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Business Communication

Does your organization suffer from the classic ‘wars’ of us versus them, management versus the workforce, maintenance versus production, central office versus the branches, in general terms - silo versus silo – or do people in your organization work as one team heading in one direction? Is the focus on tackling problems or on fixing blame?  What can make the difference is the embedding of business communication at all levels of the organization, particularly at the workforce level. Sound business communication is essential for business today. Its absence can be one of the most costly errors made by management.

 

Whenever the output of work relies on the contribution of more than a single individual, all those involved must be able to communicate effectively. Whenever you see individuals working together successfully, you find regular two-way communication.  Communication skills are essential for team work.  While organizations may invest resources in ensuring that the financial director has all the information he or she needs to make decisions and perform the role effectively, those same organizations may invest few resources in delivering the sort of business communication and information that workers need to perform their role – yet these are the people who immediately add value to the products or services delivered by the organization.  As Lynton Hayes said, when he was Executive Director, AIM, Western Australia :

 

The message coming from workers is loud and clear: My productivity would be higher if my supervisor and management would give me more feedback on the results of my work, listen more to my ideas and provide greater recognition for good work.

 

An organization’s business communication has to be directed to all those who work in the organization and in terms that are relevant to each work group. For example, the performance measurement system must show the financial director how the company’s actual financial performance compares with its budgeted performance, and also show each local team how their actual performance compares with their performance targets.

 

When business communication is systematically established across the organization, particularly in the form of performance feedback, a performance culture inevitably results. Because business communication brings relevant performance information to everyone, ownership  and accountability of performance targets can be transferred directly to the various teams doing the work. When teams take responsibility for their targets and get clear performance feedback on how they are doing, they are motivated to improve. A culture of performance improvement develops and grows.

Effective business communication skills are therefore essential for any leadership role because leaders must communicate effectively with their team members and also with the manager to whom they themselves report. Effective leaders direct their teams’ efforts towards team goals through delegating tasks, imparting information and providing feedback, all of which require communication skills.  If you can’t communicate effectively, you can’t lead. But no-one is born a good communicator; business communication skills are developed.

 

When change is introduced into an organization, effective business communication is essential to ensure that everyone understands and accepts the change. Effective business communication keeps everyone informed and involved. Technical people in technical environments are notoriously poor communicators. Sometimes they don’t communicate at all. This becomes a significant problem for management when change is implemented at the workforce level, especially if resistance to change is supported by unions that have the capacity to win the hearts and minds of the workforce by their allegiance to the maxim that ‘he who communicates leads’.  A sound business communication strategy is essential to the successful implementation of a performance improvement system. The business communication strategy should address both what to communicate and how to communicate, particularly at the workforce level.

 

In the absence of a sound communication strategy, even the most carefully thought out and well-planned performance system will fail.  Performance-linked communication relates organizational communication to the performance needs of the organization by answering the question, ‘What needs to be communicated to the person doing the job so that targets can be achieved?’ and then building the infrastructure to ensure its delivery.

Performance-linked communication is a purposeful, ongoing and integral part of an organization’s continuous improvement system. It can be a major contributor to a sustainable competitive advantage by ensuring the continuous flow of performance information to all the people doing the work.

 

Performance-linked communication enables the organization’s values, vision, mission, strategic goals and targets to be felt throughout the organization, providing a unified sense of direction that has everyone singing from the same song sheet. Strategy is translated into team outputs, performance measures, targets and action plans, ensuring that what people do on a daily basis is connected to the achievement of the organization’s goals. How the team is performing in relation to outputs, performance measures and targets is monitored and fed back to the teams so that variations can be identified and corrected. Poor performance is analyzed and corrected.

 

Continuous performance feedback gives control to each team because it shows them how they are doing and what they need to do to improve. When management rewards and thereby reinforces strong performance, employees are motivated to perform well and performance improvement becomes anchored within all parts of the organization.

 

 

What is best practice?

Best practice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

 

Perhaps you have seen many a promising innovation do more harm than good to the complex arrangement of systems that make up your organization. After all, we all have a limited capacity for trying new things, especially when we see numerous initiatives come and go without any lasting positive effect.

Many a consultant is ready to promise that their approach, aimed at solving part of the problem, will provide a total solution. However, total and continuous performance improvement and best practice relies on more than just measuring performance or developing goals or putting in a new system. If you are to achieve sustained performance improvement and best practice, nothing short of a purposeful, total and systematic approach will suffice.


Sacher Associates has identified the following ten essential components of team performance that are strongly evident in all high-performance teams and are basic to achieving best practice.

 

The ten essential components of team performance

  • A unified sense of direction
  • Strategy or long-term goals
  • Outputs and performance measures
  • Targets
  • Performance feedback
  • Communication
  • Training (skills/knowledge)
  • Systems and processes
  • Structure and job design
  • Reward systems

 

The better a team develops these components, the better its performance. By developing the ones that need improvement in your organisation, you are able to get on with creating a high-performance environment and culture for your organization. When these ten components are systematically built into everyday activities, performance always continuously improves and best practice is achieved.

 

Performance problems arise in business when management has not properly designed the organization’s performance systems. Encouraging the workforce to focus on the ten essential components of team performance concentrates their efforts on tackling any problems, rather than fixing blame. Engineering a work environment conducive to team performance gets widespread support within the workforce, and enables you to achieve best practice.

 

Many people believe that their organisations have ‘been there, done that’ or are ‘currently doing all of this stuff’. However, many of them are yet to anchor these ten components even minimally, let alone at best practice levels, especially at the workforce and team leader/supervisor levels.

 

In other organizations, although managers attend in some way to these ten components of team performance, they do not go the distance in ensuring that these components become successfully and permanently entrenched in the work environment or culture – the stage that is directly correlated with the highest levels of employee performance and job satisfaction.

 

As we are human beings, the potential to improve our performance is limitless, and the competition intense. Our business focus should be on achieving best practice through increasingly more thorough implementation of these ten essential components.

 

If you are not yet achieving best practice in all ten components across all the teams in your organization, you have the opportunity to improve performance through sharpening your practice within each of these basic, essential components.

 

To assist you in achieving best practice Sacher Associates has distilled 25 years of practical consulting experience and advice into four productivity manuals (Performance Measures Applied, Commonsense Approach to Business Planning, Performance-linked Communication, Performance-linked Learning) and into our two books Success through Team Performance and simple, easy-to-use book What Do I Do on Monday Morning? This book gives you daily advice on practical ways of achieving sustained performance improvement. The items for each day in January focus on ‘the big picture’ while the daily items for February to November focus on each of Sacher Associates’ ten essential components of team performance. The December entries provide guidance on how to successfully implement high-performance teamwork.