll dive deeper into specific formats like all-hands meetings, skip-level one-on-ones, setting communication KPIs and more. With continued effort, lack of communication in the workplace will soon be a relic of the past at your company.
Aya is Wing Assistant’s blog manager. When she’s not wrangling content briefs, editing article drafts and handling on-page SEO, she is crafting messages for Wing’s other communication materials. Aya writes about SaaS startups, marketing for startups, search engine optimization, and pop culture.
