Communication: A Vital Determinant of Workplace Culture & Productivity

Part One of this series examined the stories people quietly construct about one another’s behavior. Part Two includes details that may help you understand how communication affects workplace culture and performance, and influences behavior.

Workplace culture is often described in the language of mission statements and posters meant for marketing or to broadcast business standards. We must not forget that workplace culture is built, moment to moment, through ordinary communication.

Early communities relied on body language and vocal signals, elders’ storytelling to pass on traditions and memories, and long-distance methods such as drumming patterns and smoke signals to relay news and warnings across distances (South African History Online, 2011). Cave paintings created roughly 30,000 years ago are among the earliest known examples of visual communication, appearing well before any formal writing system (Capatana, 2024). Writing systems did not appear until roughly 5,000 years ago (Capatana, 2024). The tools available for communicating have changed considerably. The underlying need to share information reliably has not.

Communication within an organization carries decisions, expectations, and context between the people who must act on them. When communication is clear and reliable, coordinated effort tends to follow. When communication is ambiguous, delayed, or absent, uncertainty fills the gap, and that uncertainty may cause confusion and hurt productivity, engagement, and trust.

Structured Communication as a Performance Lever

During the Second World War, American manufacturers faced a crisis of time and skilled labor, as factory supervisors were called into military service just as demand for equipment accelerated. The federal government’s response included the development of a training program called Training Within Industries. The program’s organizers asked managers to open a continuous channel for small, incremental suggestions from every employee, not only supervisors (Maurer, 2004, pp. 13–14). Suggestion boxes were placed directly on factory floors, and executives were instructed to treat every comment with genuine respect (Maurer, 2004, p. 14).

The quality and speed of American equipment production were driven by sharing and receiving feedback (Maurer, 2004, p. 14). The same approach was used in Japan, where it evolved into what is now known globally as kaizen. Japanese businesses that adopted kaizen rose to among the highest levels of productivity in the world (Maurer, 2004, p. 16). In both cases, the mechanism was not a change in what work was being done, but a change in how information about that work was allowed to travel: upward, continuously, and with an institutional commitment to act on it.

When Communication Fails

In The Laws of Human Nature, Greene (2018) noted that over 65 percent of all human communication is nonverbal, yet people consciously register only about 5 percent of it. Most of our attention focuses on words. Greene explained, “words are often used as a cover-up, a way to conceal what is really going on” (p. 92).

Confusion, Doubt, and the Time It Takes to Recover

Ambiguous communication not only produces logistical errors; it produces an unproductive aftermath. Much of the productivity costs of poor communication accumulate after mistakes are made or when confusion kicks in. The unproductive aftermath includes fixing mistakes, lots of second-guessing, and people privately rehearsing what the instruction might have meant. Resources are wasted. Distress commences. Nguyen (2022) argued that hesitation, doubt, and insecurity tend to surface not from the triggering event itself, but from the overthinking and over-analyzing that follows it (p. 46).

Nguyen (2022) further noted that goals or expectations introduced under pressure or urgency tend to manifest into self-doubt and something close to imposter syndrome in the people asked to carry them out (p. 49). The same goals or expectations, however, introduced with clarity and a shared sense of purpose are far less likely to trigger the same spiral. Once confusion has been introduced, some people and some teams settle quickly after clarification; others take considerably longer. This pattern is not confined to the workplace. Brown (2007), while researching how people move through experiences of shame and uncertainty, found that recognizing a difficult moment for what it is allows a person to find the space needed to process the experience and regain clarity. It is best to allow time for processing, rather than reacting immediately or shutting down. Allowing time to process is also necessary after a workplace miscommunication has been cleared up. Pushing an employee or team that survived confusion rarely speeds recovery.

Practical Reminders to Put Communication to Work

Professionals at any level may consider the following reminders.

• Be present during conversations and pay attention to nonverbal cues. Most people focus on the words being said. You can learn more by watching body language.
• Create a communication channel for feedback. Treat both received and given feedback with respect. When feedback is received, act on it if appropriate. Communicate efforts to improve based on feedback. When giving feedback, be clear. The Training Within Industries suggestion-box model worked not because it collected ideas, but because those ideas were acted on and acknowledged rather than filed away (Maurer, 2004, pp. 13–14).
• Give confusion room to resolve. Rumination, not the original event, is what sustains confusion and doubt (Nguyen, 2022, p. 46). Professionals recovering from miscommunication may benefit from having space (after clarification is given) to process the matter rather than being pressured toward an immediate return (Brown, 2007).