Further Resources

Why Your Company's Communication Strategy is Confusing Everyone (And How to Fix It Without Another Bloody Meeting)

The other day I watched a senior executive spend forty-five minutes explaining a "simple" new process to his team. By the end, three people had different interpretations of what they were supposed to do, two had given up entirely, and one person was frantically scribbling notes that would later prove completely useless.

This wasn't some startup chaos or family business dysfunction. This was a Fortune 500 company with a dedicated communications team, branded templates, and enough process documentation to choke a horse.

The problem? Their communication strategy was designed by committee, approved by lawyers, and delivered by people who'd never actually done the work they were explaining.

The Real Problem Isn't What You Think

Most companies think communication problems stem from poor public speaking skills or unclear emails. They send people to presentation training courses and call it a day.

But here's the thing - and this might ruffle some feathers - your communication isn't failing because your people can't speak properly. It's failing because you're trying to communicate everything to everyone all the time, and you've forgotten that good communication requires someone to actually shut up and listen.

I've worked with over 200 companies across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane over the past eighteen years. The ones with the worst communication are usually the ones with the most communication policies.

They've got style guides thicker than phone books, templates for templates, and approval processes that require sign-off from people who weren't even in the original meeting. It's madness.

Stop Trying to Sound Like Everyone Else

Walk into any corporate office and listen to how people talk. "Let's circle back on this." "I'll reach out offline." "We need to socialise this concept across stakeholders."

What absolute rubbish.

These phrases don't mean anything. They're corporate white noise designed to make people sound important while saying nothing at all. And yet companies spend thousands training their teams to speak this way because someone decided it sounds "professional."

You know what sounds professional? Saying what you mean clearly and then stopping.

When Atlassian launched their Work Life blog, they didn't try to sound like IBM or McKinsey. They wrote like actual humans talking about actual work problems. And guess what? People read it, shared it, and actually changed how they worked because of it.

Compare that to the corporate communications you receive. How many company newsletters have you read cover to cover lately? How many internal announcements have actually influenced your behaviour?

Exactly.

The Meeting Epidemic

Here's where I'm going to lose some of you, but someone needs to say it: 80% of your communication problems would disappear if you stopped having meetings about meetings.

I recently worked with a client - let's call them a major telecommunications company - where the average employee attended 23 hours of meetings per week. Twenty-three hours. That's more than half their working time spent talking about work instead of doing it.

And here's the kicker: when we surveyed their staff, 67% said they regularly left meetings unclear about their action items.

The solution wasn't better meeting management training. It wasn't improved facilitation skills. It was cancelling three-quarters of the meetings and replacing them with clear, written communication that people could actually reference later.

But try suggesting this to most executives and watch their faces. They'll nod politely while mentally scheduling a meeting to discuss your suggestion.

What Actually Works (And Why You Won't Like It)

Effective workplace communication has three characteristics that most companies absolutely hate:

It's brutally specific. Not "improve customer satisfaction" but "reduce average response time to under 4 hours for all support tickets logged between 9am and 5pm." Not "enhance team collaboration" but "Sarah will send weekly project updates every Tuesday by 3pm, including what's blocked and who's responsible for unblocking it."

It assumes people are intelligent. Stop explaining everything like you're talking to children. Your employees figured out how to get hired; they can probably understand why you're asking them to do something without a thirty-slide PowerPoint explaining the strategic rationale.

It acknowledges when things aren't working. This is the big one. Good communication includes admitting mistakes, changing direction, and saying "we don't know yet" when that's the truth.

Most companies would rather send seventeen carefully worded emails avoiding a difficult conversation than have one honest discussion that solves the problem.

The Tools Aren't the Problem

Every second week, someone shows me a new communication platform that's going to "revolutionise workplace collaboration." Slack, Teams, Notion, Monday, Asana - the list never ends.

And you know what happens? Companies implement these tools on top of their existing communication chaos, and suddenly instead of getting unclear emails, people get unclear Slack messages. Instead of pointless meetings, they get pointless video calls with better audio quality.

The tool isn't the problem. Your approach is the problem.

I've seen teams using basic email more effectively than others using million-dollar collaboration platforms. The difference wasn't the technology - it was whether people actually thought about what they were trying to achieve before they started typing.

Here's a radical idea: before you buy another communication tool, try improving the actual communication skills of your people. Novel concept, I know.

The Australian Advantage (That We're Wasting)

Australians have a natural advantage in workplace communication that we're systematically destroying with imported corporate speak.

We're culturally comfortable with direct conversation. We don't mind asking "What's the actual point here?" We're skeptical of unnecessary complexity. We value getting things done over talking about getting things done.

But walk into most Australian offices and listen to how people communicate. It sounds like they've been through a corporate language blender that removed all traces of personality and clarity.

Canva didn't become a billion-dollar company by communicating like everyone else. Neither did Afterpay or Atlassian. They talked like Australians solving real problems for real people.

Yet somehow, the moment we step into a corporate environment, we start "leveraging synergies" and "optimising outcomes" instead of just doing good work and telling people about it clearly.

What to Do Tomorrow

Stop reading here and implement these three changes:

Pick one communication channel for each type of message. Project updates go in email. Urgent issues go via phone. Social chat happens in Slack. Stop mixing them up and wondering why nothing gets through.

Write everything at a Year 10 reading level. If you wouldn't say it to your neighbour over the fence, don't put it in a work email. This includes you, legal team.

Set a 48-hour rule for responses. Not "as soon as possible" or "at your earliest convenience" - 48 hours. Then actually stick to it, which means not sending non-urgent emails at 11pm on Sunday expecting Monday morning responses.

Look, I get it. Changing communication feels risky when everyone's already confused. But here's the thing - they're already confused. You're not breaking something that works; you're fixing something that's been broken for years.

The companies that figure this out first won't just have better internal communication. They'll have competitive advantages that show up in everything from customer service to product development to staff retention.

The rest will keep scheduling meetings to discuss why their communication isn't working.

Your choice.

Further Reading: Communication Training for Better Workplace Results | Professional Development Investment Strategies | Modern Communication Skills Training | Workplace Communication Excellence