My Thoughts

Why Your Company's Communication Strategy is Confusing (And How I Learned This the Hard Way)

Three months ago, I watched a perfectly competent marketing manager explain a simple product launch to her team using seventeen different buzzwords, two contradictory deadlines, and what I'm pretty sure was a made-up methodology called "agile waterfall integration."

The team nodded politely. Then spent the next week doing completely different things.

This wasn't some corporate giant with layers of bureaucracy. This was a 40-person Melbourne company that prided itself on being "nimble" and "communication-forward." Yet somehow, they'd managed to create a communication strategy so convoluted that even their weekly team updates required a decoder ring.

I've been consulting on workplace communication for sixteen years now, and I'm convinced that 80% of Australian businesses are accidentally sabotaging themselves with overcomplicated communication strategies. Not because they're incompetent—quite the opposite. They're trying so hard to sound professional, inclusive, and comprehensive that they've forgotten the point of communication: getting your message across.

The Jargon Trap (And Why We Keep Falling Into It)

Here's my controversial opinion: most communication training programs are making the problem worse.

They teach people to "leverage synergies" instead of "work together." They encourage "touching base offline" instead of "let's chat later." They turn simple updates into PowerPoint presentations with mission statements, key performance indicators, and action items that require follow-up meetings to discuss the action items from the previous meeting.

I watched this happen at a Brisbane logistics company last year. The CEO hired an expensive communication consultant who introduced something called "360-degree stakeholder engagement protocols." Suddenly, asking someone to cover a shift required a formal request through three different channels, a risk assessment, and what they called a "team impact evaluation."

The drivers started calling in sick more often. Not because they were actually sick, but because it was easier than navigating the new communication system to swap shifts.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

The Australian Problem with Being Too Polite

We've got this uniquely Australian challenge where we're trying to be polite and inclusive in our communication, but we're doing it in such a roundabout way that nobody knows what we're actually asking for.

I see this constantly in emails. Instead of writing "Please have the report ready by Friday," we write "If it's not too much trouble, and when you have a moment, could you possibly consider perhaps having the report available sometime around Friday, or whenever is convenient for you, no pressure whatsoever."

This isn't considerate communication. It's confusing communication disguised as politeness.

The result? Missed deadlines, unclear expectations, and teams that spend more time clarifying what was meant than actually doing the work.

What Actually Works (From Someone Who's Seen It All)

The best communication strategy I've ever encountered came from a Sydney plumbing contractor with 12 employees. No fancy frameworks. No consultation processes. Just three simple rules:

Say what you mean
Say when you need it
Confirm they heard you

That's it.

Their project completion rate was 94%. Their employee satisfaction scores were through the roof. Their clients consistently rated them as "excellent communicators."

Meanwhile, I've worked with ASX-listed companies whose communication strategies filled 47-page documents and whose project completion rates hovered around 60%.

There's a lesson here that most business schools won't teach you: clarity beats sophistication every single time.

The Technology Trap

Don't get me started on companies that think adding more communication tools will solve their communication problems.

Slack for instant messaging. Teams for video calls. Email for formal communication. WhatsApp for urgent stuff. Monday.com for project updates. Trello for task management. And somehow, inevitably, a Facebook group chat that half the team forgot they joined.

I worked with a Melbourne accounting firm that used seven different platforms to discuss a single client project. Seven. The project manager spent three hours a day just checking all the different channels to make sure she hadn't missed anything important.

When I suggested they pick two platforms and stick with them, you'd have thought I'd suggested they go back to carrier pigeons.

Technology should make communication easier, not create more places for messages to get lost. But somehow we've convinced ourselves that more options equals better communication.

Wrong.

The Meeting Problem Nobody Talks About

Here's another unpopular opinion: most of your communication problems could be solved by having fewer meetings, not better meetings.

Every time I audit a company's communication strategy, I find the same pattern. Teams are spending so much time in meetings talking about work that they don't have time to actually do the work they were talking about.

Last month, I timed a Perth construction company's weekly planning meeting. Ninety minutes to discuss tasks that could have been sorted in a fifteen-minute conversation between the right three people.

But they'd read somewhere that "collaborative communication" was important, so everyone had to have input on everything. The result wasn't better collaboration—it was decision paralysis dressed up as inclusive communication.

The most effective teams I've worked with communicate like this: the person who knows the most about the problem makes the decision, tells the people who need to know, and gets back to work. Revolutionary, I know.

Why Simple Beats Sophisticated

I used to overcomplicate everything. Early in my career, I thought impressive communication meant using impressive words. I'd write emails that sounded like I'd swallowed a business dictionary.

Then I worked with a Cairns tourism operator who ran the most efficient operation I'd ever seen. Their daily briefings were five minutes. Their written updates were three sentences. Their customer satisfaction was 97%.

Their secret? They'd figured out that communication isn't about sounding smart—it's about being understood.

The tour guide didn't say "We'll be implementing a flexible itinerary based on prevailing weather conditions and guest preference indicators." He said "If it rains, we'll do the indoor stuff first."

Guess which message everyone remembered?

The Real Cost of Confusing Communication

Poor communication doesn't just slow things down—it actively costs money. And I'm not talking about the obvious stuff like missed deadlines or confused clients.

I'm talking about the hidden costs. The time people spend trying to figure out what was actually asked of them. The duplicate work that happens because two teams thought they were responsible for the same task. The good ideas that never get implemented because they got lost in a chain of unclear email forwards.

A Adelaide manufacturing company I worked with was losing approximately $180,000 a year to communication inefficiencies. Not from major disasters or obvious failures, but from thousands of small misunderstandings that added up.

When we simplified their communication processes—and I mean really simplified them—they recovered about 70% of those losses within six months.

That's the power of clear communication. It doesn't just prevent problems; it actively saves money.

What to Do About It (Starting Tomorrow)

If you want to fix your company's communication strategy, stop thinking about it as a strategy. Start thinking about it as a skill.

And like any skill, you get better by practicing the fundamentals, not by learning fancier techniques.

Pick one communication channel for each type of message. Urgent stuff goes here. Project updates go there. General announcements go somewhere else. Stick to it religiously.

Write like you're talking to your cousin, not your university professor. If you wouldn't say "please advise on your preferred course of action" in a conversation, don't write it in an email.

When someone gives you a confusing message, ask them to clarify immediately. Don't guess what they meant. Don't spend twenty minutes trying to decode it. Just ask.

And for the love of all things productive, stop having meetings about having better meetings. If your communication strategy requires its own communication strategy, you've already lost.

The goal isn't to sound impressive. It's to be understood. Everything else is just noise.

Most Australian businesses already have smart, capable people who want to do good work. They don't need more sophisticated communication frameworks. They need permission to say what they mean and mean what they say.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is keep it simple.

Looking to improve your team's communication skills? Check out workplace communication training programs that focus on practical, real-world applications rather than theoretical frameworks. For broader professional development needs, consider emotional intelligence training that helps managers communicate more effectively with their teams.