Are you over-communicating? Or perhaps you’re the recipient of too much communication? Does your organisation send you announcements and news that have no relevancy to your job? Does your manager make you sign a form to say you’ve read something ‘important’ when it clearly isn’t important at all?
If communication is part of our role, how can we judge if we’re sending out too many messages, or if we’re over-communicating?
I’d like to remind all writers, communicators and emailers (so that may well be all of us) that communications should be:
- relevant;
- timely;
- concise;
- contextual;
- rich.
I will discuss each concept this week, so I hope you’ll return each day.
“How do we know if we’re over-communicating?”
But to answer the question – consider this simple query: Is it actionable?
Much of our communication is ‘for information‘, but a good deal of whatever we send out should be either fact-finding (queries, polls and conversations) or comms to help people change their behaviours and do their job better.
So, are you asking your constituents to take action? If not, you may want to consider what the point of your communication is. If it’s informational, then is it valuable and relevant?
Actionable comms (sorry for the use of a business term) should have a ‘call to action’ and cause people to make a change or take some action.
My call to action today is for you to ask yourself ‘is this actionable’ before sending messages out, and to return through this week to kilobox communiqué to discuss the above list of commununication concepts.
[Wedge]
