What are the costs of poor communication?

Liz Makin Author

Nov 10, 2025 |

When you are frustrated with communication and relationships have you ever considered the underlying costs?

Effective communication is key to life and work. Just think how much better things would be if you communicated effectively with your friends, family and contacts and how more efficient and profitable the company you work for would be if everyone communicated effectively with each other. However, effective communication is one of the biggest challenges in life and at work.

How often have you complained about the communication at work?

How many times have you had a communication issue with someone in your personal life?

How is your communication and how are your relationships at work and at home?

It is common to think about the answer to these questions from a purely personal perspective, however there are also wider underlying costs of poor communication and relationships, which we will now highlight.

The costs of poor communication and relationships

1. The emotional cost. Poor communication and relationships, increase tension, frustration and uncertainty, leading to increased stress and anxiety for you. It can also have an emotional impact on the people you are communicating with, whether at work or in life.

2. Workplace performance. Poor communication and relationships can lead to poor motivation and low morale for you and your colleagues at work. This will negatively impact your performance at work and the performance of others, with significant decreases in productivity and an increase in workplace inefficiencies.

3. Personal disruption. Poor communication and relationships can result in tension, heightened emotions, misunderstandings, disharmony, fallouts, relationship breakdown, arguments and upset in your personal life. This will impact your family, friends, social life and many other aspects of your life and can ultimately impact your work too.

4. Missed deadlines. Poor communication and relationships will impact your ability to meet deadlines at work, as well as impact the achievement of the company deadlines due to lack of focus, poor coordination and lack of teamwork. Poor communication and relationships can also result in the failure to meet deadlines in your personal life, such as bills not getting paid, being late for events, and failing to organise your holiday.

5. Losing customers at work. Customer service may suffer or you may be late with delivering a product or service due to poor internal communication, low staff morale and motivation, high staff turnover, poor staff attitude and customers picking up on these internal issues. This can in turn damage the reputation of the company, as customer complaints increase and staff start leaving for other companies.

6. Losing the faith of your family and friends. Poor communication and relationships in life can cause your family and friends to lose faith in you as you struggle to communicate with them. For example, your parents are not happy with you over a communication breakdown, caused by you being unclear with them.

7. Lack of focus. Poor communication and relationships can lead to a lack of focus of everyone at work. If communication is not working this may result in focus being haphazard or lost all together, at a big cost to the company. Equally there may be a lack of focus in your personal life. For example, not supporting your children with their homework or organising the weekend’s trip with your partner.

8. Missed opportunities. Poor communication and relationships can result in opportunities being missed both at work and at home, for example, a project does not completed at work because the team communication is very poor or you don’t apply for the new managerial position because you were distracted dealing with a difficult team member.

9. Financial implications. Poor communication and relationships will also have financial costs and implications for the organisation where you work. All the costs we have discussed so far will impact company profitability and cash flow negatively and reduce shareholder value.
At home there may also financial implications, for example, overdraft charges because you did not tell your partner that you had taken money out of the joint account or the personal costs of not spending time with family and friends.

10. Not achieving goals, objectives and plans. Poor communication and relationships will ultimately result in you and the company not achieving the goals, objectives and plans that have been set and you not achieving your life goals, objectives and plans.

Do you want to explore more about communication and how to more effectively communicate and build good relationships?

If you want practical tips and strategies to help you more effectively communicate and build good relationships in your life and at work our communication online courses are for you. 

Take a look at our communication online courses by clicking on the links below:

Communication for life: how to be a better communicator

Communication for business owners, directors & managers

Conflict management for life & work

How to deal with difficult people in life & work

You can take a look at our range of online personal development courses and bundles, including current special offers, at https://onlinecourses.makinithappen.co.uk

Categories: : Communication, Life, Online courses, Personal development, Relationships, Work