What is the real cost of miscommunication? 


We’ve all been in that situation where you’ve had a great meeting with your whole team, someone’s assigned to type up notes, everyone’s given their next steps, and then it all falls to pieces.

Sharon finishes the first draft of copy and pings Bill on Slack.

…but it gets buried in the project group chat, so Bill doesn’t remember to review it.

Sharon is working away on another task, but Bill can’t find the document, so he pings her on Slack. She stops what she’s doing and re-sends him the file.

She then gets 15 emails from Google Docs “notifying” her of of every single one of his edits, but the email with the deadline gets buried in her inbox and so she doesn’t start working on it until it’s already due.

So much wasted time, so much frustration — and this is multiplied across multiple tasks, across multiple teams,

across the entire company.

Studies have actually been done to try quantify how much companies and employees lose from miscommunication. It turns out poor communication causes: financial loss, a decline in employee satisfaction, and — of course — wasted time.

When someone pings your slack channel asking where a file is…

According to a 2018 study by Dynamic Signal, nearly half the companies surveyed said miscommunication had cost them more than 30% in revenue. As a solution, many companies invest in project management tools, such as Asana and Trello, hoping these will help. But, more than half of corporate communication professionals report their current tools have not improved their project management difficulties.

As for employees using these tools on a regular basis, 53% admitted feeling overwhelmed by the number of communication tools they need to constantly check. For many companies, this includes: Email, Google Drive, Asana or Trello, Slack, their calendar, Salesforce, and a GANT management tool. Considering all these tools, one in two employees said they feel stress from fear of missing important information as they try to stay on top of all these platforms. Within the C-Suite, more than one in two executives surveyed reported missing vital information due to the channels and communication tools used in their company.

When you get a message on slack, email, blimp…

So clearly this is a serious cost — both financially and emotionally — when companies don’t tackle their project management process. This is why Ed Parsons created RipleyHQ: “We found so many companies we worked with used Google Drive and another project management tool and wasted a significant amount of time trying to work between the two. In our design, we focused on automating communication and then created the simplest interface we could think of. No bells and whistles, bright colors, or complicated features. With RipleyHQ, your Google File is the center of each task. Our goal was to keep our tool as simple as possible, so that everyone can use it.”

From that focus, the product launched on Product Hunt in November and was a huge success, especially with small businesses and remote teams looking for something easy but effective. Want to give Ripley a try? Try the free version right now or email Ed Parsons (Ed@RipleyHQ.com) code PRODUCTIVE2019 and you can get 25% off the monthly business membership. And as proof of how simple the product is, sign up now for an onboarding session and Ed can show you and your team how to use it in under 20 minutes.