Update:

Last year, I used this post to try and create a new way of framing public relations and reputation management. If it didn’t work to provide leaders with a measure of ROI, what about cost recovery? What about reversing the costs associated with poor communication? The basis was research by Harris on behalf of Grammerly.

This research has been updated. It is showing that the problem is only getting worse…which is not surprising for a bunch of reasons, including who is doing the research! Having said that, I think when you look at hybrid work forcing more written communications (email, slack, whatever) without skills to match, you can see what Grammarly describes as a “perfect storm”

Here is what leaders told Harris:

As I noted last year, there are no quick fixes to this problem. To paraphrase Henry Ford, all the solutions look like work. And, no doubt, you have plenty of work to do. People scream to you all day about how busy they are. In this case, you could save time, distraction and frustration across the enterprise.

Here are three quick ideas:

1. Communicating effectively should be everyone’s job. That should be in the job descriptions, evaluation, and your training across the board.

2. You will need to measure how effectively your leaders communicate.

3. When some colossal failure happens because of poor communication, there needs to be an incident team ready to quickly diagnose what happened and ensure it is a learning experience. For extra credit, take a cue from healthcare and include “near misses”: a time when you got away with it.

4. Develop case studies on good communication, bad communication and improved communication.

We have all been there: we have trouble getting the resources we need to do our job. We tend to think of that in terms of budgetary resources—which matters—but it always seemed to me that the bigger issue was that you could never get the attention you needed. Projects went unapproved for days or weeks. Or, a project was approved in early stages and attention was only paid when it was launch day and THEN changes were made or the stop sign was pulled out.

We have been conditioned to believe that the reason for this is that leaders don’t see an ROI in communications. And we have spent a lot of time learning to demonstrate our ROI—with, I think we can agree, mixed success.

Maybe we are looking at this issue the wrong way. A recent study by Grammarly and the Harris Poll shows that poor communication could cost around $12,506 per employee, per year.

In other words, maybe strong communications would be better positioned as cost-recovery, not ROI.

Grammarly’s infographic is below and you can download the full report here.

Here are a few things I gleaned from the report.

Poor Communication Costs Time

The business leaders in the study estimated that almost 19% of a workweek was lost to poor communication. That should be a wow for anyone involved in this business. Even cutting that number in half with a strong communication effort would reduce waste significantly.

Poor Communication Costs Money’

Yes, poor communications cost money as well as time. I mean, cash money.

Two examples in the study.

First, 86% of business leaders reported losing more than $10,000 in business to poor communication. More than one-in-five (22%) report losing $50,000 or more.

Second, 40% of knowledge workers and 17% of business leaders (business leaders!) report that they could be losing deals because of a lack of confidence in communicating with external clients and business leaders.

Simply put, there’s a lot of talk about being customer-focused, but a lot of silence when it comes to investing in the people who actually deliver customer focus.

Intangible Costs: Focus and Momentum

It’s more than just money and time. There are intangible costs as well—which are not included in the study. People who have to spend 8 hours a week making up for the damage poor communication causes are losing the ability to focus on more important issues. Call it opportunity cost if you went to business school.

Just as importantly, they are not going to create the flow and momentum that is part of effective work, especially in the knowledge arena. It’s frustrating and it lowers morale and confidence in any strategic vision the company might be propagating.

Sadly, No Quick Fix

The saddest story of them all. No, you can not remedy this problem by adding a position in communications.

That will help with the strategic engagement you are trying to build. But many of the issues are probably arising in communications that go ACROSS the organization, not up and down.

The fix is for the organization to be committed to strong communications. Communication has to be everyone’s job. That means creating systems. That means training everyone—especially supervisors—on communications skills. It means measurement and accountability. And it means openness and transparency, so everyone understands the business implications of their work.