The business cost of poor communication at work
4 ways investing in designing effective communication systems can improve your company’s bottom line and increase your employee satisfaction
Did you know, according to SHRM, poor communication costs enterprise companies an average of $62.4 million dollars per year? I can believe it. I’ve seen the results of poor communication at all levels in my career. It can happen in startups. It can happen in non-profits. It can happen in enterprise businesses. It can happen anywhere. Between co-workers, bosses, leadership, companies and their workforce.
Imagine being a new employee or contractor. Everyone’s excited. New team, new company, new problems to solve. Early on you start to notice a communication gap that’s not being addressed. No expectations are set for you in terms of what you are to do, what you are responsible for, and who are the stakeholders that you need to build relationships with even though you’ve raised the issue.
You discover your team doesn’t have the right systems in place to help you understand your new role. No one has taken the time to set expectations for you or let you know how you will be measured or what success looks like. The team is disorganized and there isn’t a repository of past work for you to review or learn from. You have to hunt for it. Your boss leaves you alone, for days, even weeks at a time, which makes you feel like you’re not valued. When you reach out for help, the response you get is bleh. You’re left feeling anxious, unsure about the team, and battling with the internal struggle of, “did you end up in a role where you aren’t valued, appreciated, or needed?” You try your best to ramp up and adapt to the culture and your product space, but no one’s provided you with enough information to do that. Everyone seems overwhelmed or too busy to help. You keep getting passed around to all sorts of people in your effort to assimilate. While the relationship building is a plus, you feel like you’re floundering as a result of the lack of communication and a poorly designed system that hinders your ability to do your job.
Missed opportunities like this, where leaders and managers fail to impart valuable communication to their new hires, are shooting themselves in the foot. It is costing their team and company time and money. Imagine having 10 contractors on your team who are idle for 10, 15, 20 hours a week because of your team’s poor communication. Because that’s what happens when teams and organizations don’t communicate effectively with each other, especially with their new hires. It unintentionally sends the message to the new hire that they are not as integral to the team or company as they were led to believe when they were offered the job. No one wants to say anything for fear of getting fired or to have their role be seen as less inessential because then we assume that it somehow must be our fault that we aren’t able to be a productive member of the team when it’s not. It’s the existing processes and system that are causing the problem. It’s the responsibility of the management team to set their people up to win. If they don’t do that, then we need to look at why that’s happening.
I get it. Things happen. Teams grow too quickly. They don’t take the time to invest in creating a winning employee experience because it’s not viewed as important as other aspects of the business. That’s a short-sighted way to look at managing people and a way to empower your competitors who are willing to invest in creating a winning employee experience. The talent wars — especially for knowledge-based roles like UX, product, and engineering — are heating up. Experienced UX designers are in high demand and have more say in what they will or will not tolerate from the companies they work for. Companies that don’t create winning employee experiences quickly are going to lose out on top talent, which will impact the quality of the solutions their business can deliver.
One of the consequences of poor communication is that it may result in the new hire experiencing a decrease in morale and a loss of confidence in their team or company. That feeling may encourage those new hires reflect on whether or not they are in the right role or the right company. These thoughts can trigger them to start job hunting, to see if they can find a team or company where they feel more appreciated and empowered. According to Talent Pulse, 20% of new hires leave for new roles in their first 6 weeks with an organization.
Let’s say there is a company whose’s UX team is growing rapidly. They are getting budget for 5 UX designers a month because the company is seeing the value of UX and wants their help in solving customer and business pain points. “That’s great news!” you think. However that company hasn’t invested in designing an onboarding process that works for both the company, the UX team, or its new hires. As a result, for every 5 hires they make, they are losing 1 to 2 new hires every month, because they haven’t corrected that onboarding experience. That’s at least 12 open head count a year that they are losing, coupled with a lower rate of productivity from those who choose to stay — E.g. companies end up paying for 40 hours a week of work but may be only getting 25–30 hours due to poor communication and a lack of good systems in place to manage their new hire’s onboarding. The loss of money and productivity for that company as a result of this poorly designed and communicated experience totals in the millions of dollars of inefficiencies per year.
I’ve watched multiple former employers throw away millions of dollars of UX work rather than fix their poor communication. Poor communication isn’t an isolated incident or limited to to just large enterprises. I’ve seen this poor communication and an ineffective onboarding experiences at nearly all of my UX jobs. I find it a bit ironic that Designers and Design Managers are great at designing products and services for their company, but many times the same skills and methods we use to solve our customers problems, we fail to apply to our own team or workforce. Those same tools and methods can be applied to solve your poor communication processes. Yet not enough companies do it. Why not? Because those in positions of leadership either aren’t aware or haven’t gotten the buyin necessary to invest in solutions. Thet need to be able to craft the story to those in charge of the purse strings about why investing in solving those broken processes is a smart business decision.
So how do teams go about fixing their broken employee experience? They do four things.
№1— Audit current processes and be brutally honest with how well they are serving your team and company. Don’t assign blame to the issues that arise. Regardless of if there is someone at fault or not, you still have the responsibility to fix the issues.
Are the communication issues happening with a specific person or team, or is there a larger problem that you’re facing - like not really taking the time to craft a winning onboarding process or how to teach junior team members about how you do specific aspects of your job? Depending on the type of issues your facing will dictate how you solve the problem.
If it’s a single person, then review your current strategy to see how you can resolve the situation. Maybe it’s as simple as having a conversation with them.
If it’s a broken system or process, that’s going to require a bit more time, money, and energy to solve. You may need a more sophisticated strategy to get buy-in from your leaders to secure investment for your team. You may need to bring in outside help to find the right solution for your team.
When you are auditing your processes, it’s important to check and see that they work for both the managers and the workers. I get not wanting to add more to people’s plates, so explore what solutions are available to you to help you resolve them. Maybe it’s an internal initiative that you dedicate resources to. Maybe you bring in an outside consultant or team to help you do the audit and update your broken processes. Maybe you focus on tackling one specific issue a quarter until you get through everything your audit revealed. You get to decide on how you want to tackle the challenge.
№2 — Create a safe environment and ask for feedback. Talk to both the individual contributors and the managers on your team to see what challenges they are facing because they most likely will not be the same. A manager may be having issues because they aren’t provided with helpful systems that allow them to empower their people resulting in lower team performance than expected. An individual contributor may be having issues with getting up to speed on a new team because there isn’t any documentation to help him or her do so.
It is imperative that you create a safe environment for your team to be able to share their struggles. It has to be more than lip service. When workers feel like if they share their struggles that they will be punished or labeled as difficult, they will stop sharing important information you and your team needs to hear. I don’t share feedback with the intent to point the blame on others, but to shine a light on the issue, so we can find ways to resolve it.
You can’t fix what you don’t know about or acknowledge is an issue.
I’ve worked in companies that were managed by yes men. They told their bosses exactly what the boss wanted to hear, even when it wasn’t the truth. Yes we’ll get those UI bugs fixed in the week. Yes we will follow the instructions and guidelines given to us by the UX team. Only to have them do the exact opposite of what they committed.
One of my big pet peeves is over-promising and under-delivering. If I commit to doing something, I do it. If I discover I can’t deliver on what I’ve promised, I quickly communicate that with the other stakeholders so they are aware of what’s going on, and what the roadblocks are that are impacting my ability to honor my commitment. I find it unethical and demoralizing to work with individuals and companies that operate in this fashion.
№3 — Pay attention to the details. They matter. They shape how your workers view their team and the company. They either will build up trust and rapport with your workforce or they will tear it down.
A poor onboarding experience can sour a person enough that they realize they’d rather take their chances with another company instead of sticking with yours. No clear instructions on how to be successful in your role can sour a person on the team because they feel insecure in the work they are doing, not knowing if it is meeting the level of expectation because the expectation wasn’t make clear to them. Not listening to your team members when they bring up their concerns with their boss whose threatening to fire them for not blindly obey sours your workers on your company. Not properly dealing with a toxic co-worker who’s getting more verbally aggressive with your team and giving your at-risk worker an option to remain in the company sours your workers on your company. A poor off-boarding experience can sour a worker from applying for other roles you that you need filled that may be a better fit their skills and passion turning them into someone who can’t recommend working with your team or company.
Imagine you just signed a letter accepting a new job with a company that you admire and share similar values with. You are excited. You have a start date set for 3 weeks from now. You complete all your HR paperwork and then you wait. There is no welcome message from your new company or team. Then a couple of days before you are scheduled to start, you are sent the wrong laptop. “That’s odd?” you think and check with your recruiter to see if that was an accident or was done on purpose. They assure you it was an accident and the IT team has already sent the correct laptop in the mail. It is scheduled to arrive the day after of your start date. You’d think that’s not a big deal, but it is.
It is an issue because your recruiter told you that you have to start on a Monday, otherwise your start date will get pushed back an entire week. That causes you to sweat a little. You don’t want to push your start date back a week and feel like the company policy is potentially punishing you for something you have no control over. That mistake on the part of the company threatens to cost you a week’s worth of lost pay. Now what felt like a minor red flag with the IT team sending the wrong laptop, has now escalated into something more important since its affecting you’re ability to earn a living. All because the new company didn’t pay for overnight shipping and have you sign for the package to make sure you were equipped with everything you need to start your new role on the agreed upon start date. Not making sure that your new hire has everything they need prior to their start date doesn’t communicate to your new hire that you value them. It sends the opposite message. It decreases their morale before they start the job. Especially when the solution is just the difference between 2-day and 1-day shipping. You wonder what other red flag policies the company you’re getting ready to join has, if they are okay with policies like all workers must start on a Monday.
Details like what I’ve described in the scenario above, shape how workers think about their current employers. They may seem like minor instances to companies, but they’re not to the new hires. How those minor details are implemented are a reflection of the company culture that shows workers whether they are valued or not. If it’s not important enough for the company to get their workers the right hardware and software before their first day and make an effort for them to feel welcome, seen, and appreciated, then how will they treat you when other issues arise? When details like this are missed, it makes your new workers feel unimportant, like the work they are being hired to do isn’t really that important to the company, and that the company places more value on their own bottom line than on taking care of their people. If a company commits to a start date with a new worker, they should honor that start date, pay them, even if all of the hardware and software needed isn’t ready for them. Don’t punish new hires for things that aren’t their fault or you’ll end up seeing a higher than normal turnover rate in your ranks and lose the war for top talent.
№4 — Invest in getting help from a neutral, 3rd party to help you get to the root of the problem and facilitate your workplace transformation efforts. Companies or teams that are running into communication issues can highly benefit from working with a consultant or organization for a number of reasons. One benefit is that they have fresh eyes when looking at the problem. Consultants aren’t as in the weeds as the management team and workers are, so they can more quickly assess the situation and work with the team or organization to address their issues.
You may also find that your people are more likely to share their real experiences with a 3rd party than with their leadership. This is an effect poor employee experience, which can create a lack of confidence around sharing their concerns or experiences with their manager. Maybe they fear how their feedback will be received or think that it is a reflection on them as a worker if they raise issues and that they may potentially get punished for calling attention to their issues. If your team’s managers and leaders haven’t invested in building strong, healthy relationships with their workers, then issues like poor communication can fester for months, even years resulting in so much wasted time, money, and effort with suboptimal results.
There can be a myriad of reasons why your team is having communication issues. Maybe it’s a lack of processes in place around certain tasks. Maybe its supersonic growth that your team isn’t prepared to handle and things like onboarding are getting lost in the cracks. Maybe it’s a new manager who’s still learning the ropes and hasn’t quite figured it out how to do their job. Maybe it’s legal dictating what is and isn’t allowed depending on what type of worker you are dealing with. Maybe it’s a toxic team member who’s negatively impacting the team’s morale. Maybe there is a conflict between the different stakeholders as to what the group should do next regarding the product they’re working on.
The good news is that you can fix your poor communication at work. Awareness is the first step. Now its up to you to determine how to respond to it and create a plan to help you resolve it.
If you are a people manager who’s dealing with communication issues within your team, are looking for ways to cut down on your team’s idle time, and want help putting a strategy together to solve this for your team or business so you can win the war for top talent, I invite you to reach out to me and book a free 30-minute discovery session. We will talk about the challenges you are facing and see how I can help you and your team build a winning experience for all of your workers.
What kinds of issues do you see poor communications costing you or your team at work? I’d love to hear your stories. Share them below in the comments.
