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March 12, 2008
Is less, indeed, more?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several conversations with clients about the amount of information communicators send to employees. My advice is always the same: Send less.
By “less,” I mean in every category: fewer in number, shorter in length, less lead time. My advice is based on feedback from employees in which they express how overloaded they feel, and their strong desire to reduce the amount of information they have to manage. Just say less, employees say.
This is consistent with how consumers feel about product information, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Iowa.
The study found that people who only have a little information about a product are happier with that product than people who have more information. There’s a paradox here: people want the ability to get information (if they want it), but they don’t want so much information that they second-guess their decision.
As eMarketer analyst Karin von Abrams notes, “The predicament for today’s shoppers is compounded by the world’s complexity, and the surfeit of choice, as well as the increasingly fast pace of life, leaves many people in a state of perceived pressure or stress much of the time.
“As a result,” she adds, “the need to make a choice is felt as a burden.”
I experienced this phenomenon this week: For a weekend house my husband and I are building, I had to select medicine cabinets for the master bathroom and powder room. I Googled “medicine cabinet” and was rewarded with thousands of hits, at such web sites as simplyvanities.com, faucet.com and medicinecabinetshop.com.
Each of these stores had hundreds of medicine cabinets to choose from, in every style from plain to ornate and at every price point from $75 to several thousand dollars. The possibilities made me dizzy. I bookmarked dozens of potential medicine cabinets. I kept revisiting saved shopping carts. I was paralyzed by having too many good choices.
Finally, the only way I could break the logjam was to add a criteria: The medicine cabinets had to be available to ship immediately. Suddenly, the selection narrowed to just a few, and I was freed by the tyranny of information.
In medicine cabinets as in employee communication, less is truly more.
Posted by Alison Davis at March 12, 2008 04:39 PM
Comments
Allison:
how wrong you are.
Employees hang on every word pushed at them by their employer's HR Department by e-mail, the company web sites, their Blackberry, and the ever-popular mailbox/deskdrop flier.
I think there may be a way to do two good things by adjusting our behavior on a single front.
By reducing the amount of "junk communications" we can silultaneously reduce the number of electrons, pixels, trees, the energy required to produce and convert them into "communications" AND make everyone much happier living in a more sustainable, less communication polluted environment. "Give a hoot - don't (communication) pollute!"
Tim
Posted by: Tim Fidler at May 22, 2008 07:52 AM