If you had at least one day job before starting your business, you’ll already know something about how important communication is to the smooth running of a company. Something as little as a missed call, or an email sent to the wrong address, can turn the whole operation on its head, and cause a range of costly issues. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at how bad communication leads to bad business…



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Poor Efficiency

One of the biggest damages incurred from poor communication is lower efficiency. Poor communication within a business, whether it’s written or oral, can be a major crutch on the efficiency of a single department, or the business as a whole. Documents with silly mistakes, emails that are vague and need extra clarification, and uninformed presentations can all drag out the time it takes for a business to achieve short and long-term goals. They may not seem like much by themselves, but if the whole business is characterised by a culture of poor communication, it can have a massive negative impact on how productive the company is as a whole. In the worst cases, it can affect how quick you are to respond to full-blown business disasters, as this page explains. Fail to implement good communication standards, and every project you take on will be slow and inefficient.

Employee Morale

With the exception of your customers, your staff are the most important people to your business. If you don’t spend enough of your resources on better business communication, it can be very detrimental to the motivation of your whole workforce. When a working environment is highly collaborative and communicative, it will promote employee productivity, inspiration and creativity. On the other hand, if communication standards are poor, employees will lack the enthusiasm it takes to really take a bite out of assignments, and will even start to question the value of the business’s products or services. Dull presentations and meetings will bore your workers to tears, and vague, unclear communication will frustrate them, confuse them, and make them resent the higher-ups at the business. If you’re having trouble with employee morale, the issue may be in your communication.

Decreased Innovation

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Another massive problem with poor communication is that it stifles innovation in all facets of the company. When there are low standards of communication, it results in a poor standard of work in important projects the company is handling, which in turn can cripple a business’s capacity for new, innovative ideas, and its ability to make meaningful contributions to their industry and their community. Countless studies have shown that the capacity for a business to innovate is directly linked to the capacity to communicate instructions, as well as new, exciting ideas of how to improve the way the company operates. Even if your business isn’t especially centred around cutting-edge tech, you’ll need to break the mould every now and then if you want to remain relevant and competitive in a rapidly changing market. Don’t let bad communication stifle innovation!