A pretty cool, innovative company that was launched in the middle of the pandemic discovered that they were having some major communication issues, not unlike many organizations. As innovative as they were and quick to adopt technology, they’d been using Slack. But what they found was that there were a lot of direct messages going on – lots of DMs and individual conversations.
So when a group would get together to discuss a project or collaborate, people were left out of new information or updates, and then showing up unprepared or with incorrect data. They therefore instituted a policy that there would be no more DMs; that everything needed to be communicated out in the open, so everyone’s on the same page.
So I want to park that over here, right? Lots of communication, everybody knows about it. I want to come over here for a moment, a client that I’m working with where they have a very similar policy. Some DMing is fine, but for the most part, it is communicated on Slack in these channels for projects, where everybody can see all of the information.
But there’s one particular employee that seems to be overwhelmed; when you’re asking this employee about their project status or what they’re working on, they share with the manager that they haven’t gotten to it yet. And while there’s some other variables that are happening, learning how to prioritize, learning how to do some project management, part of the challenge is that they are so distracted by the volume of communication they are a part of.
So as I look at these two on the opposite ends of the spectrum, they’re experiencing great results with lots of communication, and then we’re over here where we’ve got potentially an employee, or several that we may not know about, who are overwhelmed by that level of communication. So I encourage you to take a look at how we’re leveraging these platforms and this technology for communication, and start to think about where people should be involved, and where they shouldn’t. And this is not to withhold information, but to make sure that you are receiving the communication for projects and things that are relevant to you.
That the communication is serving to benefit, that the communication is helping drive toward goals, drive toward efficiency and effectiveness, and not toward distraction, overwhelm, or potential confusion.
I loved seeing that both of these organizations can have the same policy, yet what can happen as a result on both sides is much different. So before you get to either one or the other – and I hate to see the pendulum swing too far – I really encourage you, especially if you’re a leader, to be thinking about what that looks like for your team and within your organization.
Where could the volume of communication for some people serve as a distraction and decrease or reduce efficiency and effectiveness? And where could you maybe increase your communication, to make sure that everyone’s on the same page?