By Syed Balkhi
Team communication issues can impact sales, growth, and company culture, but with the right strategy you can overcome these organizational barriers.
Do you want to find out if poor communication is costing your company more time and money than you realize? If so, you’re in the right place!
If you don’t have a strong communication strategy in place, it’s a safe bet that it’s affecting your bottom line. For context, it’s estimated that businesses with 500+ employees lose a staggering 6.2 million dollars every year in lost productivity.
You need to make sure your team is all on the same page. When done correctly, this will make people more efficient, encourage them to innovate, and, most importantly, make sure everyone understands their role in the company.
Despite how important this is, many organizations struggle with communication barriers. Whether subtle or noticeable, they all undermine your potential for success.
Our goal is to help you overcome these issues and build a stronger team.
Impact of Communication Barriers on Businesses
First, let’s look at a list of direct impacts poor communication can have on businesses, regardless of their industry.
- Decreased Productivity – Poor communication leads to wasted time and misaligned priorities. You could see this manifest as ineffective meetings, project reworks, and decisions made with incomplete information that requires time and money to fix.
- Lowered Employee Morale – When communication breaks down, many employees feel uninformed, undervalued, and frustrated because they can’t make meaningful progress. Businesses with this barrier may see workplace disengagement, increased burnout, and, ultimately, higher turnover rates.
- Slower Innovation – Communication barriers make it difficult to get across necessary information for innovation, which prevents organizations from developing competitive solutions. When information doesn’t flow freely between departments and hierarchical levels, the organization loses access to diverse perspectives that drive creative problem-solving.
- Damaged Customer Relationships – When internal communication fails, external communication suffers. This all leads to inconsistent customer experiences and a significant drop in trust, which can directly impact retention and lead to fewer positive reviews.
- Financial Losses – Beyond productivity costs, poor communication leads to losses through missed opportunities and failed projects. These losses often go unattributed to their root cause of communication failure but significantly impact the bottom line.
- Strategic Misalignment – Without effective communication, different parts of the organization have conflicting priorities and interpretations of company strategy. This creates widespread inefficiency and can prevent the organization from achieving its most important objectives despite significant effort.
How to Identify and Resolve Common Organizational Barriers
Now, let’s discuss the different types of communication barriers, including how they form. We will also share actionable strategies you can follow to avoid or correct these issues.
Hierarchical Structures
One of the most common types of barriers deals with hierarchy. If a company has a rigid hierarchy that insists on people only communicating with the people directly above them, this is bound to cause problems.
This problem works both ways. It can dilute and distort information going to and from the top down.
As a result, senior management doesn’t get the complete picture from the frontlines. Similarly, employees often get a percentage of the original message from leadership, which can cause confusion.
How to Fix It:
- Host town hall meetings where leadership answers questions from employees directly.
- Conduct skip-level meetings that connect executives with employees several levels down.
- Embrace open-door policies that genuinely welcome input from all departments.
- Improve decision-making processes by adding diverse perspectives from various levels.
Cultural and Language Differences
When you consider all of the great talent out there, it makes sense that most companies hire globally.
There’s no question that this is crucial for creating opportunities for innovation, but there are challenges around communication that you’ll need to consider.
Cultural norms around directness, authority, and feedback can vary wildly from place to place and cause unnecessary friction if they’re not addressed. For instance, someone from a more direct culture could come off as rude or standoffish to someone who is used to more indirect feedback.
How to Fix It:
- Provide communication training to teach your team about different communication styles.
- Establish clear values and guidelines that your team should follow when communicating with others.
- Invest in translation tools and language support when necessary.
- Create glossaries of company-specific terminology to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Silo Mentality
Information silos are one of the biggest communication barriers out there. Basically, what this means is that departments act as isolated islands instead of being a moving part of the larger organization.
These silos prevent “idea cross-pollination,” which can stifle innovation and lead to people doing unnecessary work.
Let’s say your marketing team decides to work on a YouTube series promoting a product feature. After their videos are wrapped up, they share them with senior leadership only to find out the development team is already in the process of phasing that feature out. Suddenly, all that time and effort put into the videos is lost.
How to Fix It:
- Form project teams with members from different departments for deeper understanding and perspective.
- Create physical and virtual spaces that are dedicated to collaboration.
- Implement regular company-wide meetings so the company goals are clear.
- Recognize and reward collaborative behaviors.
Technological Barriers
Tech has come a long way. For you, this means it’s more important than ever to ensure everyone is on the same page.
For example, if an engineering team uses Jira for project tracking, marketing relies on Asana, and leadership reviews progress through Excel spreadsheets, information inevitably falls through the cracks.
Teams end up wasting valuable time transferring data between systems or searching for information buried in email threads or chat logs.
How to Fix It:
- Invest in a unified communication platform like Microsoft Teams or Slack that integrates messaging, file sharing, and video conferencing.
- Use the same project management tools like Asana, Monday, or Trello to create transparency across teams.
- Leverage knowledge management systems that preserve and share information everyone should know.
- Develop company-wide processes via documentation so everyone is using the best tools for each project.
Lack of Feedback Mechanisms
If you don’t have structured channels for giving and receiving feedback, employees will likely feel like they don’t fully understand what they’re doing well and where they can improve.
This uncertainty leads to hesitation, which reduces initiative and innovation. On the other hand, employees who receive performance feedback regularly can use this information to improve over time.
The same principle applies to management. If leadership teams don’t ask their employees for feedback on how they’re doing, they could lose valuable insights on process improvements and sentiment, which can have a ripple effect if not addressed quickly.
How to Fix It:
- Start conducting quarterly performance reviews rather than relying solely on annual reviews.
- Utilize 360-degree feedback to provide employees with unique ways of looking at things.
- Create anonymous feedback channels so everyone feels free to share their thoughts.
- Conduct regular pulse surveys to gauge employee sentiment.
- Follow-up on feedback with visible action to demonstrate that input is valued.
Final Thoughts
Organizational barriers are impactful and expensive, but you can overcome them and build a stronger team in the process. By understanding the different communication barriers we discussed today, you can start to make meaningful changes without your business.
Now, take a few minutes and think about your own company. Did any of the challenges we addressed today stand out to you? If so, this should be the first thing you tackle. Resolving the big issues first will help to improve productivity and employee happiness.
Once you’ve done this, really get into it and try to identify communication problems that haven’t fully manifested. Stopping these issues in their tracks will help you set your business up for long-term success.
