Most workplace disasters aren't caused by poor process. They're caused by bad communication.
Someone assumes one thing. Someone else assumes another. Nobody checks. A deadline gets missed, a client gets the wrong version, a project starts half-briefed - and when you trace it back, it's almost never a skills problem. It's a channel problem. The wrong medium got used for the wrong kind of information at the wrong moment.
Being told to improve communication is meaningless advice - everyone already thinks they do. The real skill is knowing which channel fits which moment: when a Slack message will do, when it needs to be an email, and when it genuinely has to be a meeting.
Get that wrong and you pay for it. Use Slack when you needed a documented decision, and three weeks later nobody agrees what was actually agreed. Use email when you needed a conversation, and you get a one mile thread going nowhere. Call a meeting when an email would've done, and you've just cost four people an afternoon over something that needed three sentences.
Getting it wrong, three ways
Slack, misused, loses decisions. Something important gets agreed halfway down a fast-moving channel, scrolls out of view within the hour, and three weeks later nobody can find it - or agree on what was actually decided. If it needs to be pointed back to later, it needed to be an email.
Email, misused, kills momentum. A question that needed a two-minute conversation turns into a ten-reply thread, each reply half-answering the last, the actual decision getting further away with every "just to clarify." That's the moment to stop typing and pick up the phone.
Meetings, misused, waste the most time because they waste it for the most people at once. A 30-minute call across four people who didn't need to be there is two hours gone, spent avoiding three sentences someone could have written.
Of the three, meetings are where agencies bleed the most - so it's worth a closer look at why they keep happening.
The meeting epidemic
Before remote work, if you had a quick question, you walked over to someone's desk, asked it, and got on with your day. Thirty seconds, done. Now you have to "find a time," which rarely means five minutes and rarely means just the people who actually need to be there.
Multiply that across a team and you get the single biggest complaint I hear in every agency I work with: too many meetings. Not the workload itself - the meetings about it. Most of them didn't need to happen. The usual reasons, in no particular order of blame:
- Unclear ownership. No one's driving. The meeting drifts, restates what was already said in the group chat, and ends with no decision and a follow-up meeting to discuss it further.
- Lazy management. It's easier to say "let's grab everyone for a call" than to sit and write clear instructions. The meeting becomes a substitute for actually thinking through what needs to be said.
- Fear of exclusion. Nobody wants to be the one who left someone off the invite. So the list grows on "we're one team, better include them" - and half the room ends up with nothing to say and nowhere to put their eyes.
- It's just easier. Grabbing everyone for a call takes fewer seconds than writing the email that would've done the same job.
If you've sat in a meeting and watched two or three people say nothing for the full hour, ask why they were invited. Then ask why they said yes.
The meeting killer
Before any invite goes out, it has to meet every one of these:
1. Named chairperson
Someone owns the meeting and runs it.
2. Clear objective
What the meeting is for, written in the invite, not discovered five minutes in.
3. Confirmed attendees with a defined role
not "might be useful," a specific reason each person is there.
4. Minutes with clear action points
who does what, by when, sent out the same day.
Run every request through that and most of them collapse into an email. Once you're forced to state the objective and justify every attendee, you usually realise you don't need a room full of people. You need three sentences and a deadline.
The clearest sign you actually do need one: an email thread that solves nothing and never ends. Replies keep coming, nobody's landing on an answer, and the work behind it just sits there. That's the moment to stop typing and say, "can we jump on for five minutes and just sort this out." Five minutes of talking resolves what an hour of back-and-forth won't.
Clients don't run on your rules
Everything so far is internal - your team, your habits, your channels to fix. Clients are a different game entirely, and it's the bit most agencies skip.
Internally you can set the standard. Externally you're working inside someone else's, and most agencies default to whatever channel is comfortable for them rather than whatever actually works for the client. Some clients want everything in writing - queries, sign-off, decisions, all traceable, nothing agreed verbally. Others expect a WhatsApp message and treat a formal email as a black hole nothing comes back from. Get that read wrong and you've either buried a client in admin they never asked for, or left an important decision so informal it comes back to bite you at the invoice stage - "that's not what we agreed."
There's no house style that solves this, because the answer is different for every client. What solves it is asking, upfront, on every new account: how do they want to be updated, how fast do they expect a reply, what needs to be in writing, and what can just be said out loud. Put the answer in the brief. Revisit it if the relationship or the person on the other end changes.
Internal miscommunication costs you an afternoon. Client miscommunication costs you the account.
Try it
Pick one thing this week. Run the four-point test on your next meeting invite. Or, before you fire off a fast Slack message, ask if it's actually a decision that needs to be findable later. Or, before a two-line email turns into a ten-reply thread, pick up the phone instead.
Then do the one most agencies skip entirely: ask your next client how they actually want to hear from you, rather than assuming your internal habits will do.
None of this is about communicating "better." It's about picking the right channel before you hit send. Do that and you'll solve the majority of your issues - or at least stop them becoming issues in the first place.
