How Poor Internal Communication Can Cost Your Firm
Source: CPA Trendlines
The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by Bruce Marcus.
Relegating internal communications to second-class status can be costly, even to the smallest firm:
- The service promise you make to clients can't be fulfilled if the people who have to make the promise a reality don't understand and accept it.
- In most firms, people go to clients, to the offices of other firms, to other cities. With half the staff off site on any given day, an internal communications program is necessary to keep everybody informed of everything he or she must know in order to function productively.
- In even the best run firms, turnover can be high. That means that new people must be educated constantly, either from scratch or by updating.
- Motivation begins with communication. If everybody who shows up for work every morning has a different view of why he or she is there, then there's no cohesive motivation. All the motivational speakers in the world aren't going to help.
- If there's no clearly defined internal communication plan, the most urgent directive, no matter how clear or simple at the outset, is garbled, distorted, and diluted as it goes down the line to the people who have to act on it.
- Cross-selling is doomed if the firm's professionals are uninformed about all aspects of the firm's range of skills and experience.
- There is a great deal of information that must be imparted to every individual in the firm. But each person has a different degree of responsibility, experience, and access to the firm's practices. Each must use the information differently. Each bit of information means something different to each individual in a firm.
- And of course, there's always the need to fight rumors and misinformation.
For the complete article, read “Can You Hear Me Now? Eight reasons why accounting firms need to work on internal communications first.”
From CPA Trendlines, February 15, 2013, http://cpatrendlines.com.