Issue
Communication is currently a significant source of organizational complexity and stress.
- Everything is important
- Too many messages from too many channels, tools, and events
- Behaviours and decisions don’t match – mixed messages mean even more messages
- Language adds to the confusion – business jargon and acronyms
Facts
Managers spend 57 – 80% of their time spent in verbal communication.1
Employees get 70% of information from the grapevine.2
Learnings
You can reduce complexity and stress, improve the quality of the conversation and build business momentum:
- Target audiences – not all messages impact all employees the same way
- Engage, empower and support managers
- Build and enlist informal networks: harness the grapevine and get their feedback
- Choose the right tool for the right job
- Tell one story – increase the consistency and focus – connect the dots
- Use plain language
- Listen and adjust
- Build communication…
…behaviours that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic…
Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy
Manage your energy, not your time, Harvard Business Review, October 2007
Bottomline
Make it your mission to simplify communications and reduce complexity in your workplace.
1. Henry Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1973, p. 382.
2. Bill Quirke, Putting communication on management’s agenda, Journal of Communication Management, Volume 1, Number 1, 1995, p. 67