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Why Your Company's Communication Training is Theoretical Rubbish

Bloody hell, here we go again. Another email landed in my inbox yesterday about "mandatory communication skills training" for the entire team. Mandatory. As if communication is something you can fix with a half-day workshop and some PowerPoint slides about "active listening techniques."

I've been running workplace training programs across Melbourne and Sydney for the better part of seventeen years now, and I can tell you straight up: most communication training is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Not because the concepts are wrong, mind you. It's because companies treat communication like it's a software update you can just download and install.

The Real Problem Nobody Talks About

The issue isn't that people don't know how to communicate. The issue is that most workplaces are structured in ways that actively discourage good communication. You can teach someone all the fancy active listening techniques you want, but if their manager interrupts them every thirty seconds or their company culture punishes anyone who speaks up about problems, what's the bloody point?

I was working with a logistics company in Brisbane last year - brilliant people, good intentions, terrible results. They'd spent $47,000 on communication training. Forty-seven thousand! And their internal survey scores went backwards. Know why? Because they taught everyone to "speak with confidence and clarity" but never addressed the fact that their regional manager was a complete control freak who shot down every suggestion.

Why Most Training Feels Like Theatre

Here's what happens in 89% of corporate communication workshops (and yes, I made up that statistic, but it feels right): Someone gets up and talks about the importance of "two-way communication" and "creating psychological safety." Everyone nods along. They do some role-playing exercises where Dave from Accounting pretends to give feedback to Jenny from HR about her "challenging behaviour."

It's all very civilised and theoretical.

Then Monday morning arrives. Dave's still terrified to tell his actual boss that the quarterly reports are wrong because last time he questioned something, he got a twenty-minute lecture about "staying in his lane." Jenny's still interrupting everyone in meetings because that's how she's always operated and nobody's ever called her on it properly.

The training was a nice day out of the office. Nothing changed.

What Actually Works (And Why It's Harder)

Real communication training starts with acknowledging that most workplace communication problems aren't skill problems - they're system problems. You want better communication? Start with these three things that trainers never want to tell you because it makes their job harder:

Fix the meeting culture first. If your meetings run over time, have unclear agendas, or are dominated by the same three people every time, no amount of "effective communication strategies" will help. I've seen companies spend thousands on presentation skills training while running meetings that would make a prison warden weep.

Address the elephant in the room. Every workplace has that one person. You know who I'm talking about. The one who creates drama, talks over everyone, or turns every discussion into a personal grievance session. Until you deal with them directly, all your communication training is just background noise.

Change how you measure communication success. Stop measuring training effectiveness with happy sheets and start measuring actual behaviour change. Are people speaking up more in meetings? Are conflicts being resolved faster? Are projects running smoother because information flows better? That's your real data.

The Australian Approach That's Actually Sensible

Here's where I might lose some of you, but I reckon Australian workplaces have a natural advantage when it comes to communication. We're generally pretty direct, we don't faff around with corporate speak as much as our American cousins, and we're reasonably good at calling out nonsense when we see it.

But we're also hopeless at structured communication processes. We think "having a chat over coffee" solves everything. Sometimes it does! But when you're trying to coordinate a project with seventeen stakeholders across four time zones, "she'll be right" isn't a communication strategy.

The sweet spot is combining our natural directness with some actual professional communication training that focuses on practical tools rather than personality tests and trust falls.

What I Got Wrong for Years

I used to think communication problems were mostly about personality conflicts. Sarah doesn't like Tom's communication style. Tom thinks Sarah is too aggressive. Let's get them in a room and sort it out with some conflict resolution techniques.

Complete rubbish.

Most communication problems are about unclear expectations, poor information systems, and terrible meeting management. The personality stuff is just what bubbles to the surface when those underlying issues aren't addressed.

I spent years running workshops focused on individual communication styles when I should have been helping companies redesign their information flow. These days, I spend more time looking at org charts and process maps than I do talking about emotional intelligence. Results are infinitely better.

The Hard Truth About Modern Workplaces

Remote work has made everything more complicated. Not worse, necessarily, but definitely more complicated. You can't rely on overhearing conversations anymore. You can't read body language through a Zoom call. That casual feedback you used to give someone while making coffee now requires scheduling a formal meeting.

Companies are responding by adding more communication tools. Slack for instant messaging. Teams for video calls. Asana for project updates. Monday.com for task management. Email for everything else.

Result? People spend more time managing their communication tools than actually communicating.

I worked with a marketing agency recently where people were getting 200+ Slack messages per day. Two hundred! They'd implemented Slack to "improve communication efficiency." Instead, they'd created a digital hamster wheel where everyone was constantly responding to messages about messages about meetings to discuss other messages.

What to Do Instead

Stop treating communication like a skill deficit and start treating it like a design problem. Good communication doesn't happen because people know the right techniques. It happens because you've created systems that make good communication the easy choice.

Design for clarity. Make it obvious who needs to know what, when they need to know it, and how they'll find out. Most communication breakdowns happen because someone didn't know they were supposed to be informed about something.

Reduce communication overhead. Every tool, every meeting, every status update creates work. Before adding another "communication touchpoint," ask yourself what you can eliminate first.

Make feedback normal, not special. If feedback only happens during formal performance reviews, it's too late to be useful. Build tiny feedback loops into regular work rhythms.

Look, I'm not saying communication training is completely useless. I make a living running these programs, for crying out loud. But the training needs to be connected to real workplace changes, not delivered in isolation like some sort of corporate vitamin supplement.

The Bottom Line

Your people probably communicate just fine when they're motivated to do so and when the systems support them. The problem isn't their communication skills. The problem is that your workplace makes good communication unnecessarily difficult.

Fix the systems first. Then worry about the skills.

And for heaven's sake, stop measuring success based on how people feel about the training. Measure it based on whether communication actually improves. Revolutionary concept, I know.

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