Communication Excellence in Project Management

A common problem I have seen as a project manager, trainer, and university professor is the inability for people to make time for reflection. In today’s world of hyper-competition, people are running at full-speed from one task to another. Even people who profess to have a healthy work-life balance are still busy with either work tasks or personal tasks. Like the famous fictional character, we have jumped on our horses and have dashed off rapidly in all directions.

Pausing and being still can be powerful. Bruce Lee, the famous martial artist, would often use quick pauses to observe his opponent and plan his next flurry of attacks. Having the project team pause occasionally can help them better understand their work and allow for better, more thoughtful conversations between team members. Stillness also allows the project manager hold those difficult conversations with project team members and stakeholders in a more productive way.

Have you, as a project manager, ever communicated to your project team that, sometimes, it is a good idea to stop and pause? To reflect on what we have done, where we are heading, and if it is still a good idea to keep moving in the same direction? That, on the days when there is no work, it is a better practice to take stock of what we have done and consider more effective ways to do our work?

I’ve recently started researching the connection between employee engagement and communication. Now, I know that many of you are thinking that there is an obvious connection between engagement and communication and probably a significant factor (if not the most significant factor) in engaging employees. I agree. 

Even so, I wanted to dig deeper and understand just exactly how communication connects to engagement. What is the role of communication? What types of communication work better than other types in fully engaging employees? Communication is a broad concept and the communication field has numerous theories. Just what is it about communication that compels engagement in employees?

In researching communication and engagement, I came upon the concept of “quality of communication experience” (QCE). Formulated by Leigh Anne Liu, Chei Hwee Chua, and Gunter Stahl (2010), QCE is a construct first used for understanding intercultural negotiations. QCE consists of three parts:

Clarity – “the degree of comprehension of the meaning being communicated.”
Responsiveness – “the norm of coordination.”
Comfort – “a condition of positive affect [sic] of ease and pleasantness when interacting with each other.”

After reading these definitions, I thought that these parts are also equally applicable to employee engagement. To test my assumption, I am currently analyzing government employee workplace surveys for the United States Federal government, the United Kingdom national government, and the UK National Health Service. After my initial analysis, I will do a factor analysis of the survey items to validate a QCE Index.

I also plan to create a QCE survey instrument to be used with project management teams. First, I want to measure the overall engagement of the project team. Then, I will administer the QCE survey to determine if there is a correlation and how strong the correlation is. The final step is to do a quantitative analysis to determine if a causal connection between engagement and communication does exist and the strength of that causal connection.

In upcoming posts, I will update you on my findings and research.

Reference: Liu, Leigh Anne and Chua, Chei Hwee and Stahl, Günter (2010) Quality of Communication Experience: Definition, Measurement, and Implications for Intercultural Negotiations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95 (3). pp. 469-487. ISSN 0021-9010