Great workplaces invest time on communication fundamentals: intentional structures and processes. Failure to shore these up leads to communication breakdowns. Below, we identify 6 common communication issues and tips to improve communications:
- Managerial Micromanaging or Ghosting: When managers are unsure what their staff is working on or their progress, their interactions can bounce between micromanaging or being too hands-off.
- Pro tip: Set regularly scheduled check-ins where issues can be surfaced.
- Out of the Loop: Staff can become frustrated or demoralized when they feel left out of a project’s status that they expect to be part of.
- Pro tip: Use a project management tool to keep everyone on the same page.
- Unclear Roles: When staff don’t understand their role’s relevance to information received, they’re confused by communications.
- Pro tip: Signal their work is important by discussing how it connects to the team and their value in and to the organization.
- Meeting Mismanagement: When schedules fill with too many meetings or those with no agenda, attendees’ time is wasted.
- Pro tip: Think through ‘why’ you think you need a meeting. Most teams spend hours on status meetings that can be shared in a project management tool.
- Unclear Follow-Up: When the meeting or discussion ends without clear follow-up tasks, attendees leave with conflicting ideas about next steps, responsibilities, and expectations. This can duplicate efforts or cause work to fall through the cracks.
- Pro tip: A tip to improve communications post-meeting is to prepare ahead of time and adopt meaningful meeting practices, including notetaking and identifying a plan for follow-up.
- Unclear Accountability: No one knows who owns or is accountable for results of various tasks. This impedes project progress and causes confusion.
- Pro tip: Adopt a DACI matrix framework. We help clients understand and implement these because it creates structured communications. It clarifies roles and spells out responsibility and accountability for different aspects of a project. Taking the first step of considering who on your team belongs in each role can help you organize your team’s responsibilities and tasks. Doing so will help you plan, make decisions, and communicate with intentionality.
Create structured communications
A top tip to improve communications: eliminate guesswork. These symptoms result from a lack of structure around communications, which lead to ambiguity. Why and How you communicate about work affects its completion. These create structure and become guardrails around your communications. If you know why you are communicating and how you should communicate it, you improve the odds your recipient receives the message and takes action. Guardrails minimize guessing because they ensure everyone has the same understanding. Without structured communications you’re guessing whether your message is received.
Build intentionality into communications
Intentionality is one of our top tips to improve communications. Regardless of workplace, putting structure around communications produces better results, more engaged staff, and saves time and frustration up front. ‘Effective communications’ takes practice, consistency, and intentionality. Changes in frequency, staff, workplace model, and tools can lead to changes that cause pain points to surface. Being intentional and creating structure around communications helps avoid the 6 common symptoms outline above.
If you want to help your teams communicate more effectively, contact us for more information on how we can assess your structural communication issues to offer you actionable solutions.