Where does Poor Communication lead in Business?

Where does Poor Communication lead in Business?

 

 Why is communication important to business? Couldn’t universities just produce graduates skilled at crunching number? Good communication matters because business organizations are made up of people. As Robert Kent, former dean of Harvard Business School has said, “In business, communication is everything.” Here are the numbers: managers typically spend 75 to 80 % of their time engaged in some form of written or oral communication. Let us examine some reasons why good communication is important to individuals and their organizations. 


First, the National Commission on Writing estimates that American businesses spend $3.1 bullion annually just training people to write. According to the report of the National Commission on Writing, people who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired, and if already working, are unlikely to last long enough to be considered for promotion. Corporations with greatest employment growth potential (this is 80% or more of the companies in the services and the finance, insurance and real estate sectors) assess writing during hiring. Besides, two-thirds of salaried employees in large American companies have some writing responsibility. More than 40 percent of responding firms offer or require training for salaried employees with writing deficiencies. Besides, an ability to communicate was rated as the most important factor in making a manager “promotable” by Harvard Business Review. Hence, ineffective communication is very expensive for firms.


Second, the world’s economy is becoming increasingly global. By the end of the 20th century, 80 percent of U.S. products were competing in international markets. The direct investment of foreign-based companies grew from $9 trillion in 1966 to more than $300 trillion in 2002. Many products we assume are American, such as Purina Dog Chow and KitKat candy bars, are made overseas. Brands we may think are international, Grey Poupon mustard, Michelin tires and Evian water, are made in the United States. For managers, having international experience is rapidly moving from “desirable” to “essential.” A study by the Columbia University School of Business reported that successful executives must have multi-environment and multinational experience to become CEOs in the 21st century. Moreover, products have failed overseas sometimes simply because a name may take on unanticipated meanings in translation. For example, the Olympic copier Roto in Chile (roto in Spanish means ‘broken’); the Chevy Nova in Puerto Rico (no va means ‘doesn’t go’); the Randan in Japan (randan means ‘idiot’); Parker Pen’s Jotter pen (‘jockstrap’ in some Latin American markets). This kind of mishap is not an American “monopoly”. A successful European chocolate and fruit product was introduced into the U.S. with the unfortunate name “Zit.”

Naming a product is communication at its simplest level. The overall implications of intercultural communication for global business are enormous. Take the case of EuroDisney, later renamed Disneyland Paris. For the year 1993, the theme park lost approximately US $1 billion. Losses were still at US $1 million a day in 1994-95. There were many reasons for this, including a recession in Europe, but intercultural insensitivity was also a very important factor. No attention was paid to the European context or to cultural differences in management practice, labor relations, or even such simple matters as preferred dining hours or availability of alcohol and tobacco. EuroDisney signals the danger for business practitioners immersed in financial forecasting, market studies and management models when they overlook how culture affects behavior. Few things are more important to conducting business on a global scale than skill in intercultural communication.

Poor communication in business (both written and/or oral), can obstruct the efficiency of an organization. For example, vague email messages that require clarification, documents that need rewriting due to errors, and uninformed presentations and speeches, can greatly affect the flow of work in the company. Business communication skills impact the motivation of employees. Communicative and collaborative work environment promotes emploess productivity, creaticity and inspiration. Employees will lack enthusiams, if communication skills are poor. They will question the value of the thing they are doing. Poor communication skills can demoralize employees, since in this case they are forced to listen to a boring presentations where the person who presents is not able to provide clear objectives and instructions, which will as a result lead to monotony and total confusion. Consequently, lack of enthusiams will lead to decreased innovation. 

Therefore, before hiring an employee, companies should think twice whether they really need the employee who lacks communication skills that might lead to the consequences I mentioned above.

Based on http://smallbusiness.chron.com/effects-bad-communication-business-2880.html - “The effects of bad communication in business”

http://groupbrain.wjh.harvard.edu/jrh/pub/JRH1975_2.pdf - FRANK, HACKMAN (unknown). A Failure of Job Enrichment: The Case of the Change That Wasn't. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 12 (3), 413-436.

Tamar Khechoian.