A friend's son turned one over the weekend. She shared with me a photo showing the birthday boy up to his elbows in cake and icing. I have the same photo of my son doing the same thing on his first birthday. I bet those of us with kids all have that same photo. There's just something about giving a kid a giant cake with lots of icing and letting him get beyond messy with it.
Today on Twitter I participated in a chat about internal communications and how we as communicators are both experiencing and contributing to a similar messy situation in our workplaces: information overload. It's tough realizing we're both victims and offenders in this situation.
But I'm afraid that, in lots of workplaces, it's true. In an effort to thoroughly communicate, we have a tendency to overcommunicate, leaving employees to the dirty job of filtering through all of the information to find the important pieces of data. Here's your newsletter, emails, e-newsletters, intranet site, videos, town hall meetings, instant messages, texts, blogs, voicemails and Twitter/Yammer feeds. Good luck keeping up.
In fact, my firm just completed a communications survey with a client's frontline managers. More than 55 percent of the respondents indicated that they "do not have the time they need to share important information" due to information overload. In the commenting section, one manager put it this way: "what you expect me to share, give me the time to share." Another said "we need info that is direct, easy to find, and easy to pass on to my employees; we have about five minutes to pass any information we have prior to dispatching my crew."
Clearly these folks are up to their elbows in cake and icing. They barely have time to get their "real" jobs done, much less their communications responsibilities. And we've helped contribute to the problem by throwing all of these communications tools at them without clearly thinking through how to use all of these tools and whether they're all needed. Don't get me wrong: I can be just as guilty of this as the next person. I love cake and icing, especially all of the shiny, new stuff that's out there.
But as we discussed on Twitter today, a few well-chosen tools of both the push and pull variety populated with honest, transparent, relevant and interesting information can work as hard as you need them to to get the job done. A mad rush to provide everything to everybody in every form possible creates more problems than it solves. Choose your tools wisely and carefully and then let them do their jobs. Evaluate them every once in a while to make sure they're still relevant. But resist the urge to add a new tool just because you can.
All of that cake and icing is tempting. Just know you'll pay the price for it sooner or later.
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