The chasm is growing: what do you do when communicators and executives are on one side, and everyone else is on the other?

Communication World, Oct-Nov, 2003 by Bill Jensen

The full truth always includes dissent. That's why we bury it or spin it. The full truth would not make our bosses happy; that's why we package it. The full truth does not appear in most of the speeches we write, or the videos, meetings, newsletters and web sites we produce. Perhaps, even, the full truth is disconcerting when we look in the mirror, and that's why some of us avoid it.

This is an article about the full truth, and the choices it represents--choices our employees are making in greater and greater numbers. And choices our communication community must make.

That's because the full truth is that there is a growing chasm between the two sets of clients we serve.

SEARCH FOR A SIMPLER WAY: LATEST FINDINGS

In 1992, The Jensen Group began an ongoing research project, "The Search for a Simpler Way." The group studies how easy or hard companies make it for people to get stuff done. More than 350,000 people worldwide have participated. The Jensen Group has looked at company-wide practices, such as performance management, as well as functional practices, such as corporate communication.

Early on, the group found that most work complexity (the hard part of getting everything done) actually originates from within companies. More than a decade later, certain findings and predictable behaviors keep popping up. How We Communicate was originally among the top three sources of work complexity. It still is. And it's getting worse.

Although it's important to acknowledge how things have improved--not long ago, senior executives were slammed for not communicating enough--mostly what has changed is quantity (how much communication is coming from above), as well as message consistency.

What continues to get worse, however, is utility--how useful the information is in making a fully informed and independent decision. On the whole, companies are communicating a lot more, but little of the communication truly helps employees make informed choices. Also, communicators are now their own worst enemy. Communication volume--the amount of messages employees must suffer through in order to get what they need--is a huge problem.

LEARN FROM, DON'T TALK AT EMPLOYEES

We are seeing a widening chasm between communication-savvy companies (with greatly improved ability to capture attention and stay "on message") and communication-savvy employees (with greatly improved ability to filter out anything that's not immediately relevant and important to them).

At the very time when we need to be learning more from the people who do the work, most firms are focused on perfecting how to talk at them. It is disheartening to see how few companies work backward from the needs of their employees. For example: It took one company (which has been continuously ranked as a great place to work) almost 10 years to redesign its hour-long Meetings-in-a-Box for middle managers who, according to the company's own performance management system, had fewer than 10 minutes available to communicate what was in the box.

Result: Thousands of managers struggled, blamed themselves, worked harder, grew more tense or simply learned to ignore 83 percent of what they were sent (the other 50 minutes' worth).

This situation is replicated most everywhere. Almost none of the utility and volume of corporate communication is driven by employee needs. It's almost entirely based on senior executives' views of what's needed.

THE BIG 'SO WHAT?'

In most companies today, the new universal definition of work is: Figuring out what to do with finite time and attention and infinite information and choices.

Most everyone who works today is overloaded, with too many daily decisions, too much information that is not immediately helpful to them in their daily workload, and too little help in sorting through it all.

One of the primary coping skills we've uncovered is that people deal with all this by figuring out what they can ignore. Anything that isn't designed to save them time (e.g., too much information that's too hard to sort through) or isn't immediately applicable to their work (e.g., utility defined from some senior exec's perspective, not theirs) is ignored.

And the savvy employees are figuring out that it pays to ignore more!

During 2002-2003, we interviewed more than 400 people, asking questions like:

* Which communication do you regularly ignore?

* Why?

* What do you gain by ignoring communication?

* What's in it for you?

We found that those who reported an increase in productivity and overall happiness did so by ignoring much of what communicators delivered!

Employees who had a proactive strategy for reducing what they paid attention to reported an increased ability to work on what matters with no significant decrease in loyalty or understanding of company priorities. Once they understood their company's or department's priorities--many described that understanding as just the "the gist of the overall direction"--they felt comfortable ignoring a lot of company e-mails, notices or broadcasts, even skipping mandatory all-hands meetings. They made their decisions by selectively scanning for information that was: