Rework: why poor communication is so expensive

Why does poor communication affect rework in construction - and why is it harder to avoid than a technical error?

Because poor communication leaves no trace on the invoice. Rework is work that has to be carried out again - corrected, altered or completely redone - because the first attempt did not meet the project requirements, specifications or quality standards. It is not normal, planned work, but work that should not exist if the first attempt had been right.

A survey by the Austrian company PlanRadar with more than 2,500 respondents showed that rework costs can amount to more than 11% of total project costs, and “poor communication between teams and stakeholders” was named as one of the main reasons - in as many as 12 of the 15 countries surveyed. (PlanRadar, The Cost of Rework in Global Construction, 2023.)

When silence costs billions: a case from London

The Crossrail project, today's Elizabeth Line in London, is Europe's most important infrastructure project and was due to open in December 2018. At the end of August that year, the public was told that the opening was being postponed. (Railway Technology, 2018.)

The first explanation for the delay was technical: a transformer explosion and software problems in the signalling. (Railway Technology, 2018.) But subsequent reviews revealed a coordination failure as the systemic cause: the group of contractors did not jointly review the progress of the phases and sites - nor did they communicate problems to one another. (ScienceDirect; Crossrail Learning Legacy)

The delay at one station quietly blocked train testing for months before anyone publicly admitted it. On the other side, the Client assumed that the contracting parties would coordinate among themselves.

The outcome: a delay of almost three and a half years and a budget that grew from the planned £14.8 billion to almost £18.7 billion. (Railway News; International Railway Journal)

Why is poor communication harder to detect?

There is a reason why it is easier to fix a wrongly installed cable than poor communication: a cable fault is easier to spot. A communication failure usually goes unseen until the damage has already been done - and that is exactly where its insidiousness lies:

1. Information about a problem carries a risk for the person who passes it on

Admitting that your own phase of the project is running late, or that the contracting party you work with is not delivering what it promised, means taking responsibility, exposing yourself to criticism, and perhaps jeopardising a relationship or a contract. On Crossrail, one of the participants described how the client looked at its own critical path data and chose not to see it - because admitting the delay at that moment would have triggered a series of unpleasant consequences. (Crossrail Learning Legacy)

2. Responsibility for communication is diffuse

In projects with several contractors, responsibility for communication is diffuse. When Crossrail was divided into “vertical” contracts (individual sites) and “horizontal” contracts (systems running along the entire line), the assumption was that the contractors would coordinate among themselves because that was what the contract said. (ScienceDirect) A formal obligation to communicate, however, is not the same as an actual communication channel. The result was what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility - a phenomenon in which an individual feels less personal responsibility when in a group of people, believing that someone else will react.

3. Bad news travels slowly upwards

Information that something is not going well has to pass through several hierarchical levels before it reaches someone who can make a decision - and at every level there is an incentive to downplay the problem, solve it locally or postpone it. By the time it finally reached the top, a problem that was initially manageable had become critical. (International Railway Journal)

Something similar happens on our construction sites too: an engineer keeps quiet about a subcontractor running late, assuming it is better – for him – to try to temporarily hide the problem and solve it himself. At some point, or with a bit of bad luck, the problem is discovered by the director and the owner anyway.

When communication turns into cost

A system in which it is easier to keep quiet about a problem than to escalate it guarantees that the problem will escalate by itself - only later and at a higher cost.

Poor communication will show up as additional working hours, repeated meetings, extended deadlines and additional checks due to lost trust.

That is exactly why one of MIKRO HR's areas of work is – communication within and outside the team on the construction site.