Communication occupies a remarkable amount of the working day. In its recent State of Business Communication research, Grammarly reported that the professionals it surveyed spent 88% of their working week communicating. That makes the quality of those interactions a business issue, not simply a matter of personal style.
The costs can be hard to spot because they rarely appear as a single line in a budget. Research conducted by Grammarly and The Harris Poll in estimated that ineffective communication could cost US businesses as much as $1.2 trillion annually in wasted labour time. The business leaders surveyed estimated that their teams lost an average of 7.47 hours a week to poor communication. These are survey based estimates, but they give a sense of how quickly time spent clarifying, repeating and correcting messages can accumulate.
At Templar, we are particularly interested in the moments when communication determines whether expertise can be put to use.
Consider an investment professional presenting a recommendation. They may have tested the assumptions, examined the risks and reached a well-founded view. The people hearing it need something different from a complete account of that work: they need to grasp the recommendation, understand the judgement behind it and know which questions remain open. If those points are buried, a great deal of analysis may still fail to move the discussion forward. The consequences of unclear communication extend beyond lost time. In Grammarly’s research, 41% of workers surveyed reported lower productivity as an impact of poor communication, while 26% reported missed deadlines. Those findings cover workplace communication broadly; they do not measure the effect of any one presentation or client conversation. They do, however, challenge the idea that clarity is merely cosmetic.
There is a related lesson in project delivery. The Project Management Institute reported in its research that one in five projects was unsuccessful due to ineffective communication. Its findings also pointed to two familiar problems: explaining the business benefit and using language the intended audience could understand. The research is older and concerns projects rather than investment decisions, but those communication challenges remain recognisable in many senior conversations.
This is the part of the story that interests us. Strong communication requires judgement about what to say, when to say it and how to respond. Should you lead with the answer? Which detail will give this audience confidence? When someone challenges your conclusion, do they need more evidence, a clearer explanation or space to voice a different concern?
In client discussions, investment recommendations and conversations between leaders and their teams, the aim is not to make complex work sound simple. It is to make the thinking accessible enough to be questioned and useful enough to act upon.
That is the communication dividend: less effort lost to misunderstanding, and more value realised from the expertise already in the room.