The Importance of Effective Workplace Communication – Key Statistics for 2024

With so many US employees now working from home, videoconferencing software, small business phone systems, and a range of other collaboration tools have become completely indispensable to facilitating effective workplace communications for millions of businesses worldwide.

And, although the pandemic is well behind us, lounges, bedrooms, and kitchens are still playing host to millions upon millions of workers across the country, every day of the week. Data collection by the WFH Research group found that, as of mid-2024, 13% of full-time US employees are fully remote with a further 26% working in a hybrid arrangement.

This seismic change to the way we work has had a number of psychological effects, too – only 21% of Gen-Z and 23% of Millenial workers prefer face-to-face communication over remote interactions. This is just one of the many considerations senior leaders have to take into account in 2024 if they want to improve communication at their workplaces.

With this in mind, we’ve collected a range of crucial facts and figures about remote working, including some eye-opening statistics on communication in workplaces obtained via Expert Market’s poll of 130 CEOs and decision-makers, to help you find out what sorts of actions businesses are taking today. Read on for the latest stats plus some tips on how to perfect your workplace comms.

12 Key Workplace Communication Statistics

How is the working world communicating and what are the common trends? Here are the crucial statistics on workplace communication:

• 86% of employees cite the lack of effective collaboration and communication as the main cause of workplace failures.
• Improving internal comms can improve organizational productivity by as much as 25%.
• 97% of employees believe communication impacts their task efficacy every day.
• 16% of managers feel uncomfortable speaking face-to-face with employees.
• Poor communication is affecting trust for 45% of workers.
• When employees are offered better communication technology and skills, productivity can increase by up to 30%.
• 28% of employees cite poor communication as the reason for not being able to deliver work on time.
• Poor communication in the workplace reportedly accounts for a loss of 7.47 hours per employee, per week. For the average employee, earning a salary of $66,976, that amounts to $12,506 per employee per year in sunk costs. For the whole market, these losses are estimated to be around $37 billion a year.

Expert Market’s Workplace Communications Survey

Here are the key findings from our own August 2023 study of 130 CEOs & decision-makers.

• Slack is the most popular platform for workplace communication – used by 67% of respondents. This is followed by Zoom (62%), and Google Suite (26%). 
• 99% saw positive benefits of flexible working options.
• 12% stated that there were negative impacts.
• 95% stated that they will continue working in a remote/hybrid way.

We compared them with a similar study we did in May 2020 of 100 CEOs & decision-makers:

Like the graphics on this page? Please feel free to use them, we also have infographic versions compiling them together too. You can access them all on this Google Drive – all we ask is that you credit us with a link back to this page if you do use any. Thanks!

Why Effective Communication Matters in the Workplace

Since the move from office-based collaboration to remote collaboration, some businesses have struggled to maintain best practices in terms of communication. Below are some stats that highlight how communication can benefit your business.

Increased productivity

• Organizations with connected employees show productivity increases of 20-25%.
• 64% of businesses list communicating their ‘strategy, values, and purpose’ to employees as a key priority.
• 97% of workers believe that communication impacts tasks every day.
• When employees are offered better communication technology and skills, productivity can increase by up to 30%

Increased trust among team members

• 86% of corporate executives, educators, and employees cite ineffective communication and poor collaboration as reasons for failures in the workplace.
• Employees who feel their voice is heard in the workplace are almost five times more likely (4.6x) to feel empowered to deliver their best work.
• 39% of employees around the world feel that people don’t collaborate enough within their organization, yet 75% of employers rate collaboration and teamwork as ‘very important’.

Time and money saved

• 28% of employees cite poor communication as the reason for not being able to deliver work on time.
• Miscommunication costs companies with 100 employees an average of $420,000 per year.
• Communications barriers could be costing businesses around $37 billion a years.

How Employees and Managers Prefer to Communicate at Work

Employees like communication, it makes them happier and more efficient:

• Harvard Business Review cites that 72% of employees feel their performance would improve if their managers were to provide corrective — sometimes also dubbed as “negative” — feedback.
• A study by Officevibe shows that 43% of highly engaged individuals receive feedback at least once per week, in contrast with only 18% of low-engaged individuals.
• A report by Trade Press Services shows that as many as 85% of employees claim they are most motivated when regularly updated about company news and information.

According to Gallup, team members with higher levels of engagement:

• Produce substantially better outcomes
• Treat customers better and attract new ones
• Are more likely to remain with their organization
• Are healthier and less likely to experience burnout

What won’t be a shock to many employees is that managers don’t always love to communicate on employees’ terms:

• 69% of managers are uncomfortable when communicating with their employees, with 16% preferring email to face-to-face interactions.
• one Gallup estimate shows that only 50% of employees know what their managers expect from them.
• 73% of employers want employees with strong written communication skills, as found by the National Association of Colleges and Employees.

How do Businesses Feel About Hybrid and Remote Working?

Hybrid and remote working arrangements for employees have their benefit and their drawbacks – just like in-office work.

To find out more, in August 2023 we spoke to 130 company CEOs, founders, and decision-makers from European and North American companies. We asked them about their hybrid/remote setups and how this way of working had impacted their workplace culture and employee welfare. They let us know how they’ve fared when offering the option, as well as what programs and methods they use to adapt their operations.

The overwhelming majority of businesses (99%) saw positive benefits of flexible working options – including an increase in employee productivity and happiness. This is slightly up compared to our previous report in May 2022 of 125 companies, where 92% saw positive WFH benefits.

From our same 2022 report, 16% said they’d witnessed negative impacts, such as a reduction in productivity, difficulty in maintaining the work/life balance, and difficulty in assessing accountability. In our latest findings, 12% stated that there were negative impacts. It’s worth noting that some companies found both positive and negative impacts and chose both options.

Of all the 130 hybrid/remote companies, 95% stated that they will continue working in a remote/hybrid way. This is not too dissimilar from 2022 when 94% of the companies expected staff to request remote working after returning to the office.

Out of the 130 companies we spoke to, 5% aim to return to the office within the two years of our survey, on a full-time basis.

In-office now and in the future

We split the 130 respondents by whether they’d already returned to the office full time (5 days a week), had plans to in the future, or if they would continue hybrid or remote working. We also asked hybrid companies how many days they’d instructed their employees to work in the office.

Another trend, stated by some of the remote companies, will be using co-working spaces or renting meeting spaces for any employees who’d like face to face time:

“I think it’s unlikely that our company will ever return to the office full-time in the future. We’ve been working remotely for over two years now and it’s just been so much more efficient and productive for us.

I think with companies increasingly moving towards remote work, there’s just no need to have everyone in the office all the time. It’s not sustainable or necessary. When we do need to meet in person, we can always just rent out a meeting space. There’s just no need to have a whole office full of people when they can be working from home.” Tomek Młodzki, CEO at PhotoAiD

Benefits and Downsides of Hybrid and Remote Working

Here’s a breakdown of what the CEOs mentioned were the biggest benefits and downsides of hybrid/remote working. We’ve split it by combined overall insights, and then specifically by hybrid and remote companies.

The data below is from our 2022 survey. 

“When working remotely, it is easier to maintain a work-life balance, and we consider it crucial, especially in turbulent times that we’ve all been exposed to recently. We work really hard on cherishing our values and keeping the spirits up throughout the company so that we all can maintain a good level of productivity and optimism.” Monika Dmochowska, Talent Acquisition Specialist at Tidio

Statistics on Workplace Communication Technologies

With fewer face-to-face meetings than ever before, organizations have been even more reliant on technology. Here are the findings from our study on the most popular communication platforms and work managment platforms:

Below, we’ll quickly discuss the most popular videoconferencing brands and their meteoric (yet necessary) rise in usage since the COVID-19 pandemic. After that, we’ll show you some awesome stats on email, VoIP, and phone communication.

Videoconferencing stats: Zoom, Skype and Google Meet

Few phenomena took over the COVID-19 discourse like the ‘Zoom boom’. Zoom quizzes, drinks, and catch-ups became so common that the company’s revenues jumped by 169% in 2021.

Zoom has around 467,100 paying customers in 2024, slightly down from the 470,000 figure quoted for 2023. The quantity of meeting minutes that take place on the platform every year is still over 3.3 trillion!

Similarly to Zoom, there has been huge hype around Skype. Microsoft’s video calling service reported 40 million daily users in March 2020, up 70% from the previous month, with some sources putting its 2023 user figures at over 300 million.

Google’s video conference tool, on the other hand, has also seen a meteoric rise in usage, with its usage rising by 11.6% from 2021 to 2023.

Workplace collaboration stats: Slack, Microsoft Teams

While videoconferencing platforms like Zoom have become essential to many businesses in recent years, apps like Microsoft Teams and Slack have also become indispensable to corporations, non-profits and all sorts of other organizations.

As of 2024, Slack has around 65 million active users and is predicted to have 79 million monthly by 2025. Its closest rival, however, is even bigger – Microsoft revealed at the end of 2023 that Teams had 320 million active users.

However, Slack is much more popular with Fortune 500 companies – over 80% use it to facilitate collaboration and discussion between their employees.

Email stats

How many emails do we send and receive each day, and just how much of our time and profits are unwanted emails wasting?

Quantity

With over 4 billion email users in the world, it’s no surprise that email is one of the most used methods of contact. In fact, email is the primary method of communication for remote workers, followed by instant messaging and video chat. However, even though 362 billion emails are estimated to be sent and received worldwide, every day, only 20.74% of emails in North America are actually opened.

Usage

People spend an average of 11 hours per week reading, responding to, and sending work emails. This is far easier now than it was even a decade ago, due to the ease of checking emails on mobile devices. Astonishingly, a reported 81% of emails are opened on a mobile device. This allows 42% of Americans to check their business emails while in the restroom, with a condemnable 18% even doing so while driving.

Usefulness

However, as we all know, not every email that is sent is worth reading. Only about 38% of the average inbox contains emails that are actually relevant or important. It’s no surprise, then, that 60.8% of employees ignore emails at work. People spend just nine seconds, on average, looking at an email, too.

Almost half (47.7%) of workers said that receiving fewer emails at work would increase job satisfaction, and 26% of employees view email as a serious productivity killer. However, email is still preferred as the primary method of communication for 74% of adults, and regardless of the email’s importance, it takes an average of 64 seconds for a worker to ‘recover’ from an email interruption, and resume work as normal.

Phone stats

Phones are absolutely everywhere – but do they belong in the workplace? What attitudes do employers hold towards mobile work, and how good are we at picking up the receiver?

Usage

Three in five companies say that phone systems are among their most urgent priorities for investment. Despite this desire, only 26% of US companies provide mobile phones for their employees. This discrepancy may be because 98% of enterprises report their employees use smartphones for business purposes, and 87% of companies expect employees to use their personal devices for business purposes.

It’s not just standard workers who are expected to use their own phones. One quarter of a CEO’s time in a working day is spent on phone calls.

Phones aren’t perfect. They leave a lot of wiggle room, with 57% of employees multitasking during work phone calls, and 86% of calls to businesses being put on hold before the caller speaks to anybody. In this case, almost a third (32%) of those callers will hang up immediately.

Preference

Speaking of customers, it’s worth mentioning that two thirds (65%) of customers still prefer to contact a business by phone. However, 75% of millennials don’t like making or taking phone calls because of its time-consuming nature. 78% of people who text wish they could have a text conversation with a business.

Looking at workers’ preferences, 70% of workers keep their personal phones “within eye contact” at work, and 85% of employees use more than one device to communicate at work

Workers who feel their employers use mobile technology effectively are 23% more satisfied than those in companies where use of mobiles is “bad.” They’re also 21% more loyal, 18% more creative, and 16% more productive!

VoIP stats

29% of companies have switched to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) office phone systems because they make it easier to forward calls to their mobile phones. The expected market value for VoIP worldwide is expected to reach $151.4 billion in 2024.

Small businesses that switch to a VoIP telephone system can save up to 40% in local call costs, and 90% on international calls!

Tips for Effective Communication in the Workplace

Face-to-face meetings

Despite all the technology we’ve discussed, sometimes the best thing for a team or individual is a face-to-face meeting. Whether this is a team of 10 getting together to recap their progress or a one-on-one meeting between an employee and their manager, the benefit of these meetings cannot be understated. And most employees and managers alike prefer having them face-to-face, too.

These meetings don’t have to be in person. A Zoom call or Google Hangout can achieve the same effect. It’s just helpful to foster an environment where people can voice issues or raise questions that don’t warrant an entire email, or are harder to convey over text.

Manage time effectively

That said, meetings aren’t the solution to every problem. We’ve all only got a limited amount of time to work each day, and having this time get consumed by useless meetings will only lead to slower workflow and frustrated employees. 71% of workers claim that their time is wasted due to unnecessary meetings.

“This meeting could have been an email” is a common sentiment among workers who find their workflow constantly stunted by half-hour meetings that could have been summed up in a sentence or two. Make sure that you’re aware of peoples’ time allowances, and plan accordingly.

Make it a conversation, not a lecture

Your team is (hopefully) made up of adults, so there’s no need to make every interaction into a drawn-out, classroom-esque lecture. There will be times when a presentation or two is necessary, of course, but it’s a lot more engaging for everyone if they’re allowed to voice concerns or ask questions.

Make sure training is airtight

59% of employees claim that they received little to no training when starting a new job, with 87% of millennials believing that learning and development in the workplace is an important part of employment.

Investing a solid week or two into properly training a new employee might sound tiring or like a waste of time, but it makes the entirety of their remaining employment far easier for both parties. Communication won’t be bogged down by constant questions and mistakes, and everything will flow far easier.

Diplomacy is key

It’s a fact that every workplace is going to have a conflict or two. Around 85% of employees experience some kind of conflict during their tenure at a business, with 49% of these being caused by clashings of egos and personalities.

These issues are always going to be harder to navigate than a standard workplace issue, so it pays off to sincerely listen and cater to both sides (as long as one side isn’t openly ridiculous).

Key Takeaways

From our own research and the stats provided, the first thing that becomes clear is that many businesses aren’t good enough when it comes to communication with their employees.

The organizations nailing their communication are the ones succeeding, while those with poor communication techniques are typically dogged by missed deadlines, lower employee engagement, and a lack of confidence in managers.

What about the future? It looks like hybrid and remote working are here to stay. From our research, the vast majority of businesses see the benefit of flexible work options for their employees and will continue implementing them.