4 employee communication mistakes to avoid
Ding. Ping. Beep. In most organizations, employees get inundated with emails and messages. In fact, 300 billion emails were sent every day in 2020 alone.
It’s not just the quantity of communication that can cause stress and anxiety, it’s knowing what to take action on and what needs our attention.
Take, onboarding for example. It’s not uncommon for new hires to be bombarded with long messages from multiple sources, likely sent all at once.
80% of employees dislike their organizations communications - a disheartening statistic for People Teams
With so many emails, it’s natural to worry that what we take time to craft isn’t being read, or worse, actioned on. Given all of this, how can we learn to improve how we communicate so that it’s time well spent?
I’ve worked with some of the world’s top companies to help enhance their employee communication during many of the most important moments in an employee journey - including onboarding, becoming a manager, and launching organizational change
Here is the most frequent advice I've found myself giving to organizations:
1. Know your outcome
Clarify what you want people to do with the information you work so hard to share.
Before you even begin crafting your message, clarify your outcome. What do you need from the people you’re trying to affect? If we don't know, our employees won’t know either.
Chances are, all content fits into one of these 4 effects: compliance, informing, entertaining, and engaging.
Do you want employees to:
Take an action
Internalize information
Feel delighted
Increase their sense of buy-in, ownership, and perhaps behavior change
Try this: at your next town hall, lump your compliance asks (for example - sign up for benefits) into one slide instead of sprinkled throughout the hour.
Ask yourself questions about the outcome, not the content:
Who is this communication for?
What do you want them to do differently?
Why would they read this?
What information do your employees need?
What is the key action step?
2. Don't stuff the suitcase
Starting with outcome questions can feel jarring and different at first. Conversations about information to include are often more comfortable. This is one reason why we overpack our messages. I call this ‘stuffing the suitcase’.
Many of us approach communication the same way we approach travel. We throw everything in the suitcase just in case we need it. With employee communication we think as long as we’re sending a message, it’s best to give them as much information as we can.
Resist the urge to overpack your communication.
Just like overpacking a suitcase makes it heavy, overpacking your message makes for a heavy cognitive load. Not to mention, this approach gets in the way of others absorbing our message.
It’s not about what’s in the suitcase. It’s about where it allows us to go.
It’s not quantity we’re after, it’s quality.
3. Be action-oriented
Believe it or not, many of your employees want to be told what to do. This is especially true when they’re going through a new moment in their employee journey, like onboarding.
It’s during employee journey transitions that employees are most likely to need our advice and seek our help.
While we may believe casual or fun language sends a good message and friendly tone, it can get in the way of it being read and make it harder to decipher what’s important.
Be action-oriented not just informational.
Start with your subject lines. Try “5 things to do on your first day” instead of “What to consider when you join our company”. Action-oriented subject lines clarify the promise of what’s inside if people click. Less guesswork, more certainty.
4. Match the message to the moment
The timing of your message matters.
Ever try, yet fail to recall what you learned in new hire orientation after just a couple of months on the job?
Our ability to recall information is harder the further away from the moment of need it is. Communicating in the flow of work is easier for employees to remember and act.
Focus on the moment of need for your employees as much as the message you’re sending.
What’s happening for them right now? What are they trying to accomplish this week? What information is currently most applicable and relevant for them?
Instead of sending your communications all at once, make it timely by matching the message to the moment.
Instead of burying instructions for how to create a 90-day plan, guide the manager across key moments in their employee’s onboarding process at the moment it would likely take place and be most relevant.
Help employees ‘land the plane’ by directing them when and where to use the information you’re sharing. For example, share communication tips for a team meeting versus general best practices. “Try these tips in your next team huddle”.
Key takeaways
Remember, it’s not just about quantity or the amount of information we share, but people’s ability to take action on it.
To be employee-first, we need to gear all our communication towards what is relevant in their context and most helpful to them. We can also do so by focusing on the moment of need as much as the message.
These tips help us refocus from the information we want to share, to the people we are sharing it with.
When we do that, we bring people not only closer to our message but to us.
Lindsey Caplan is a screenwriter turned organizational psychologist who helps HR & business leaders create experiences that boost motivation, engagement, and performance