2 common maladies hindering your internal communications

What’s impeding communication in your organization?

I recently met with clients to review their employee engagement scores. The senior vice president of HR responded to me with concern: “Wow, our communication scores are low. What’s going on here? We do actually talk to each other. I’m at least 75 percent sure of it.”

We then looked at the global norms—which were equally as low—and I said to him with a smile, “It appears that you guys aren’t alone.”

The puzzling part for all of us who work to ensure communication effectiveness is that most organizations have established ways for people to communicate—meetings, newsletters, email. We have cell phones. We text. We call. We IM.

So, what’s the problem?

There are the usual suspects:

There also might be two subtler obstacles, which we can coach people to avoid:

1. We overuse corporate jargon, acronyms and other weird sayings.

It’s hard enough to be understood at work without introducing unnecessary hurdles-and corporate jargon and acronyms definitely fall into that category.