“I feel like I’m always chasing information.” Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, meetings. Everything is in place. But information still keeps getting lost, and you’re the one who has to pick up the slack.
According to the Grammarly State of Business Communication report (2024), ineffective team communication costs North American businesses a lot every year. Scaled down to an SME, the figure is just as telling.
You probably experience it every week. Information circulates within your team, but it doesn’t reach the right people at the right time. An important message gets buried in a Teams thread that half the team doesn’t follow. An urgent approval sits in an Outlook inbox that the colleague concerned only checks at the end of the day. A meeting decision is understood differently by three people because it was never written down in a task-tracking tool.
And you find out about all of it after the fact, when the delay or misunderstanding has already had consequences.
Ineffective team communication is one of the most common issues in growing SMEs. If you want to explore other challenges that hold your team’s performance back, our guide on Microsoft 365 optimization for team leaders gives you an overview.
Each interruption costs someone on your team 15 minutes of focus
Let’s take a concrete example. A customer service colleague is writing a detailed response to an unhappy customer. They took the time to find the exchange history in the CRM, checked the return policy in SharePoint, and are in the process of putting together a proposal that will resolve the case.
A notification pops up in the General Teams channel. A colleague asks if anyone has the conference room number for the 2:00 PM meeting. Reading the message takes ten seconds. But getting back to the level of focus your colleague had on the customer case takes 15 minutes. And during those 15 minutes, the quality of their response to the customer drops, because their train of thought has been interrupted.
Multiply this scenario by the number of notifications each person receives in a day. Your colleagues feel like they’re working hard all day, and yet the important files aren’t moving forward at the pace they should.
No one is to blame. It’s a communication environment that interrupts more than it supports, because no one has defined what deserves an immediate notification and what can wait.
With ineffective team communication, the information exists somewhere, but no one knows where
This kind of situation comes back every week in a different form.
There’s no shortage of information. It’s in five places at once, and everyone on the team has their own habits for looking for it.
When no one knows where to look, trust in the information is lost
Over time, this situation creates something more corrosive than a simple loss of time. Your colleagues start doubting the information they find. “Is this the latest version?” “Has this decision been confirmed?” “Who said that and in which channel?”
Misunderstandings multiply, leading to frustration and unnecessary conflict. Each team member ends up spending more time verifying sources than moving their tasks forward. This creates an atmosphere where productivity is hindered by the constant need for clarification. Eventually, projects stall, and creative work becomes rare, because the team loses sight of its shared goals.
When these questions come up dozens of times a week, trust in communication itself erodes, and that immediately undermines collaboration within the team.
Outlook absorbs what Teams can’t manage to organize
Because of the excessive number of messages in Teams, some colleagues fall back on Outlook. Email gives them a sense of control. They send direct messages, manage their own inbox, and organize information according to their own logic. It’s an understandable reflex. When no one knows which channel to use for which type of information, going back to the tool you know best feels like the only reasonable option.
Except that this reflex privatizes information that should be shared. A meeting recap emailed to five colleagues out of eight. The other three don’t know what was decided and discover the next steps by chance, in a hallway conversation or during a follow-up where they’re the only ones not in the loop.
And unlike Teams channels, these conversations are completely invisible to you as a manager. When something goes off track, you often find out after the fact that the information existed—somewhere in an email thread you never saw.
If you want to understand how to concretely improve team communication and collaboration with Microsoft 365, our article 5 rules to improve team communication and collaboration with Microsoft 365 explains the simple practices that help bring order back to exchanges, decisions, and information sharing within your team.
When the manager doesn’t establish shared rules for communication and collaboration
“Did you see Pierre’s message?” “Have we confirmed the date?” “What’s the final decision on this file?” If your day feels like a series of micro-questions like these, it’s because your team communication has no structure. The information exists, but no one knows where to find it without going through you.
And it’s your responsibility to change that. Defining communication and collaboration rules within your team isn’t an IT mandate. It’s a management mandate. As long as you don’t decide where information lives, your tools remain disorganized:
- Not SharePoint, because documents aren’t uploaded there systematically.
- Not Planner, because tasks aren’t tracked there.
- Not a Teams channel dedicated to decisions, because it doesn’t exist.
Without shared rules, each colleague develops their own communication habits. And when no one knows where to look, everyone turns to the only person who seems to have the full picture. You.
The day you’re not available, collaboration stops.
An ineffective team communication problem doesn’t get better on its own
Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner. Your team has access to all of that. The tools work. What’s missing is a shared agreement on how to use them together. No one has decided which channel is for which type of information, what goes in Teams rather than Outlook, where official documents live, or how a meeting decision is documented and made accessible.
Without that agreement, each colleague develops their own habits. And those habits diverge a little more each month:
- A new Teams channel is created for a project, but no one closes the old one.
- An important conversation moves from Outlook to Teams halfway through, and the first half becomes impossible to find.
- Notifications multiply without anyone knowing which ones deserve their attention.
Each month that goes by without shared rules roots these habits a little deeper. What looked like a temporary annoyance has become the team’s normal way of operating.
If these situations sound familiar, the next step is to review the communication and collaboration rules within your team.
Our article 5 rules to improve team communication and collaboration with Microsoft 365 presents practices that help you use Teams, SharePoint, and Planner consistently to reduce noise, clarify decisions, and improve work coordination.
If you want to explore other issues that team leaders deal with day to day, our guide on Microsoft 365 optimization for team leaders gives you an overview.
And fixing it becomes harder over time, not easier.
Want more content like this?
We’ve been thinking of you. In Trajectoire, our newsletter, we share content based on the realities you face every day. We also offer potential solutions so that technology truly helps you move your business forward.
Sign up!
