Losses due to misunderstanding

In different companies, there’s often not just a communication gap, but a real gaping chasm, which is observed between engineering and everyone else in the business. It might feel like technical teams are speaking another language that other teams do not understand. They know specialized programming languages and terminology that may not translate well to departments like product, finance, sales or marketing. They may communicate well internally, but have difficulty translating that knowledge into formats that other teams can easily digest.

That has a massive negative impact. It is found that the average employee as a rule spends nearly 40% of their time clarifying poor communications or following up on requests for information. In a company of 100 people, that could end with productivity losses worth $530,000 per year.

So, what can we do to address this gap and give our employees the tools and framework to proactively collaborate and openly communicate? Let’s try to guess why these communication problems occur, and offer strategies that your team can use to solve them and get the whole organization to speak the same language.

When does the gap occur?

Often, individual business units exist in siloes, and don’t often communicate about recent updates to their strategy or roadblocks that are stopping them from meeting certain goals. When that’s the case, other units may be left in the dark about important initiatives that can impact their own business objectives.

Some businesses plan regular cross-team meetings, but even so, a lot of crucial information can slip through the cracks. Developers often become aware of bugs or roadblocks mid-way through the development cycle and don’t have the time to provide regular updates to outside teams. As a result, your other business units may be left in the dark about updates that could have a big impact on expected features or time frames for delivery.

Sometimes, your development team may provide an update, but the message may not be clear if employees on other teams lack the subject-matter expertise to understand its relevance, and none of the developers have the time to clearly explain the situation. In some cases, the problem isn’t getting enough information, but receiving too much information, with no way to prioritize or determine what’s actually relevant.

Tips to avoid misunderstanding

The key to better communication across the enterprise doesn’t always mean more communication—the focus is on delivering the right information in the right format. Rather than holding cross-team meetings only when there are important announcements to share, schedule in weekly or daily “stand up” meetings with stakeholders from different business units, in which they each can share what they’re currently working on, discuss upcoming goals, any roadblocks in their way, and ask questions of the other team members. Record the meetings.

Each team has its own innate understanding of challenges that might come up around the product and how it’s used. Encourage team members from each business unit to share their commonly-asked questions or common issues that might arise, and then get them to collaborate on building out each use case with members of the engineering team. These resources can be shared widely and easily accessible for whenever they’re needed.

Make all technical documentation easy to find. Use a knowledge sharing and collaboration platform to enable seamless cross-team collaboration and discussion. When collaboration is based on who is available at the time, knowledge is shared or retained by a small group and hidden from others. You need a solution which is not reliant on people’s in-the-moment availability. It might be a platform built for asynchronous work.

One more case of misperception

How could poor English communication affect personal and professional life? A lack of contacts may often lead to missed opportunities, especially at work. This can happen because an employee does not clearly communicate their interest in an opening for a promotion, for example, or because they don’t effectively communicate their interest or willingness to take on more responsibilities.

When people do not have the information or knowledge, they feel they need low productivity results. The reason is basic. Usually people tend to avoid situations in which they will be regarded as not knowing, not understanding, as well as not having expertise. We believe we are born good at communicating and therefore do not practice and do not get better. But it is not the way things should be done in 2023.

What is to be done? Learning has always been the greatest and most important thing to keep a human being’s spirit high. It goes without saying. Enrich your English try eLang Extension! Communication is the key and in front of you there is always an opened door to start improving it.