Companies with 100 employees could be losing more than $5,000 per employee per year by not addressing inefficient communication issues.(HEADLINE: Siemens Enterprise Communications Group)(Report)

on average, 70% of employee respondents of small and medium businesses (SMBs) with up to 400 employees said they spend 17.5 hours each week addressing the pain points caused by communications barriers and latencies, according to a global study sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications and conducted by SIS International Research. The research also showed that while SMB awareness of unified communications as a solution is rising, nearly 60% of SMBs do not currently employ one based on the sampling.

In addition, researchers at SIS International Research determined that the time spent per week dealing with communications issues was more than 50 percent higher in companies with more than 20 workers. In hard costs, the study concluded, companies of 100 employees could be losing more than $500,000 each year by not addressing their employees' most painful communications issues.

Key Findings. The Siemens-sponsored SMB study ascertained the top five pain points to be, in order of their estimated expense to an SMB: inefficient coordination; waiting for information; unwanted communications; customer complaints; and barriers to communication. Specifically, they obtained the following responses to each of these pain points:

1. Inefficient Coordination: Sixty-eight percent of respondents have trouble coordinating communications among team members, affecting their ability to respond quickly to time-sensitive customer requests. They also average 3.7 hours per week attempting to coordinate communications across team members, slowing the ...