What happens when communication fails in the workplace?
What are the common problems in communication and what can we do to fix communication issues at work?
In this case study we will try to understand how things can go wrong and what should be done to avoid the catastrophic consequences of bad communication.
Let’s take a look at small projects that you have to work on daily. Projects or activities that somehow you were expecting would improve your job, increase efficiency, productivity or improve relationships.
In this post, I want to analyse what brings people to fail in communicating.
I want to analyse a real event happened in the company I work for when a new project had to be planned and executed to improve scheduling of the machining and tooling department.
Creation of a new project
Our Head of quality (that we will call Mr L.) suggested that the company needed to improve the planning and scheduling of the machining and tooling department.
All companies that have machine production do this, and we already had someone scheduling this department (Mr M.), but we needed someone that could do it much more in detail and ahead of time.
- Eventually, the supervisor of the machining department (Mr S.) was elected to be the best person for this job, so the CEO of the company decided that Mr M. had to train Mr S. and explain the method he followed for the planning.
- Mr M. is known to be someone that likes to work the way he wants to work! In other words, he is not known for being someone that listens to other people’s opinion, so Mr S. (much younger) had some difficulty getting information out of Mr M.
- This problem had been planned. In fact, before this project started there had been at least two separate meetings, one together with Mr M. in which the steps of the projects were planned and agreed upon, and one meeting without Mr M. where the relationship issue was discussed with the CEO.
Starting the project
Mr S. was not satisfied with the training received by Mr M. and more than once explained that he could not start scheduling the machines if he had not received more information from Mr M.
After he explained this simple point to the CEO, he almost lost his job and was told that “there are other people out there that can do your job!”.
Mr S. almost left the company, but eventually decided to continue and asked help to other members of the company and understood that there were important elements missing.
He had very poor tools that could not help him understand what had to be scheduled, there was no method and the MRP (Material Requirement Planning) was missing most BOMs.
Without this basic information there was no way that he could receive the correct data from the MRP and start planning.
Where is the communication issue?
Mr. M. was cut out without notice.
The first and maybe the most important mistake was performed by the CEO. He did not understand why there was a need to increase efficiency in the planning and did not communicate properly this need to Mr M. which had been doing it for over 10 years.
How to communicate with Mr M?
The communication issue with Mr M. was not sufficiently taken into consideration by the CEO nor by the head of quality. Given the younger age of Mr S. it was given for granted that there would have been communication differences between the two, but clearly, this cannot be a reason for not facilitating communication.
Age difference in today’s companies is a very important topic that has been studied for decades and needs to be understood deeply by HR managers, CEO’s and middle management in organizations.
What should have been done?
First, the communication problem with Mr M. should have risen at the beginning, in the very first meeting, and should have been faced directly explaining what everyone expected from him.
Second, there had to be a better role definition and goal setting. Who does what and when!
If everyone had a clear idea of the steps required before Mr S. could take ownership of his new task, probably they would have learned from the very beginning that there were important information missing.
They would have saved a lot of time and probably Mr S. wouldn’t have almost lost his job for no reason.
What everyone did was concentrate on the relationship with Mr M. and believed that the project could not continue because of him and not because of the lack of tools to properly schedule the machines.
How did things go?
It ended with Mr S. losing almost 3 months without planning.
The company lost a lot of time and money on something that would have taken a few days to figure out.
Mr M. and Mr S. did not improve their communication skills.
The head of quality stopped following the project and did not facilitate the cooperation between the two.
Communication continued to fail and other projects did not meet the results expected.
The CEO believed that Mr S. was not right for the job and probably never changed idea.
Production efficiency decreased.
All of these “catastrophic” consequences were caused by a simple communication issue.
Common communication issues
These are some common communication difficulties:
- Not explaining goals and priorities properly
- Not asking questions
- Preconceived ideas
- Not understand the actual problem and where the project is aiming to
- Jumping to conclusions
- Not exploring alternatives
