Financial impacts of good or bad communication
I’ve been examining several articles about the financial impact of good or bad communication. Mistakes in documentation cost money, and there’s some good evidence of that point. In addition to the cases that involve documentation, I’m also interested in communication in a wider sense.
Here’s what I’ve found so far:
- Workplace communication statistics (2021) in the Pumble Knowledge Library. This is a comprehensive article with a long list of references at the end.
- The Cost of Poor Communications, a Holmes Report by David Grossman on Provoke Media.
Thank you to Kit Brown-Hoekstra of Comgenesis for the following cases of communication mishaps that have cost money:
- The loss of a Mars orbiter cost NASA $125 million. The root cause was that the engineering teams used different units of measurement (metric vs English).
- A missing Oxford comma cost a dairy company $5 million.
Looking for more
Do you know of any other recent research into the financial impacts of good or bad communication? I’m interested particularly in metrics around how good communication can save an organization money, and of times when communication that’s gone wrong has cost money.
Posted on 10 October 2021, in technical writing and tagged business communication, technical communication. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
Within a few minutes of reading your blog post, I read this article in the Guardian, about how a (potentially) missing apostrophe in a Facebook post got the person who wrote it into hot water for defamation. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/oct/10/missing-apostrophe-in-facebook-post-lands-nsw-real-estate-agent-in-legal-hot-water
Hallo Titch
Thanks, that’s an interesting one. And it’s Australian too!
Cheers
Sarah