It will come as no surprise to anybody who has ever held a job that managers are often lousy communicators. Even if you have leaders who communicated well, you undoubtedly had co-workers who weren’t so lucky.

Employees are not promoted into jobs with supervisory responsibility based on their communication skills. Rather, the promotion track eventually leads to a job with managerial responsibilities, after which few companies require managers to complete any kind of communication skills training.

A human resources consulting firm called Novations has surveyed 2,046 senior HR and training and development executives to assess the degree of the problem. “HR people have a unique vantage on employee opinions and attitudes, and are ideally placed to evaluate the communications effectiveness of top management,” according to Rebecca Hefter, Novations’ Senior VP for Training.

On the one hand, I laughed out loud when I read that quote. I’ve known plenty of HR people who were among the worst communicators I’ve ever experienced. I’ve also worked with companies where HR was an obstacle to effective communication. On the other hand, HR is one of the few departments in any company that touches every other department; it’s also the place employees go to complain.

Hefter continued: “The survey results aren’t just disturbing, they’re also startling, given the time and money devoted to internal communication.”

Again, I had to chortle a bit, given the scant resources most internal communicators have to work with. Most communication resources are shoveled at marketing and external PR. Employee communicators are often left with the droppings.

The survey results are startling, though. Asked to grade the effectiveness of senior management’s communications with employees, HR and T&D executives broke it out this way:

A: 14%
B: 39%
C: 32%
D: 13%
F: 02%

That’s nearly half of senior executives earning a grade of C or less. Even more interesting are the reasons given for such lousy performance:

35%—Senior management relies too much on email (and not enough on face-to-face communication)
30%—Senior management assumes a single message is adequate
28%—Senior management has no feedback loop in place
24%—Senior management’s messages often lack clarity
03%—Senior management communicates too much, too often

The last one is odd, since the benefits of over-communication dramatically outweight the risks of under-communication. The rest, though, resonate. Hefter’s most salient comment:

What stands out is the inherent weakness of email for employee communications. The Internet is used more and more, but there seems to be a point of diminishing returns when email is relied upon so much. Employees like to see and hear their management and may feel depersonalized by too much email messaging, instead of direct contact.”

I suspect email is also being used ineffectively in a lot of cases, but Hefter’s right: We have come to rely far too heavily on email as a means of reaching employees (who, incidentally, are already buried in email).

Part of the problem is that many employee communication departments have little influence over what senior leaders do (hence the quest for that elusive seat at the management table). And, of course, there are those who would argue that senior leader communication is irrelevant anyway.

The fact is that trust is a critical component of engagement and commitment, and trust evolves from (among other things) clear line of sight between the senior-most levels of the organization and the front line. The folks in the C-suite make decisions that determine whether front-line employees will have a job in the future. Strong leader communication is a vital element of any internal communication effort, and therefore needs to be strategized like any other aspect of employee communications.

With luck, the ability to share this data with senior leaders will produce some results. It would have been nice, though, if the research had been able to to tie bad leader communication to disappointing business results. Change is most easily initiated when the organization can ease some pain.