Effective communication sharing across all units of an organization is good business.
Some executives will tell you this practice builds good internal and external customer engagement and strengthens the companies bottom-line, but effective communications is cliché – it might sound good in principle, but in practice seldom applied, even in some of the largest organizations.
One might assume much of poor communication is attributed to an inadequately skilled workforce, but in practice it’s a matter of cooperative buy-in and discipline. It is a sheer belief that staying the course reaps positive results –both for the organization and the customer.
One of the biggest barriers to solving today’s business problems, particularly at a time when companies find themselves expending extraordinary resources on information technology, is what is referred to as the “Silo Mentality” — that is to say, employees carrying out organizational objectives with an independent mindset of not sharing with other units of the organization.
According to a 2017 Forbes business article, The True Cost of Poor Communication, company leadership often fail to see how poor communications hinders the organization as a whole and disrupts business operations on a fundamental level. The Holmes Report, published several years ago, concluded 400 companies with 100,000 employees each cited an average loss per company of $62.4 million per year because of inadequate communication to and between employees. Poor communication practices internally will inevitably reach external customers – whether mirrored in the quality of a product, or the execution of service to customers.
Contrary to the euphoric idea that people instinctively work in harmony with each other, we tend to function naturally in silos, independent of our co-workers and other business units. But rest assured this is a short-sighted approach to achieving larger organizational objectives. Oftentimes than not it creates immediate and long-term business problems down the road, because one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing.
Communications excellence begins with a strategy plan that requires buy-in from leaderships across all sectors of the organization, so that everyone is on the same page. Without uniformity, workers will assuredly adapt to the present environment.
So while each business unit may be responsible for a section-specific deliverable, communicating project and program deliverable inputs and outputs is a collaborative effort — all deliverables across the organization, collectively, contributes to that larger end-goal.
