Inside Business: It's time to speak clearly

MOST senior executives acknowledge that communication is a vital component of success. Yet few are doing it well.

According to a recent report from Synopsis Communication Consulting - "Talking Business: New Rules for Putting Communication To Work" - many UK companies are "shooting themselves in the foot by the way they communicate with their own people." It adds that, "despite the significant amounts of money being invested in internal communication, companies are not getting the results they need, and are turning off employees in the attempt".

The problem is made more stark by the rapid take-up of electronic communications. When a chief executive can address a whole workforce at the touch of a button, sentiments that might be alleviated in person can appear overly harsh when sent through the ether.

Meanwhile, the advent of e-mail has inflicted information overload on more and more people. This is bad enough on its own, but worse when organisations confuse information with communication.

"Nil By Mouth", a report published last week by Investors in People and Andersen Consulting, points out that "for electronic communications to work for a company rather than against it, senior executives need to be fully involved in the planning process. Evaluation of e-comms needs to focus on people performance as well as IT performance."

When it comes to communications as whole, though, the Synopsis research suggests that organisations are causing confusion and resistance among employees by failing to make communication clear and simple. This, in turn, is contributing to the high failure rate of so-called change programmes.

"Companies in the UK are investing millions each year, looking to internal communication to deliver faster change, more flexibility and innovation," says Bill Quirke, managing director of Synopsis.

But his organisation's research among 120 leading UK and US companies shows that "unco-ordianted and misdirected communications are raising management and employee frustrations to boiling point, and causing the substantial investment in internal communication to evaporate".

Synopsis has identified what it calls four communication ailments. These are:

High quantity, low quality. Senior management's frustration at the slow pace of change is matched by employee frustration at information overload. Staff are bombarded with waves of change, each with its own three-letter acronym and accompanying newsletter.

Megaphone management. Too many companies assume that if people do not do as they would like, it is because they haven't understood the message. Their solution is to shout louder. Businesses need to move from "telling the troops" to engaging with their people and explaining what change means for them.

Raising awareness, but not requesting action. Leaders hope for changes in the way that people act, but often employees are not told what they should be doing.

Making messages, not meaning. Companies are spending time and a lot of money bombarding employees with beautifully crafted and relatively useless soundbites and slogans. They need to swap management speak for plain talk.

However, other communications specialists feel that even this does not get to the root of the problem. For example, Kevin Thomson, chairman of Marketing & Communication Agency, says too many managers equate communication with informing and instructing rather than involving.

The way to encourage team working, says John Smythe, chairman of the Smythe Dorward Lambert consultancy, is for executives not just to walk around their offices but to make a point of talking to the people they find there.

There is no shortage of manuals for companies seeking to communicate with their workforces, but it is clear that it will all be a waste of effort, and possibly counter-productive, if it is not accompanied by genuine changes in behaviour - particularly among what are generally termed the top brass.

Perhaps they need to take a tip from Ken Iverson, who turned an ailing US organisation into the highly profitable steel maker Nucor, largely through the application of commonsense management principles. He writes in his pithy book Plain Talk about how early on in his career he was taught the importance of listening.