Editorial
Effective communication is a perennial challenge in all workplaces. It isn’t so much about getting people talking — the digital tools for that exist and are well-used — but instead about the substance of the communication itself.
In particular, the ease with which questions can be posed by frontline workers or customers themselves and answered is crucial to customer experience and process execution. Delays in getting an answer from a backend system or team are acutely felt on the front end, and this is often a key driver behind improvement initiatives.
Scoping work on these initiatives could involve town hall meetings and workshops, as well as more technically-oriented work such as a process mapping exercise. In my experience, there are often two common outcomes from these exercises that both point to a lack of effective communication.
Straying From Processes
The communication process is often more complex, with more moving parts, than imagined. While it may initially appear to be the domain of a single department or team, as the mapping exercise progresses, it often becomes clearer how the process interconnects or interacts with many other parts of the organization, with both back-to-front and front-to-back communication flows and information exchanges.
Second, the process flows, including the ease with which this exchange of communications between the front and back-of-house occurs, are often different from expectations or previous documentation. Business processes often evolve informally over time, as different people approach some of the steps in different ways.
As informal workarounds or variations become part of the process structure, things slowly drift out of alignment with what organizations think is occurring. The process still works, but at some point questions arise about its efficiency, structure or operation outside of previously understood patterns. Only then might the extent of the drift become apparent.
A hard truth in this is that over time, people don’t stray from the documented process with any ill-intent. Instead, variances often occur as a workaround to problems with data quality and information exchange between the different internal teams who have a stake in the process. Those variances then stick as communication bottlenecks and organizational misalignment becomes more entrenched.
Related Article: Communication Breakdown at Work? Here's What to Do
Disparate Knowledge Sources and Definitions
Companies often lack a single source of knowledge or truth internally, as well as standard language or definitions for processes and requests between teams and functions, which makes effective communications more difficult.
Many organizations have evolved, organically or by acquisition, to have multiple instances of what would better function as a single, standard business system and source of truth. Instead, there exists a convoluted knowledge base that can mean multiple possible answers to a single question.
There have been several responses to this problem in recent times.. One is application consolidation efforts to merge overlapping platforms and set up one organization- or group-wide platform.
Standardizing systems requires considerable planning and language work.. Many business and government organizations execute this under the guise of data governance, as teams seek to address the fundamental lack of accepted definitions and language standards. It’s a foundational step to moving to a single standardized system that records all newly-created data in a standard way.
It’s also important for historical data. By cleaning up different existing datasets with standardized fields and terminology, they can be joined together and utilized, for example, as training data for an artificial intelligence model.
There are, of course, greater benefits to having the entire organization agree on language than just standardizing the way data is collected. It also opens enormous possibilities to streamline communications between teams and functions. With everyone speaking the same language, and tapping into supporting data that carries the same meaning, it streamlines process flows.
With ineffective communications between the front and back-of-house no longer adversely impacting the execution of a process it should lead to efficiency dividends, such as reduced time-to-serve and a better customer experience.
Related Article: Disorganized Data Can Hold You Back — Here's How to Fix It
Engage Your People for Optimal Results
Given the considerable work involved here, some organizations may elect to skip these steps and use an overlay to make sense of their information complexity. This could involve the use of chatbots or generative AI to look across all the different systems and datasets, with the aim of surfacing a summarized single answer to a question. It could also mean surfacing an answer deemed the best fit, while providing the other answers as well in case they offer additional assistance or context.
This approach is not without its challenges, however. You will likely need to keep a human involved to ensure that the bot or AI’s summary or ‘read’ of the information is correct. In addition, it does little to address the underlying causes of ineffective communication, and organizations may find they still need to pursue some kind of standardization efforts down the line.
There are challenges present in whatever approach is chosen to enhance communications and improve business processes,but it’s important for organizations to embrace change. While the discovery that a process is more operationally complex than it first appeared may be daunting, that should not stop organizations from moving forward.
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Tooling can be a significant aid to breaking the process into its component parts; assigning ownership, roles and responsibilities; getting internal teams on the same page and driving continuous improvement to ensure processes aren’t able to drift back out of alignment.
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