Efficient Internal Communication

Enterprise communication issues arise from the size of the teams themselves, but also from complex responsibilities and regulations.

Discouraging number of emails

Internal communication is still mostly oral or by emails, even though it is a very inefficient way of communication. It is not uncommon for executives to have over 100 emails per day, as well as hundreds of unread messages. However, even 5 useless emails per day means waste time that could spend in better way. A single-day unread email might cause million-dollar loss.

To many emails is burdensome not only for executives, but also for experts. Even the experts are often overwhelmed by requests and long-time waiting for answers is not only costly but often dangerous.

“Workers from enterprise confirm that at least 50%, but often 90% of emails by executives, are “for information” – to keep the addressee informed, although the author does not expect direct response or action.”

Too much information

Large companies overwhelm their workers with a lot of information. Information often lacks a good structure and they are mostly not interconnected. Most of the news are communicated to workers in the time when author invented it, instead when the receiver needs it. Or even when receiver doesn’t need it at all.

Effective communication does not mean that information should not be published but that it is available when the recipient needs it.

Ineffective consultation

Perhaps the most common complaint relates to the ineffective consultation. It is a complex problem, ranging from the inexperience of meeting organizers, to improperly set processes (e.g. the obligation to discuss things in a meeting, even if the meeting does not bring benefits), to the lack of tools for "online" corporate communication.

Efficient meetings need not only experienced managers, but meetings automation. Last but not least, other communication channels that can replace much of the meeting and thus reduce the need to meet.

Complex regulations with too many changes

Enterprises tends to have many internal regulations and directives. Every week workers receive information about changes in regulations. Communication of regulations is costly (reading time × number of readers = several thousand dollars) and inefficient. Workers can never remember all changes, at best they got an idea about the change.

The solution is in dynamically managed tasks directly linked with Quality Management System and regulations. Regulations are linked with tasks and worked is informed about them in time when he needs it regardless when it was issued. Workers will observe regulations much more easy and could never say that they didn’t know about some new policy, standard or regulation.

In particular, small business lacks tools and the culture. Both are depressed by small investments in internal organization as well as missing experience.

Missing tools

Small business often has nothing but emails. Intranet sites, shared directories, shared knowledge and many other tools that people in larger business use every day are beyond a small company scope.

Tools are often missing because there is no experience with the real boost of the efficiency, experience and necessary staff skills.

Missing experience

Experience is the basic step to verifying that something really helps us. When there is no way to verify that an investment pays off, it is difficult to justify internally.

A developing business grown out of its own processes

While few new workers in a larger business have no influence on its functioning, in a small business it brings major team increase. Such change requires significant internal changes. There is a need to change how to share information, mange internal communication and tasks. When a company culture does not grow accordingly to the team size, internal problems accumulate, affect productivity, personal satisfaction as well as the service quality. Sooner or later accumulated problems explode and breaks the team. It starts the team catharsis that is good to prune ill habits but can also sweep out the whole company.

It is not uncommon for small and medium-sized companies to lack records for most decisions, agreements and instructions. Everything is handled verbally, over the phone, or by text messages or even WhatsApp.

The consequence of the lack of rules is again low efficiency, but also often disputes and ambiguities that directly affect the quality of products and services.