“Next year’s annual customer event will be held in Austin. Please start planning immediately. Be prepared to connect in a few months to present the details of your plan.”
The marching orders from your boss are clear. An event in Austin. Next year. As the Head of Events at your organization, you waste no time … diving headfirst into the plans.
Fast forward to “a few months later,” and you present your plan to the C-suite. Someone raises their hand when the first slide appears, “Why does that say ‘Austin’? Our annual event is in Boston.”
Silence. Embarrassment. Awkwardness. Frustration.
And wasted time.
And wasted money.
According to The Cost of Poor Communications — a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees — the average loss per company is $62.4 million per year due to inadequate communication to and between employees.
In another study from The Economist, Communication Barriers in the Modern Workplace, 44% of respondents said communication barriers are leading to delays or failures to complete projects. Additionally, 31% reported poor communication resulting in low morale, 25% in missed performance goals, and 18% in lost sales.
In short, miscommunication has many negative impacts on organizations, teams, and their employees.
While the causes for miscommunication can be varied (and some specific to the individual, the team, or the organization), here are 6 of the more common reasons teams struggle with effective communication.
In no particular order …
If any team is to have success, it must find ways to work well together. Poor team chemistry often results in conflicts and miscommunication. This is not only bad on an individual level (unhappy employees); it can also be detrimental to the project… and the organization as a whole.
How to fix: Team dynamics can be established and reinforced through daily standup meetings, weekly project calls, individual check-ins, and team-building activities. The better a team knows one another, the more likely they’ll be to communicate effectively.
Accepting something as accurate without having proof, often based on incomplete (or sometimes even wrong) information. When team members make assumptions — without asking for clarification — bad things tend to happen. See the Austin vs. Boston example in the intro.
How to fix: Take the extra time to ask a follow-up question until you are certain you understand. Repeat back what you heard, “To confirm, you are saying that … Is that right?”
Are you listening so you know when there is a break in the conversation … so YOU can talk? That’s called “listening to talk” and is quite the opposite of active listening. Active listening requires full concentration so that you, the listener, can understand and respond effectively to what the other person is saying.
How to fix: Turn off alerts. Close your laptop (unless you are on a video conference!). Make eye contact with the speaker. Repeat back what they said to ensure complete understanding.
Email. Slack. Phone. Text. In-person meeting. Virtual (video) meeting. LinkedIn message. In-app message. So many choices. While there is never a perfect communication channel, sometimes one is better than the other. And if you choose the “wrong” channel, messages can get lost, delayed, or left unread.
How to fix: Work with your team to establish “communication channel norms.” Agree on what channels will be used for specific types of conversations. Note: This is often unique to each organization and even to each team.
Closed-mindedness is a communication killer. It’s one thing to have strong convictions; it's another to be open to hearing ideas that differ from your beliefs.
How to fix: Build and foster a team culture that is open to new ideas and perspectives.
Organizations and teams that operate on a “need to know” basis are doing a disservice to their employees by not being open and forthright. Lack of openness and transparency can have substantial negative impacts on morale and productivity, and result in overwhelming miscommunication.
How to fix: Take the time to showcase the work of all your team members. This will help provide a “bigger picture” of what’s happening in your organization by highlighting each and every task.
DJ Waldow
In a no-risk discovery we look at how your work moves between your systems today and show what one connected system would do differently. You pay only if you proceed. Or see how we approach it.
More on the same problem:
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How to Choose the Best WordPress Portfolio Theme for Your Work (article)
Common examples include a deadline understood as end of day by one person and end of week by another, an instruction given in a hallway that was never written down, a message sent on a channel the recipient rarely checks, two teams each assuming the other owns a task, and feedback softened so much that the problem was not heard. Each one looks small at the time. The cost shows up later as rework, a missed date or a client who was told two different things.
The direct effects are wasted time and money: work done to the wrong specification, meetings held to untangle what was meant, and deadlines missed while people wait for clarification. The indirect effects are harder to see and often larger. Repeated miscommunication lowers morale, because people feel set up to fail, and it erodes trust between teams, so each starts protecting itself with extra documentation and sign-offs. Over time it slows the whole organization down.
Write things down. In a remote team, a decision that exists only in a video call is lost to anyone who was not on it, so record decisions, owners and dates in a shared place. Agree which channel is for what: urgent questions, routine updates, formal requests. Encourage people to repeat back what they understood before starting work. Keep some overlap in working hours so questions get answered the same day, and hold short regular check-ins so small confusions surface before they become large ones.
Active listening means giving full attention to the speaker, understanding the message, and confirming it before responding. In practice it means closing the laptop, not composing a reply while the other person is still talking, and summarizing what you heard so they can correct it. It matters because most miscommunication starts with a message that was heard partly and filled in with assumptions. Confirming understanding at the moment of the conversation is far cheaper than discovering the gap weeks later.
Match the channel to the message. Use a written, searchable channel for decisions, requirements and anything someone will need to find later. Use a call or meeting for anything with nuance, disagreement or bad news, where tone matters. Use chat for quick questions that need an answer today and email for formal requests that cross team or company boundaries. Agree these norms as a team and write them down, because a message sent on the wrong channel is often a message that is never read.
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