Communication follows JoAnn’s Law: when trying to communicate more with staff to quell complaints from a few about communication, those who feel there isn’t enough communication will never feel there’s enough, no matter what you do. Conversely, those who already feel there’s enough communication, which is usually a strong majority of people, will be less productive as they try to assimilate all of the new communication.

In any organization there are people complaining that there needs to be more communication, that they need to know more about what is going on and why. Just as prevalent, but given less attention, are the people complaining that there’s already too much communication. In this post, I lay out how this is an unsolvable problem and that managers are better off erring slightly, but only slightly, towards providing less rather than more communication.

Earlier in my career I had determined that the key was giving people the exact amount of communication they needed in the way they needed it, when they needed it. I soon found that this was a fool’s errand; it’s a lot of work and it’s not just unhelpful, but completely counterproductive.

Why is Communication Important?

There are several reasons why employees need communication. First and foremost, all jobs require some outside communication to be completed. Even if you are sweeping floors, you need to know when special events are scheduled so you can avoid sweeping at certain times and sweep more at other times. More complex jobs often require more information and thus need more communication to amass that information. Leadership often needs almost real-time communication from around the company to best guide the organization.

Second, humans are a communal species. Sharing and communicating is a core part of what we do. In addition to giving them information about their work, communicating with staff helps them feel more like part of the community. People are more effective when they understand how what they are doing helps the whole. As my friend Jabe Bloom says, they need to see themselves as heroes in the narrative.

When is Communication a Problem?

There are also several downsides to communicating more with staff. A big one is that it takes time to communicate. I have seen executives spend dozens of hours working on a fifteen-minute presentation that most staff sleep through. Again and again, I have seen mandatory periodic meetings where the leadership struggles to come up with enough material to talk about each week. These meetings often devolve into status reports; often a big waste of time. Everyone knows these meetings are a waste of time, but the manager has them because they don’t want to be accused of ‘not communicating’.

Another downside is that some staff will use any information given to them in disruptive ways. A common tactic amongst the most passive aggressive staff has been for them to complain loudly anytime there was anything that they thought they should have known but didn’t. In other words, anything that happens is NOT THEIR FAULT in their eyes. In years past, I tried very hard to counter this by keeping those people in the loop on everything, only to find that the amount of communication was never enough. They would always find something to complain about.

Never enough, that is, until it was too much. Several times I tried telling these people everything I knew as soon as I could. This took an enormous amount of time and effort on my part, but I thought handling these complaints was what I should do as a leader. What happened? They would complain that I had given them too much information and they couldn’t possibly get through it all!

In other words, my inability to give them the exact amount of information at the exact time they needed it meant that they felt they couldn’t do their jobs effectively. If this was true, then some level of timely information would have quieted them. Since no amount ever did, I was forced to conclude that their complaints about communication are not actually about communication at all. Rather they are a way for them to externalize their frustrations; blaming outside forces for anything that went wrong.

So, what to do?

As with anything that exhibits the characteristics of JoAnn’s law, where the reaction of the majority of people who are satisfied must be weighed against the minority whose behavior you are trying to change, the best answer is to favor the majority. If the majority is pushing for more communication, then by all means you need to up your game in that area. If most people are happy, your efforts, no matter how herculean, to try to quiet the dissenters will only produce negative results. The dissenters will never be happy.

In fact, in these cases, the best course of action is to cut back a little on your communication. One thing I like to do in meetings is to multiply the number of people in attendance times the number of hours the meeting is expected to run in order to calculate how much the company is spending on that meeting. Let’s say I called a meeting of my entire staff together, at one point about 150 people, and we talked for an hour. Including salary, benefits and overhead, these technologists cost at least $125 per hour. That comes out to $18,750 for a one-hour meeting.

I would ask myself if the value we received from the meeting would have been worth paying an outside firm $18,750. If the answer was yes or maybe, then the meeting was worth having. If the answer was no, I canceled the meeting. Often, I would make meetings like that optional so people could attend if they wished. They could join if they found it valuable. In the age of Zoom, it wasn’t uncommon for people to tune in but work on other things at the same time. I encouraged it for these informational meetings, so they could listen only to the pieces they found valuable.

Conclusion

To be clear, communication is important and serves a vital function in companies. Even the dreaded status meeting can be a vital cog in making sure everyone knows what’s happening and how it affects their work.

“Communication” has become such a buzzword at companies that saying anything other than that all companies should strive for more and better communication can be a perilous endeavor, but I think it should be looked at objectively and not be sacrosanct.  

Leaders must recognize that communication takes work on the part of both the sender and the receiver, and more communication is often not a good thing. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find the perfect level of communication with staff because all staff have different needs and the environment is constantly changing.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t communicate. I am saying that leaders must be aware that their communication has a cost as well as a benefit. Moreover, increasing communication because of those who complain about wanting more communication, especially if it’s a small subset of people, can be very counterproductive for the organization as it increases everyone’s workload and those complaining probably won’t be satisfied, no matter how much extra communication they receive.