Chapter 39: Investments & costs

For the next forty minutes Barney, Darren and Graham brainstormed numerous ways in which Internal Communication activities could hurt the business’s bottom line.? Darren had offered to act as scribe, but Barney said he wanted to capture these ideas for himself.? He connected his device to the screen on Graham’s wall.? When they were done, they sat for a couple of minutes admiring the fruits of their labour.

Necessary investments

A.??? IC Budget

B.??? Production time:

IC Specialists, clients and approval group members

C.??? Audience time

Wasteful production & distribution costs

These can make the necessary investments unnecessarily high.?

1.?Moving goalposts

Clients change their minds about what they want.? These changes inevitably mean it takes longer to produce a finished piece of work.

2. Ditched projects

The goalposts don’t get moved, but removed.? The IC Specialists do loads of work on a communication project, which gets binned before it sees the light of day.? So, all the time invested in it up to that point has been wasted.?

3. Wasted audience time

Communications waffling on for longer than necessary, or going to people who simply don’t need them.

?Communication failure costs

Either a communication has failed to do its job.? More insidiously – even counter-intuitively – the business can incur these communication costs because people aren’t communicating.?

4. Repeat communications

If a communication is supposed to address a long-term issue, it can be redone if it doesn’t work first time.? This means having to make the investments again (perhaps several times).?

?But what’s happening in the meantime?? Or what if the issue is a short term one??

• It makes no difference, because the communication, wasn’t needed, and the investments were money down the drain.
• It will incur one or more of the following failure costs?

?5. Rework

This can come from two sources:

• It could be duplication of effort: people doing a load of work that others have already done, but nobody’s thought to tell them.?
• it may be the time people are having to spend correcting their own or other people’s mistakes and misunderstandings, which can arise from:

- not having all the information they need to do their jobs properly,

- not understanding that information correctly.?

?6.???? ?Missed opportunities

These can manifest in different ways:

• short term issues: the business’s opportunities to either save money, or generate additional income or good will, have immediately been missed.?
• long term issues: employee time spent receiving unnecessary communications, or correcting the resultant mistakes or misunderstandings, is costing additional profit or stakeholder value those employees could have generated during that time.?

7. Lost audience good will

This impact can vary.?

• On employees it can increase the risk of disengagement: lower productivity, possibly industrial action, or higher staff turnover (with inevitably higher recruitment, training and possibly overtime costs).?
• On customers: if ill-informed or demotivated employees are communicating with customers, it can mean more complaints (possibly incurring compensation payments) and/or fewer sales, re-sales or referrals.? In extreme instances: court cases, legal fees,? (and possibly compliance fines and higher insurance premiums).

?8. Brand damage

Beyond unhappy customers, the availability of social media platforms can mean some employees may say brand-damaging things in the public arena.?

(They may do this because they’re disengaged and disgruntled, thanks to poor communication from their boss or elsewhere.? Or it may be more innocent; maybe they’ve misunderstood something their boss said, because it wasn’t as TRACELACE as it needed to be.)?

9.???? Purpose failure

Ultimately, if the business’s internal communications keep going wrong, it can start failing to fulfil its very purpose.? (Sometimes such failures can happen in a particular department – eg IT – of an otherwise healthy organisation.)’

It was a sobering list which, given his nervousness around numbers, Darren found both comforting and daunting.? It was reassuring to know that one of Unicorp’s CFOs had helped put it together, which leant it credibility.? But could they turn these headings into numbers which senior people would take seriously?

“Wow.? That’s a huge amount of potential.” He observed.? “The question is, Barney, how much of it can we credibly measure, and how would we go about doing so?”

“Good question, Darren.? And one which will require further thought.”?

He felt his phone vibrating in his pocket, knowing it was the alarm he’d set.? “Oh, damn it all!? Gotta rush.? Maybe we could pick this up some other time?”?

He closed his laptop, tapping it as he rose.? “I’ll email this to you” he said, making a hurried beeline for the door.

With an indulgent smile Graham called after his friend’s retreating back.? “Oh, right, so I’m still not getting that pint, then.”

Darren watched the departing accountant with dismay, feeling like he was sitting in a cinema and someone had just sat in front of him with a huge hairdo.? He was all keyed up to see the picture, and now he couldn’t.

“Don’t worry,” Graham assured him.? “We’ll catch up with him shortly.? In the meantime, we have a lunch appointment ourselves to talk through that small matter of the IC Practice Governance model itself.”

And with that, Siobhan popped her head round the door.

“Sorry to trouble you, guys.? Do you have a minute?”

About the author

We are Russell+Olivia Brooklands (ROB) - and we've been working in the field of Internal Communication for over 25 years.?We specialise in enabling IC Teams to get everything they want, to do the job exactly the way they want to do it – for good.? If you're an IC Manager we can help you secure all the:

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Some people don't dare to dream this is doable.? But in fact it's all within your grasp.? And imagine what a difference it could make to your day-to-day working life, and your long-term career, if you had it all. We’ll be delighted to explain how you can make it happen.? Message us if you’d like to have a chat.