Just because your HR messages are important, doesn’t mean people will listen and act on them.
Whether you send a corporate-wide email on something as important as COVID-19 vaccine policies or a short message to a few people on a meeting time, the chances it’ll evoke action aren’t great.
What’s the problem?
HR communication is often over saturated – too much, too often. That’s especially true as more people work remote full-time or part-time.
What works?
“Bursts of rapid-fire communications, with longer periods of silence in between, are hallmarks of success …,” Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley found in their research recently published in the Harvard Business Review.
“Those silent periods are when team members often form and develop their ideas. {It’s} deep work that may generate the next steps in a project or the solution to a challenge faced by the group.”
Effective communication takes a lot more than nonstop morning chats and silence the rest of the day. Good communication through HR takes these best practices, Riedl and Williams Woolley found.
Schedule it
Communication through messaging – email, text, Slack and other apps – isn’t as productive as real-time communication. Communication Bursts are more effective when people are together in person, on the phone or over video.
So it’s important for you and other managers to actually schedule time to talk with teams regularly, even daily, if possible. It might be difficult with a remote group juggling other responsibilities. But researchers said many teams find agreeable times early and late in the day. That way, important messages are far less likely to be ignored.
Earmark purpose, outcome
Because it can be difficult to find the perfect “bursty time,” it’s critical to waste no time when you get people together to discuss.
Earmark a purpose and outcome for conversations, so employees get out as much they put into meetings.
When employees come out of well-organized Communication Bursts, they’re prepared to act quickly and as needed on the information.
Foster silence
Efforts to communicate effectively will be useless if employees can’t stay focused on their individual work after hearing it.
Encourage employees to schedule silent periods so they can take the next steps in the project, stick to their most important tasks and/or develop needed new ideas and solutions based on what’s been shared.
Temper the video
This could be the most surprising outcome of their research: Teams communicate more effectively using audio over video.
Without visual cues (which are limited on computer screens), team members speak and listen more evenly during calls.
Plus, the quality of the interaction increases. The group might have more “collective intelligence.” They come up with more impactful ideas, share more useful information and increase team effectiveness.
Aim for less content, more quality
Beyond bursty communication, when you use email and other forms of asynchronous communication with your team, create focused messages. Researchers found the fewer ideas in a message, the more likely the message gets the necessary action or response.
For instance, if you have three things to cover, send three separate emails instead of one. It’s easier to get in-depth and exchange ideas about each topic.
