01 Mar Bad Communication Costs MILLIONS Per Year

Effective marketing is all about communication. Marketers have to communicate their business and intentions to customers, and customers have to communicate their wants and needs to the business right back. It’s a cycle of communication, and if one party isn’t fully listening, it can lead to problems. Too many problems lead to disasters. 

Chief Marketing Officers may find themselves struggling with profits with no solid way of determining how costs and values are dipping. The product is good, the service reviews well, and the team and staff are all highly-trained. However, communication can be the slow leak that sinks the ship mid-sail. Poor communication is estimated to cost US businesses $1.2 trillion a year on lost revenue – nearly $12,500 per employee, on average. 

It’s a rampant problem. 72% of business leaders have admitted that their teams struggled with ineffective communication. The back and forth gets so bad that up to 7 hours – or a whole working day – is spent fixing problems that resulted from bad communication. This is only getting worse as employees continue to leave job positions unfilled during the progressing pandemic. It’s not their fault. Employees also admit that nearly 86% experience some kind of communication problems from top to bottom revolving around their individual experiences.

Work progresses in a chain formation. Orders from up top have to be communicated down until it reaches the appropriate people within the organization to handle that task. If any of those people, at any point, misconstrue or misinterpret the orders given, mix them up, leave out details, or make something up that wasn’t part of the original request, then the whole system is affected. These issues exist at every level of a company where work can be done, or where people are able to talk at all. 

This has all been made so much worse with the shift to remote desks and at-home operations. New tools always come with new problems and new people who don’t learn at the same pace as others on how to manage their new apps or extensions. Zoom call meetings were supposed to be a standard, but many businesses fell behind as employees from the top-down failed to implement the new system in time to be productive. 

The problem is not unknown 88% of leaders and 63% of employees have voiced a desire to see more effective tools of communication be given. Over half of all communication during the day is in writing, through e-mails, or messages on an in-company app. This means almost as much time is spent reading, and all that time without other work being done when a single phone call, voice chat, or quick message can be done in less time and with a different nuance to the words being spoken. 

CMOs would do well to inspect what technology can be used to help improve communications. Without it, no one knows what’s going on, and the whole chain of command suffers.