Advice

Why Your Company's Communication Training is Failing: A Brutally Honest Take from Someone Who's Seen It All

I watched a $50,000 communication training program fail spectacularly last month, and honestly? I wasn't surprised.

After seventeen years of watching companies throw money at communication consultants like they're feeding coins into a broken poker machine, I've come to one uncomfortable conclusion: most communication training is complete rubbish. Not because the trainers are incompetent (though some are), but because organisations fundamentally misunderstand what communication actually is.

Let me tell you about Sarah from accounting.

Sarah attended every single workshop her company offered. Presentation skills, difficult conversations, email etiquette – the works. She could recite the "five steps to active listening" backwards. Yet when the restructure was announced, she still managed to accidentally start a company-wide panic by forwarding an email with "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line to the wrong distribution list.

The Problem Isn't Your People

Here's what nobody wants to admit: communication problems aren't individual failures. They're systemic ones.

I see this constantly in my consulting work across Melbourne and Sydney. Companies identify "poor communication" as their biggest challenge, then immediately assume the solution is teaching people how to speak better. It's like saying your car won't start because you don't know how to turn the key properly.

The real issues? Let's start with the obvious ones everyone ignores:

Your company culture actively discourages honest communication. When was the last time someone shared bad news and got praised for their transparency? I'll wait.

Your systems are designed by people who've never had to use them. I once worked with a mining company where incident reports required seventeen different approval stages. Seventeen! By the time critical safety information reached the people who needed it, the original incident had spawned three more.

And here's my favourite: you're training people in communication skills while simultaneously promoting managers who couldn't communicate their way out of a paper bag.

The Training Theater

Most communication training programs I've seen follow the same tired formula. Day one: what is communication? Day two: barriers to effective communication. Day three: role-playing exercises that make everyone uncomfortable.

The participants nod along, take notes, maybe even enjoy themselves. Then they return to an environment where speaking up gets you labeled as "difficult" and asking questions means you're "not a team player."

I remember working with a logistics company in Brisbane that spent $30,000 on presentation skills training. Three months later, their quarterly town halls were still death by PowerPoint. Why? Because the CEO insisted on reviewing every single slide before any presentation. The training taught confidence; the culture demanded compliance.

It's like teaching someone to swim while they're wearing concrete boots.

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

Real communication improvement requires uncomfortable changes. Here's what I've learned actually moves the needle:

Start with leadership behaviour. Not leadership "communication style" – actual behaviour. Does your MD interrupt people in meetings? Do your department heads make decisions behind closed doors then act surprised when implementation fails? Fix that first.

I worked with a construction company where the site foreman had a simple rule: any safety concern could be raised without question, and he'd stop work immediately to address it. No forms, no approvals, no bureaucracy. Their incident rate dropped 40% in six months. That's communication training that works.

Make information accessible by default, not by request. This seems obvious, but you'd be amazed how many companies treat basic operational information like state secrets. One retail client I worked with saw massive improvements simply by putting weekly sales figures on a shared dashboard instead of emailing them to "key stakeholders only."

The Email Problem Everyone Ignores

While we're being honest, let's talk about email training. Every communication program includes it, and every single one misses the point entirely.

The problem isn't that people don't know how to write emails. The problem is that email has become a substitute for actual decision-making. I've seen email chains with forty-seven replies where nobody actually commits to anything concrete.

Here's a radical thought: instead of teaching people to write better emails, maybe teach them when not to send one? That meeting request with twelve people to "discuss next steps" could probably be a five-minute conversation between two people.

But this requires admitting that half your meetings are unnecessary and most of your email communication is just covering your backside. Good luck getting sign-off on that training module.

The Difficult Conversations Delusion

Every communication training includes a module on "difficult conversations." The trainers are always enthusiastic about this bit – they get to do role-plays and talk about emotional intelligence.

Here's what they don't tell you: most "difficult conversations" aren't difficult because people lack skills. They're difficult because the underlying issues are genuinely hard to resolve.

When someone's underperforming, the difficult part isn't finding the right words to tell them. The difficult part is dealing with the fact that they might need to find a new job, and that's going to impact their family, and maybe the company should have spotted this during recruitment, and perhaps the role expectations were unrealistic to begin with.

No amount of active listening training is going to solve structural problems.

Cultural Differences: The Elephant in the Training Room

Australian workplaces are becoming increasingly diverse, which is fantastic. What's less fantastic is pretending that communication styles don't vary across cultures, then wondering why your training isn't landing with everyone.

I once sat through a presentation skills workshop where the trainer kept emphasising "direct eye contact" and "confident body language." Half the participants came from cultures where those behaviours would be considered disrespectful in certain contexts. The trainer wasn't malicious, just oblivious.

Effective communication training needs to acknowledge that there isn't one "correct" way to communicate. But that requires cultural competence from trainers, which costs more money and takes more effort than booking the same generic workshop you've used for the past five years.

The Technology Band-Aid

Let me guess – your company has recently invested in a new communication platform that's going to "revolutionise collaboration"? Slack, Teams, Workplace, or whatever the current flavour of the month is?

Technology can certainly help communication, but only if the underlying communication culture is healthy. Otherwise, you're just moving dysfunction to a shinier platform.

I worked with one company that migrated from email to Slack, convinced it would improve transparency. Six months later, they had the same communication problems, just with more emoji reactions and GIF responses. The issues weren't technical; they were cultural.

What I'd Do Differently

If I were designing communication training from scratch (and I have, several times), here's what I'd focus on:

Context, not content. Instead of teaching generic communication principles, I'd address the specific communication challenges that organisation faces. Are project updates getting lost? Fix the project management system first, then train people how to use it effectively.

Systems thinking, not individual skills. I'd spend more time on information flow and decision-making processes than on presentation techniques. How does information move through your organisation? Where does it get stuck? Why?

Measurement that matters. Instead of measuring training satisfaction scores, I'd track actual communication outcomes. Are decisions being made faster? Are fewer critical issues being discovered too late? Is information reaching the people who need it?

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what most companies don't want to hear: if your communication training isn't working, the problem probably isn't the training. It's that you're using training to solve problems that require structural changes.

You can't train your way out of a toxic culture. You can't workshop your way around poor leadership. And you definitely can't role-play your way past fundamental organisational dysfunction.

I've seen too many companies spend serious money on communication consultants while refusing to address the basic issues that create communication problems in the first place. It's easier to send people to a workshop than to admit your management structure is broken.

The good news? When companies do address the underlying issues, the improvement is dramatic. And often, they discover they need less formal communication training, not more.

Real communication happens when people feel safe to speak honestly, when information flows to where it's needed, and when the consequences of miscommunication are learning opportunities rather than blame sessions.

That's not something you can teach in a two-day workshop. But it's exactly what your organisation needs to focus on if you want communication that actually works.

The choice is yours: keep booking workshops and hoping for different results, or start having the uncomfortable conversations about why communication fails in the first place.

Trust me, the second option is cheaper in the long run.

Want to read more perspectives on workplace development? Check out these articles: Why Professional Development Courses Are Essential | Communication Skills Training Expectations | The Changing Job Market