SNC-Lavalin was one of Canada’s largest and oldest engineering companies. This assignment will talk about the communication problems that the company has faced, the causes and symptoms of those problems, the key stakeholders that are affected by these problems and how the communication model can be used to deal with the key stakeholders.

The two main communication problems that the company faced were financial transparency and unethical actions within the company. Financial transparency affected the company as the company and the stakeholders were not on the same page, as the company did not properly share the correct financial information with the stakeholders of the company. The unethical actions also affected the company as the poor communication between the company and their stakeholders led to situations where the company acted in unethical situations.

The causes of the communication problems were the mystery payments of $56 million to an unnamed agent of the company and the lack of response to feedback. The mystery payments caused the financial communication problem, as the company did not accurately tell their stakeholders about the mystery payments and why their profits kept decreasing when their revenues were still increasing. The lack of response to feedback caused the unethical action problem as the company overlooked the feedback it received about their unethical actions, which led to more unethical actions, all because the company decided not to respond to criticism.
The symptom of the financial communication problem was that the company’s financial records showed a shortage of $56 million and the symptom of the unethical action problem was the continued use of unethical actions by the company. The $56 million that was missing was because of the company’s inaccurate presentation of their records to their stakeholders, which led to financial transparency. The continued use of unethical actions was a result of poor communication, as the company did not properly relay information along to their stakeholders about their decisions on important issues, which led to them to perform unethical issues without the stakeholders knowing anything that was going on.

The key stakeholder group that is involved is the investors. They are an important group to the company as they are the ones who invest their money into the company so that the company can keep their operations going. However, the company had poor communication with their investors, which led to the unethical actions to begin. Once news about their financial and unethical misdoings came to light, the investors were hit the hardest, as they had to face the criticism of the public about the company’s wrongdoings when they didn’t even know about the unethical actions firsthand.

SNC-Lavalin can use the communication model to deal with their investors. They can encode a message to their investors through the use of financial statements. These financial statements will have the documents the investors need to understand the situation about the unethical financial actions that the company performed. This way the communication between the sender and receiver (SNC-Lavalin and the investors, respectively) will not be miscommunicated in the wrong way.

In conclusion, SNC-Lavalin had poor communication with their stakeholders and did some illegal and unethical misconduct as a result of that. In order to have good communication, they should follow the communication model which will result in better and smarter actions by the company.