What’s the actual cost of inefficient internal communications?
Do you feel you and your team struggle to reach employees in meaningful ways? Despite your best efforts, your comms may still miss the mark sometimes. Your team can waste months preparing newsletters and planning all-hands meetings if employees routinely ignore internal communications or tune out during events.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help reach and engage employees—potentially making it easier to tailor and deliver content that employees want to read when they need to. Yet, Gartner® predicts, “By 2025, 70% of enterprises will deploy at least one enterprise-wide GenAI application, but less than 10% will realize the expected ROI.”
This unrealized ROI will likely be due to a lack of optimization and complete understanding of how best to implement these tools—a reality that actually applies to any communications tool or process, not just GenAI. Companies invest heavily in technologies to improve efficiency. Still, if comms teams don’t fully understand how to leverage tool capabilities and systematize processes, these investments become costly line items without adding much value.
Inefficient communication in corporate internal comms
When we talk about “inefficient communications” in corporate comms, we mean that the messaging doesn’t achieve its purpose of informing and engaging employees and fails to achieve objectives such as motivating changes in thoughts or behavior. Here are five common causes of internal comms inefficiencies:
2. Send too much irrelevant content to too many people when only snippets or subsections apply.
3. Sending long, overly complicated messages that are challenging for employees to digest.
4. Using improper channels to distribute the content to specific audiences.
5. Using the right technology, but in the wrong way.
Being on the receiving end of inefficient communications often causes employees to tune out your messaging and complain about information overload and not receiving critical information. This situation creates a costly gap between what employees need to know and what they actually consume and retain.
The cost of inefficient and ineffective communications
1. Higher stress and lower morale.
According to The Economist, poor communication can contribute to serious but intangible issues, such as stress and low morale. Increased stress was identified as the most significant consequence of poor communication, with 52% of respondents selecting it as a top repercussion.
2. Wasting resources.
Gartner® predicts, “By 2027, organizations will shift 80% of marketing content spend to GenAI services, but effectiveness will plummet by 50% due to overwhelmed consumers.” So, while GenAI might be able to help your team produce more content in less time, the known result of sending too much content is less readership. So, if employees don’t read or engage with this content, it’s all for nothing at best and, at worst, spins the productivity clock backward by wasting otherwise productive time.
3. Information overload.
It’s already easy to overwhelm readers with too much content. Skillfully editing down to a concise, complete paragraph is challenging work. The sheer volume of emails, intranet pages, news feeds, business updates, and announcements can quickly overwhelm employees. When overloaded by excessive communication, employees may tune out entirely, missing critical information and lowering engagement.
Moving Towards Efficient, Engaging Internal Comms
Inefficient communications are costly. To avoid communication inefficiencies, prioritize authenticity and relevancy through audience targeting and technology optimization. Organizations that deploy AI tools must leverage data-driven insights and monitor employee interactive behaviors to learn how to boost employee engagement and avoid overload.
