Here’s why Communication Process Improvement (CPI) is one of the largest emerging opportunities for organizations to contain personnel costs.

Here’s a familiar scenario: It’s the worst nightmare of a growing company—your organization spared no cost in recruiting a rock star c-suite. You hired amazing technical and support people. Most in the organization are—individually— outstanding performers. Yet as functioning teams they’re stuck in their ability to execute together—lunging dangerously toward group implosion. Organization wide, the more people hired the more deadlines are missed. Costs soar and productivity plummets.

The dream of a successful organization recedes into the horizon.

Radically Reduce Costs and Improve Organization Communication

Process improvement revolutionized and saved manufacturing and business in the 90’s, cutting trillions of dollars out of processes, allowing them to compete against cheap labor around the world. Total quality management was also a key driver of that era.

Today Communication Process Improvement was developed by Carol Kallendorf, PhD, and Jack Speer, It has the potential to radically reduce the cost of organizational communication, one of the few cost variables that can be controlled to bring large savings and huge impact. This model has been very successful in the Austin, Texas area, one of the most sophisticated and fast moving corporate environments in the U.S.

Communication Process Improvement brings effective, friction-free, compelling, communication to organizations that reduces time wasted and boosts team potential. It puts the mission, vision, and values at center stage in operations instead of buried deep in a website. It counteracts a top organizational threat—time lost through miscommunication, toxic conflict, and a faltering message that doesn’t make it to the right people.

Here’s why Communication Process Improvement is one of the largest emerging opportunities for organizations to contain personnel costs.

It generates thousands of dollars in savings to an organization within the implementation year and is a bright alternative to slashing expenses where there is no room left to cut—by spiking daily employee productivity through the technology of effective communication.

Consider these points that a knowledgeable CFO can affirm:

• In 2016 fully 70% of the corporate budget is the cost of personnel.
• For every million dollars spent by a company, $700,000 is spent on people.
• 37% of employee time is spent in meetings.
• Of the $700,000 per million spent on employee salaries, $259,000, or 37% of that amount, will be spent on meetings alone.
• It is a reasonable estimate that this figure, adding in emails, texts, and conference calls, increases the cost of communication per employee to double, somewhere near 70%–over $500,000 per $700,000 spent.
• Each 20% reduction in meeting time produces more than $100,000 in employee costs savings, per million dollars spent by an organization.
• Although the costs reductions of time saved in communication is enormous, effectiveness gains is ever more important, enabling organizations and their people to seize opportunities and avoid disaster.

Here’s a summary of how Communication Process Improvement Achieves its Results

1. Bio-View. Documents Individual team members within the Context of their experience. Only by having a basic understanding who the team member is can we know how to communicate with them. With the consent of team members, we document their backgrounds, where they grew up, what life experiences framed their thinking, and what is important to them. An important goal will be for team members to understand each other’s context.
2. Self-Awareness View. CPI enables people to make the transition to a person who has the tools of personality type to know himself/herself. All of us have come to a realization that we are not like most people around us—it’s a dawning experience for almost everyone. What is not obvious how and why people differ from us, and how their approach to life and work differs from ours. We often find that people understand differences in personality for the first time through administering assessments such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, (MBTI®), FIRO-b, and a suite of other assessments.
3. Mastering Effective Team Interaction. Through the application of MBTI® we enable team members to effectively understand how to communicate with each other, and to relate to people different from themselves. The team member learns to understand commonalities and differences in different types and how to manage them in teams.
4. Individual Feedback Exercise. A key skill in the Communication Process Improvement CPI Model is developing the “muscle” for transparency, accepting and giving feedback. We most often use a 360-degree process for this phase. The best source of skills improvement comes from those who are close to a person and know them objectively. Once the “feedback muscle” is developed, team leadership is improved.
5. Putting Teams Together Through Alignment. After team members have acquired and effectively use the tools of the Communication Process Improvement Model, a key part of putting it all together are alignment sessions. These combine a communication process that puts together the organization’s vision, values, goals and strategies.

Communication Process Improvement takes star individual performers who have excelled all of their lives and enables organizations to have the same performance systems of a professional sports team—the only thing that is basically different is the product or service of the organization. CPI is part of the process of choosing and onboarding a team. It is the necessary step to team success.