Communicating Not Communication

In my career, I have worked for a variety of different companies, both big and small, and with very different cultures. As different as they all are these companies mostly shared one thing in common. I’ve seen this within members of the same department and between IT and the rest of the business. There was always evidence that pointed to staff, teams, departments or entire functions not being on the same wavelength as others around them.

For those that know me they know, I am not afraid to speak up if something is fundamentally flawed or broken. At the end of the day, I like things to work, and it makes everyone’s job easier when they do.

In my last role, I highlighted various efficiency and performance issues in how the service desk and infrastructure teams were working together which led to me fully evaluating and remodelling both. The bulk of those findings could make for an interesting post but that is for another day. The one thing that stood out amongst everything else though was the same thing I've seen in numerous other workplaces over the years; poor communication. Members of service desk didn’t speak to one another, Infrastructure didn’t speak to service desk and management spoke to nobody. Equally as important, communication between IT and the business wasn't poor too. The odd thing is service desk did speak to each other, infrastructure spoke to service desk, management spoke to everyone in IT, and everyone in IT spoke to the business. So what was the problem? Why is IT branded as poor communicators?

What has become evident over the years is that people don’t truly understand what poor communication means. It seems to be generally misinterpreted as “not enough communication”. Which explains what most IT departments do to resolve this.

IT's reaction over the years when communication is criticised is to throw out yet more communication and collaboration tools or spam the business with more emails. Management would insist on using tool "y" instead of "z" and eventually tool "x" instead of "y" as if this was the answer to the problem. This seems to be a common issue in IT which I suppose is due to our affinity with technology.

There is all this focus on tools and applications to communicate more and more with each other and the business, however, there is never any consideration given to the quality of the communication. There is no, or little thought given to the audience, and especially no consideration as to whether the message being conveyed was truly understood. All too often I see IT go from just enough communication to a barrage of one-sided declarations or announcements via email and web posts. Increasing the amount of poor communication is not going to make the situation better.

In my view, good communication consists of three components. There is what message you are trying to convey and how you are going to communicate it; the “what” and the “how”, and the final component, which the most important aspect and the part that is all too often overlooked, which is understanding that it is the communicator's duty to ensure that their message was received and understood.

It is imperative that the content of any message is written according to its audience. You wouldn't fill a message with technical jargon when speaking to someone in marketing or fill it with financial information when speaking to someone that doesn't care about finances. The audience dictates the content and language of the message. The message must be clear to them to ensure they understand it.

As important as the clarity of any message is I think the way in which IT and the business communicate with one another plays a big part in the perceived poor communication we hear about. I do see IT having a constant lean towards more technical methods of communication and this is a problem.

The list below contains the communication methods that I, and likely you too, use in everyday business:

1. Face-to-Face
2. Video Conference
3. Phone
4. Email and Instant Messaging
5. Web Posts

As you work your way down through the list the level of interaction decreases as does your ability to ensure your message was received and understood. Face-to-face is highly interactive and allows you to read nonverbal cues such as body language, emotion, and tone, it allows reactions to be gauged quickly and as a result is much less likely to be understood. None of these benefits are evident in email or web posts, which tend to be little more than people speaking at one another.

These digital communication channels do have their benefits, for example, you wouldn't verbally communicate the introduction of a new service individually to everyone in the business. Using an email or a web post allows for that very same message to be communicated to a vast audience and allows for them to interact with that information at their convenience.

The communication method plays a vital role in the relaying of any message and every situation will call for its own communication method. It is the communicators responsibility to identify that method, ensure the message they are relaying is clear and concise, and ensure it is understood.

With more conscious decisions taken around our audience and the communication channel we use perhaps we can overcome this notion of poor communication.