December 8, 2003
Resolve to Conquer Message Overload in 2004

Is it too early to make a New Year’s Resolution? If one of your employee communication challenges is an overabundance of conflicting messages, resolve to tame the mess in 2004. After all, it would be great to begin the New Year with a clear, cohesive set of concepts for employees to receive and understand. Here’s how to get started.

As organizations become larger and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide employees with a unified story about your company. So many groups—senior management, HR, each division/business unit, IT—are communicating about so many different issues that employees often report they feel overwhelmed. Employees wonder: “What’s really important? How do all these things fit together? What does any of it mean to me?”

As a communicator, although you may not feel that you have the authority to solve message overload, you do have the expertise and influence to do so, using these five strategies:

1. Deploy research to diagnose and define the problem.
Some of the best ways include:

  • Conduct focus groups and individual interviews to find out how employees experience communication, testing their understanding of company-critical issues.
  • Collect all the communication a certain critical department—your customer service center or sales force, for example— receives, then analyze whether employees can physically read it all in available time. (Our prediction: unless they’re incredible speed-readers, they can’t).
  • Assess communication across parts of the organization to see whether messages are in agreement or whether the language is in conflict. Create a matrix of how messages collide or reinforce each other.

2. Make your case to the people who matter.
Senior managers and other opinion leaders need to be aware of a message overload and alignment problem to support your efforts to solve it. Bring your research results to the right people in the forum that will best work in your organization—in some cases, a formal presentation before an executive committee is the way to go, while at other organizations, “socializing” through strategic one-on-one meetings works best. Play the role of internal consultant to identify the problem, then propose specific action steps to address it.

3. Gain agreement about message priorities.
Since it’s impossible for employees to absorb everything, it’s necessary that you gain clarity on what really matters to your organization. Part of making the case is helping senior managers set message priorities. Gain agreement on these issues: “What are the most important issues/initiatives your organization is working on? What do senior managers most want employees to understand, believe and do?”

4. Leverage or form a communicators’ network.
In most organizations, people who play a significant role in communications can be found all over the place: in divisions/business units, communication-heavy functions such as human resources and information technology, and in major locations. Very rarely do these folks all report to the director or VP of corporate communications—usually they’ve been hired at the request of a senior manager to “manage our communication.” Especially when it comes to message alignment, if all these communicators aren’t collaborating together, they’re working against one another. But you have the opportunity to support or create a community of practice that has a common purpose: to engage employees by making communication more effective.

5. Create a message calendar.
One of the most important tasks a communicators’ network can undertake is to develop a communication calendar that includes:

  • key messages throughout the entire organization, and specific supporting messages in particular areas
  • how messages will be delivered in communication channels, including the intranet, print publications, e-mail newsletters, and major meetings
  • when the messages will be conveyed.

All these components may require negotiation and adjustment. But just working on the calendar will create discipline around communication, since it will help focus on what communication employees will receive, and when and how they will receive it.

None of this is simple or easy, which is why there’s a sixth strategy to keep in mind: Stay cool and focused. It took a long time to get to the state of message overload, and it’s not going to be solved overnight. But if you are smart and persistent, you can make significant progress in 2004.