"First they tell me one thing. Then they tell me something else. When it's time for me to do something, what do I listen to?"
This was among the complaints I heard in a recent focus group. Confused and uninformed people are miserable. They're also a drag on productivity, quality and service. They cause costs to rise and make everything move slower. But they don't want to be a drag. They would rather be in the know than out of the loop.
People generally like to have a hand in winning over new customers, troubleshooting problems, bringing new products to life and cutting product development times. In short, they like to feel valued.
And yet, business leaders responding to a recent nationwide study conducted by Bright Enterprises for the American Management Association estimated that 14 percent of each 40-hour workweek is wasted due to poor communication among employees. This amounts to seven weeks a year.
The CEO of a northeast utility told me he feels paranoid about his inability to connect people with his corporate goals. "It's as though some of our employees think I get up in the morning, look myself in the mirror and commit to confusing the hell out of them. Honestly I don't. I want them - no, need them - to understand where we're going in this new business environment."
"I'll tell you what's frustrating," the head of a telecom business unit said recently. "My struggle isn't with our 12,000 employees. My struggle is with my top 10. How can I get 12,000 employees moving in the same direction if I can't get the top 10 moving in the same direction?"
Forward-thinking business leaders know that creating environments of openness, teamwork and trust will attract and keep the best and brightest people. In a seller's market, people with hot skills can afford to be selective. They won't stick around in unhealthy environments of secrecy and mass confusion.
Of course, good internal communication isn't simply a matter of recruitment or retention. It goes deeper than that. Informed people outperform uninformed people, all else equal. Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work for in America" score exceptionally higher than the norm on communication-related issues. The publicly traded companies on the Fortune list even deliver consistently higher returns to their shareholders than companies making up the Russell 3000 (the financial index that best mirrors the Fortune list).
Companies such as Allstate and Sears have proven direct correlations between improved communication and performance. Analytical rigor aside, it just makes sense that informed people would outperform uninformed people. If you wanted to win in any game, which team would you prefer to lead - the team that knows the rules or the team that's in the dark?
When today's high-performing business leaders talk about connecting the dots in their organizations, they're not talking about the soft stuff. They're looking for hard returns - like sales volume, earnings, speed-to-market, productivity, inventory levels, cost of goods sold and load factors.
They're not talking about simply putting smiles on faces or improving morale. (These things come naturally with success.) They're shooting for hard, cold business results that come from informed, passionate people.
Good communication isn't just about profiling employees in your company newsletter and telling them how much you appreciate them. It's about making the corporate engine run more efficiently - by improving productivity, introducing new product lines, improving accuracy and turnaround time, slashing absenteeism, generating savings, and so on.
Of course, many factors contribute to these kinds of wins. But the central theme in winning companies is an obsessive focus on sharing information with people throughout the company so they can perform at their peak.
Winning companies identify and eliminate flaws in the communication system that are impeding performance. These range from mixed messages to missing information to slow-moving information to unclear priorities.
How do you turn confused people into focused people?
Link them directly to the strategy and vision of the business. Make sure they understand how to contribute, that they are able to contribute, that they have the right information when they need it so they can contribute.
Most of all, show them how they'll benefit from the results they produce.
Connecting the dots takes work, and requires a basic understanding of how people make decisions in the workplace. But the returns are well worth the effort. Jim Shaffer is senior partner for leadership change at Towers Perrin in Rosslyn, Va. This column was excerpted from his new book, The Leadership Solution (McGraw-Hill) which will hit bookshelves in March. He can be reached at [email protected] or at 703/351-4750.