The Costs of Communications
It’s expensive for your team to talk to each other, and expensive if they don’t.
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Until AI takes over everything, companies are still made of people. Those people need to work together to achieve the goals of the business, and the better they work together the better the business performs. To work well together, all those people need to communicate.
Therein lies the problem.
If a team only has two people, communication is easy. Both people likely know everything that is happening, and there is only one other person to coordinate.
If a team has twenty people, communication is harder. Not everyone knows everyone else, and everyone only sees part of the business. Communication requires knowing who to talk to and what to say.
If a team has two hundred people, communication is difficult. There are so many things happening that no one knows them all. It’s hard to know who to talk to and what to talk about.
Most companies spend time on their org chart, but fail to think through the communication design. How does someone know who to talk to about a particular problem? How do you find an answer to a specific question? How do you even know what is going on? If you don’t have easy answers, your communication design is broken.
If that includes your organization, don’t worry. You are in good company! Communication is often the hardest part of any business.
The problem is that communication has two costs. It’s expensive if your team can’t easily talk to each other, and it’s expensive if they can.
For example, there is a debate not between remote and in-office work. I don’t have an opinion on which is better, but it illustrates the two costs well:
Remote teams make communication slow and purposeful, as you need to schedule time for a video call or wait for someone to see your email. That can be good, as it limits distractions, and it can be bad as it slows things down when discussions are needed.
In person teams make communication fast and simple, since you can just talk in person about anything. That can be good, as you can talk through issues immediately, but it can be bad as the interruption rate can inhibit focused work.
Which is better? That depends on your team and what you need them to do. Do they need to do complex focused work, or quickly changing inter-dependent tasks? There is no one answer, just a series of costs you need to balance.
The first step in designing a good communication system is to understand these costs and make explicit decisions about which costs you want to incur and which to avoid. Being purposeful about your decision will lead to a better org design and less overhead.
You’ll know when you have succeeded when communication no longer feels like a burden. Then, all of the people on your team can focus on doing their jobs.
For more on Teams and Communications, see: