What common issues are there in organisations today that communication can solve?

Communicating is highly complex, while the general understanding around what communication is, whose job it is and how it works is profoundly poor. Email alone has sped up the pace of business so dramatically that employees increasingly find themselves sacrificing quality for speed:

• Have you ever seen someone tick the communication box on their work by posting up a new intranet page and hoping the right people see it?
• Have you ever wondered if an important conversation might have had different outcomes if only the people involved had better Dialogue skills?
• Do you find yourself working on emails while you' re in teleconferences and not really knowing if everyone on the call ended up on the same page?
• Is it so frustrating for your team to work with others with different cultures that you end up avoiding spoken contact and hoping everything works out in the end?
• Do you tune out of presentations to think about pressing work issues because the slides just weren' t engaging enough?
• Do you wonder if anyone would actually notice if the end results were better because all your project stakeholders were fully on board, instead of just noticing that it took longer for you to get there?
• Have you found yourself deleting emails from people in your organisation because you just don' t have time to reply?

Some of this is systemic; about for example, having the right training, systems, reward structures, and resources available for people to use. Some of it comes down to individual skills and behaviours of employees themselves. Regardless, when it comes to organisational communication, there are only two issues:

• disconnects (where a message should have been shared in an appropriate way, at the right time and place but wasn't),
• misunderstandings (where the message was shared but wasn't received as intended, for whatever reason).

Effective communication inside organisations is based on behaviours of trust, openness and respect. It is not about simply sending messages and hoping for compliance (or not sending messages at all), it is about creating the space, opportunity and capability needed for people across the organisation to make meaningful connections with each other, large and small. Meaningful connections lead to effective actions, the levers of strategy implementation and business performance.

An organisation that has the ability to meaningfully connect it's parts is 1) liberating employees to connect better with each other, with leaders and with the changing marketplace, and 2) providing employees and leaders with the opportunity to discover new perspectives and ideas so that once they understand the 'what'; they can better approach the 'how',together.

This isn't the usual kind of language that communication practitioners typically use when describing their profession. Internal Communication is normally talked about in terms of 'creating alignment', 'reporting', 'sharing leadership messages' and 'engaging people', which indeed is an important role of the communication department or function.

'Organisational Communication' if you will, goes deeper, seeing everyone in an organisation as a communicator. Organisational Communication therefore isn't 'done'; it is facilitated as a core business process for leaders and employees inside the organisation. This is the space where Bogaard Arena works.

1. Learning for leaders: Leaders play a major part in driving good organisational communication practice, not least because "at least 65% of how employees make sense of their world at work is driven by observing their bosses.&(Ed Schein, MIT). Leaders have the power to determine direction and strategy, motivate and inspire, and determine behavioural habits within their organisations purely through examples set by their own actions.
2. Learning for employees: Mistakes, re-work and non-productive efforts not only cost time and money but are disappointing for those involved and can damage relationships and morale. Employees may well be familiar with the mantra 'communicate, communicate, communicate!' But what does that really mean? How can people inside an organisation connect with their colleagues and leaders across different locations, cultures and disciplines? This is a learning proposition.
3. Systemic support: this is about having the right encouragement and support, knowledge sharing systems, reward structures, and resources available for employees to use.

The fundamental premise behind any Bogaard Arena diagnosis or proposal, is that good communication is the efficient sharing of accurate meaning. Some teams may need regular communication processes streamlining. Some may need help with planning, designing and delivering communication activities for stakeholders. Others may need training programmes for new joiners, and others may need hands on consultancy support.

The influence of communication is apparent in almost everything we do at work. It can be incredibly powerful and highly destructive, yet it's amazing how easily it can be overlooked. These days, the field is gaining more recognition and respect but still there's a long way to go before communication becomes as commonplace a priority as say, safety or finance. Isn't that odd though, because communication is in everything we do and the impacts are everywhere.