People Operations

CHAPTER 13Rethink Communication

Communication is a part of the soul of your company and will have a big impact on your employee experience. No matter how big or small you are, it's the means by which you're able to motivate, inform, connect, and engage your people. And given how much the world of work has changed, revisiting your communication strategies may be a priority.

The COVID‐19 pandemic forced many American employers to rethink how they communicate. More employees were remote. Rules around customer engagement changed. But this provided an opportunity to review and refine how to communicate to be more successful.Let’s consider subpar communication practices first. If employees don't know what's going on, they're not set up for success and as a result, business results suffer. Quantified Communications found that businesses as small as 100 employees spend, on average, 17 hours per week clarifying unclear communications (Zandan, n.d). That's roughly $525,000 of annual costs lost to emails and phone calls that simply sound like, “I'm sorry, what do you mean? Can you please clarify ____?” And if customers don't know what's going on, add to that cost a loss of transactions and revenue.

Good communication practices, on the other hand, have an immediate and positive impact on workplace productivity, including a 25 percent lift in employee productivity and 47 percent higher returns to shareholders over a five‐year period when a company has strong communication skills (Baldoni ...