No matter what role you have in an organization – a manager, a vendor, a consultant, or an advisor – each comes with its own challenges, particularly in managing workplace communication issues.
Effective communication is the lifeblood of any successful organization, and navigating these challenges is essential for fostering a productive and harmonious work environment.
These communication issues often involve conflicts in employee relations. It’s usually the nitpicking or annoyance from the older hire that shows. Or, complaints about too much communication overhead or lack of proper onboarding internally primarily caused by the lack of Wiki or other documentation in larger companies whereas 5+ people in a single role have gone through it already.
Managing Communication Overhead in Growing Organizations
In a small team wherein you are responsible for monitoring communication workflows closely, stay alert for communication challenges. Mitigate these issues with the following workplace communication techniques and strategies.
Growing teams require additional help from different departments. Your senior members (or other managers) can help you analyze communication bottlenecks or seemingly low-value tasks that take a lot longer than expected.
Communication complexity and other relevant issues can arise for various reasons, such as:
- Onboarding new members who need some time to catch up
- Limited documentation for new hire training
- Undefined processes within the organization
- Introducing new roles in a department
- Creating a separate department with unclear responsibilities
- Promoting a member to a different department
- Increasing the responsibilities of a team
- Looping multiple new team members into a new project
While this list isn’t comprehensive, it’s easy to deduct that different problems require different solutions, especially since these issues manifest in different forms across organizations. Some popular examples include:
- Multiple meetings with several stakeholders led by the same member
- Ineffective meetings taking forever and including the wrong members
- Incomprehensible online communication (email or Messenger)
- Long, painful discussions with no particular focus
- Miscommunication while receiving mixed signals by different team members
- Endless onboarding for existing roles
- Extensive debugging or support time due to vagueness in existing processes
- Overhead in incorporating Enterprise-grade workflows in smaller organizations
- Repeating the same work over and over due to disorganized organizational knowledge
Common Communication Challenges in Growing Teams
1. Multiple Layers of Management
I don’t rant against big corps. Larger organizations require multiple layers of management, and communication overhead increases significantly. Everything takes longer due to cross-department coordination. Operational processes are designed for operational stability, not for speed.
It’s just the way it is.
And some R&D teams may operate more efficiently, somewhat independently. But that’s certainly more of an exception than the norm.
2. Limited Technical Expertise
A limited technical expertise or limited training increases the occurrences of communication challenges within the team.
For instance, developers need focus – since engineering is a complex craft that relies on building technical context of an application with its corresponding environment, use cases, and potential risks.
Non-technical stakeholders tend to organize one too many meetings in order to get acquainted with a project, reducing productivity even further.
The only way to combat meetings is by hacking them.
Here’s a handy breakdown on running effective meetings that I leveraged and built upon.
3. Time Zone and Geographic Challenges
Productivity may be lower in some cases when working in a distributed team. Pushing hard to deploy a project or launch a new version of a product is simply more efficient at the office. Co-located teams get excited and work hard in order to get the work done. The communication challenges, time zone, and cultural barriers may reduce operational efficiency – at times.
4. Agency Collaboration Challenges
If I have an internal team that needs help, a freelancer could be a good asset and integrate with the team. An agency would build additional operational complexity and coordination overhead which results in more coordination challenges.
5. Managing Multiple Stakeholders
Service-based companies are most prone to facing this earthquake and failing to get on track without losing several strategic projects. There are multiple stakeholders with competing deadlines and business requirements, leading to coordination challenges and scaling challenges in-house across different teams.
Of course, this is just as applicable for product companies, reporting to a executive leadership, investors, partners, and the public (especially in the event of reputation challenges).
[Tweet “Communication overhead is often a byproduct of scaling.”]
In any case, workplace communication issues are common, especially within larger companies.
You should accept it and work on limiting it. Identify the root cause, design an action plan for mitigation, share it with your team, get everyone on board, and monitor until there is no need to escalate the problem.
Don’t worry, the next one will show up soon enough, but the same process will be sufficient to handle the coming business challenges.
Communication Strategies for Growing Organizations
Communication complexity is often a byproduct of scaling.
Adding more employees to a team, working on a vastly larger project, managing stakeholder expectations, and dealing with more stakeholders can lead to more coordination challenges.
When I co-founded my first startup, we were a couple of people discussing requirements over email, on the phone or meeting face to face. Once we’ve introduced a designer and another developer, we had to switch to a model that required some proper planning and project management. Both hires were remote which meant more asynchronous communication online.
The team wasn’t working twice as fast either – we’ve been spending a lot of time collaborative planning, tracking progress, and refining processes accordingly.
The overhead was notable – and things continued to evolve with time. More bookkeeping, legal challenges, managing expectations between different people in the team and clients, dealing with sick leaves, you name it.
Why Workflow Reviews Are Essential
Interviewing a marketing director the other day, I heard the following quote during the meeting:
Every time your organization grows to another multiplier of 3, some of your processes break.
In other words, every third additional hire to your team will likely cause operational inefficiency or communication bottlenecks.
It’s similar to Jeff Bezos’ rule of meetings – never schedule a meeting where two pizzas can’t feed the entire group of attendees. Software engineering applies similar rules – Brooks’ law states, “adding human resources to a late software project makes it later”.
This is why reviewing the current workflow should happen on a regular basis – especially when a team grows.
When we were a team of 6, almost all communication happened in 2 Skype group chats. We used Asana for strategic planning or bug tracking, but that was it.
Crossing the 10-person like requires one manager overseeing most operations. At 15, we hired our first office assistant. Before reaching 20, we refined some of our operational processes and the way we interact internally and document meeting logs. We had already switched to HipChat at that point.
We reached 40+ people a few months back and many of our previous processes were outdated and ineffective. There’s more communication complexity. New hire onboarding has to be structured in a better way since a project lead has to introduce 4-7 people to a project and those may work in time zone constraints and shifts.
Key Drivers of Effective Communication
Some companies aim for a flat organizational structure. That’s feasible until a certain point and only when you hire extremely professional experts with outstanding communication and self-management skills. Working with juniors, interns, assistants always requires some management complexity.
There is no optimal structure for a startup. It depends on the team, the leadership style, the duration of the sprints, how many activities the team juggles with simultaneously, and how many departments are involved in the process.
Document challenges and review them regularly. As soon as you’ve identify a pattern, you can start automating the process, in order to lay the foundations of a process that is easy to follow.
Study how your counterparts in the industry build and structure their teams. Doing so will help you with making even better talent decisions. Here are three questions whose answers are definitely useful when aiming to handle with communication overhead while scaling your business:
- Is additional management a must?
- Do you need a full-time HR person (or perhaps a legal expert)?
- How big should each team be?
Acting upon these decisions will require some iterative improvement but it’s a part of the learning cycle of every leadership.
Using Technology to Improve Communication
Technology innovations have contributed greatly to introducing new communication methods at the workplace.
Back in the day, your entire corporation was in the same building. No distributed workforce except for specific contractors (like journalists or salespeople working remotely). Everyone clocking in and out in the same space.
Phones have been around for a while now but mostly as a tool for connecting with other organizations, rarely internally.
How Internet Technologies Changed Workplace Communication
The internet adoption has started some 25-30 years ago. Initially, the prohibitive costs of computers prevented general employees from interacting with them on a daily basis. The trend has shifted to personal computers in the early 90s and Internet connectivity slowly began to pick up.
Messengers like ICQ, AOL, MSN gained popularity in some circles. Asynchronous communication prevailed for a while (starting from bulletin boards or IRC servers too).
The early 2000s introduced mobile computing as consumer devices at scale. Smartphones and mobile Internet offered by telecoms were made accessible for business users able to afford that. Every year millions of users were gaining access to the new technology, bringing costs down (at scale).
With cheaper (and more powerful) technology and faster Internet, virtual meetings became a thing. This was introduced by online audio calls and limited video calls after. Nowadays, Zoom or Gotomeeting is accessible everywhere for the general user even on a smartphone out of town.
This whole process sparked new digital workflows, led to the adoption of remote work practices, allowed for more effective communication across time zones, gave birth to powerful ERPs, CRMs, project management platforms, united people from different departments and even organizations living far apart and now able to bridge the communication barriers on the go.
Messaging platforms like Skype and lately Slack or Messenger led to an always-on culture, with push notifications and permanent Internet access available everywhere at an affordable cost.
This whole process kept morphing over the years, which is why digital communication now is predominantly online with meetings mostly organized within departments operating on the same floor, a lot more happening online, in a somewhat distributed, support-based on-call fashion.
Communication Requires Continuous Optimization
Management should always continuously monitor communication workflows and review performance metrics across the organization. Communication is almost always the underlying issue, led by ineffective processes.
But identifying the root cause would clearly indicate the specific action that contributed to the noise, and allow for rectifying and re-applying the new best practice for the sake of efficiency.
It’s rarely a single, isolated process, and it never ends with a single intervention. Communication optimization is an continuous process just like gardening or maintaining an automobile.
Check out this list of 31 other organizational challenges I have gathered to guide you as your company grows.
