Communication overload: how do we lift the curse of modern work?

I’m not going to waste your time by describing communication overload, because I suspect you may already be living with it. A constant barrage of emails, Slack notifications and video calls that distract us from doing our “real” work is now a near-ubiquitous experience of modern work.

The data backs up the lived experience; Microsoft’s analysis of Office 365 use shows that people spend 57% of their time in communication tools - email, video calls and chat - and only 43% in “creation” tools like Word and Excel.

Many of us dislike this way of working. Leaders are increasingly aware that it damages productivity. So why has this happened? And, perhaps more pertinently, what can we do to fix it?

I’ll come to those questions in a moment. But to set some context, let’s start with a fact that may surprise you: despite completely reshaping how we work and communicate over the last 30 years, a lot of economists believe the internet has not improved macroeconomic productivity. Or to put it another way: it’s possible that many countries would be no less productive today if the internet had never been invented. This counter-intuitive idea is an example of what has become known as the “productivity paradox.”

The “productivity paradox” 2.0

The term “productivity paradox" was first used in 1993 to describe a surprising phenomenon: two decades of major progress in computing had failed to lead to significant growth in productivity.

Almost as soon as it was named, the paradox disappeared, with strong growth in the 1990s driven in large part by tech industries. But, since 2000, economic growth has slowed again. This time, the transformative technology not yet delivering on its productivity promise isn’t computers: it’s the internet.

The causes of the paradox are complex and disputed. But Erik Brynjolfsson, the academic who coined the phrase, points to two reasons why it can take decades for new technologies to deliver their promised value.

The first is that early versions of the technology simply aren’t very good, and it takes a while to iterate to the stage where they’re genuinely useful. Electric vehicles are a good example of this. They’ve been around since the 1990s, but it’s only as battery performance has improved over the last few years that they’ve started to become mainstream.

Process lags technology

The second cause of the productivity paradox is thornier and, according to Brynjolfsson and his colleague, “more important” - that is “the processes, structure, and culture of the workplace.” They don’t pull their punches on this point, continuing: “Humans, unfortunately, are generally unable to appreciate or implement the profound changes in organizational structure, leadership, workforce, and workflow needed to take full advantage of new technologies, at least at first.” (Ouch).

Cal Newport, an author who writes about work in the digital age, highlights Henry Ford’s invention of the car assembly line as an example of this phenomenon in action. What is often missing from the Ford story, he points out, is that industrial car manufacturing had been around for 20 - 25 years before Ford perfected the assembly line. There was no significant change in technology during that time; it was purely a challenge of organisation and process. And it took a long time to solve it - Ford went through a whole series of experiments before he finally cracked the problem.

Which leads us, finally, to communication overload.

Less friction, more messages

Newport argues that communication overload has come about because we’re stuck in the pre-assembly line phase of digital communication; we’ve got the technology, but we haven’t figured out the best way to use it yet. Where we’ve ended up has not, in fact, been designed intentionally to optimise productivity. Instead, change in how we communicate has been driven almost entirely by the drive to reduce friction.

The evolution of email and Slack illustrates this point. Here’s a condensed version of the story: before there was email, there was fax, mail and phone. Communicating over email is more convenient than all of these, so it largely replaced them. But as email reduced the friction of communication, the volume of email skyrocketed, to the point where the email inbox became an ineffective and inefficient way to manage the back-and-forth of daily comms.

Enter Slack, which redesigned the email workflow, organising conversations by channels and encouraging short form communication via a chat-style interface. Thus, the friction of communication was again reduced; and once again, the volume of messages exploded accordingly.

Deep work is what creates value

You’d be forgiven for assuming that reducing friction in communication would lead to greater productivity. After all, if we save time and resources communicating a message then we can spend them somewhere else, right?

Up to a point, this is true. But beyond that point, reducing friction without being intentional about the outcomes can create problems. First, people can end up being looped into a wider range of conversations, being called on to give our feedback on X, help troubleshoot problem Y, or sign off Z. This forces us to do constant context switching, which is both terrible for productivity and something humans find mentally draining.

Second, we end up constantly distracted and unable to focus on deep work. By deep work, I mean things like strategic analysis, writing, coding, creative thinking - i.e. the work that actually creates the most value. In fact, one study found that, on average, workers check email and Slack every six minutes. No wonder so many of us feel we have no attention span anymore (and if your attention span has extended to reading this far into this article, kudos to you. Treat yourself to some ideas for solutions in the next section.)

For clarity, I’m not arguing that communication overload is the sole root of the internet productivity paradox. As with any problem of that size and complexity, it will be caused by a range of interacting forces, both structural and cultural. But the evidence is increasingly clear that the way we’re using digital communication tools is dragging down our productivity in the internet age.

Fixing communication overload

So, what can individual leaders and managers do about this, particularly in the context of nonprofits? Communication overload is a complex, society-wide problem - but that doesn’t mean we can’t do a lot to start solving it within our own organisations right now.

1. Replace over-consultation with trust

I’ve put this point first because this challenge is particularly pronounced for nonprofits.

Many organisations I’ve worked with have a very open approach to feedback. Lots of people feed into lots of different pieces of work, be that a piece of copy, a project plan, a design and so on. This is often driven by positive values; we want to be inclusive and we recognise the value of different perspectives. But there are hidden costs to this approach.

First, it’s often disempowering and demotivating to whoever is producing the work, which acts as a drag on their overall ability to be productive and innovative. Second, every extra person feeding in exponentially increases communication overheads while bringing ever-diminishing returns on the value they add; once you’ve had five or six people’s perspectives, it becomes less and less likely that the next person will bring something significantly different to the table.

In addition to this, we’ve started consulting more people on a wider range of organisational decisions over the last few years, whether that’s organisational policy, strategy, employment benefits etc. To be clear, I see this as a positive and needed change; it’s how we make sure a diverse range of voices are shaping our decisions and, when done right, it encourages transparency and alignment within organisations. But some leaders (and I can think of times when this has included me, too) fall into the trap of over-consultation - bringing too many people into too many decisions - particularly when they face unhappiness from their staff or a lack of confidence in where to set boundaries. This can have huge costs in communication overload, as well as typically doing little to address staff dissatisfaction.

Instead of organisations that over-consult, we need to build organisations with clear boundaries and high levels of trust. That means trust between leaders and staff but also trust within the staff team. If staff trust their leaders’ values and incentives and also trust that their colleagues are working towards the same overarching objectives as they are, they will feel happier leaving others to make decisions without their input. How to go about building this kind of trust is a sizable topic on its own, so I won’t try to cover it here - I’m planning to return to it in another post soon.

2. Replace bureaucracy with delegation

I’ve written before about how giving teams autonomy is crucial to both running an innovative organisation and building an excellent digital programme. Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the biggest things you can do to reduce communication overload. Every extra person in a sign off chain increases the communication overheads. The volume of messaging grows, as does the number of different conversations each person needs to keep track of (hello, context switching). This isn’t just bad for those receiving sign off - it’s often even worse for those giving it. 

So, what can you do? In short:

1. give teams the range of skills and resources they need to do their work relatively autonomously

2. empower them to make as many decisions themselves as possible

3. for decisions they can’t make, strip back the number of people who need to sign off to the bare minimum. In the vast majority of situations, it should be possible to make this no more than 2 people

This might feel risky at first. But risk aversion is not always safety - I’d argue that not addressing the productivity drain of bureaucracy and communication overload creates far more risk, in fact.

3. Train everyone in how to facilitate a good meeting

Having too many meetings feeds into the problems of communication overload, and some of the changes I’ve outlined above should help reduce the number of these. But the volume of meetings isn’t what matters the most - it’s how good they are. Research from Microsoft shows that workers put inefficient meetings as their number one barrier to productivity - two places higher than having too many meetings.

How to combat this? Facilitating good meetings needs to be seen as a core skill in your team, and one that everyone is encouraged to hold each other to high standards on. Training everyone in facilitation is an investment that will pay off many times over in time savings and increased productivity; I’d go as far as to argue it should be part of every new member of staff’s onboarding process.

As a starting point, here are three principles you can apply to make any meeting better:

• Meetings should be for collaboration and decision making, not updates. Send the updates (and agenda) ahead of time so everyone can read in their own time. This helps keep the meeting short and set up for active engagement, not passive listening/zoning out.

• Set meeting objectives, agendas and timings, and stick to them. This helps keep the session focussed on what you need to achieve in the time available.

• Only invite people who can actively engage. If someone isn’t close enough to the work to be able to contribute to ideas or decisions, 9 times out of 10 they don’t need to be there; it won’t add value to them or to you, and it will waste their time and mental energy.

4. Design email and Slack out of how you communicate

When Joe and I started Modern Change, we ran an experiment: working remotely, could we communicate effectively with each other without using email or Slack? Now, of course, two people is a completely different ballgame to an organisation with dozens of staff across multiple departments. But I think the solution we came up with would be 90% applicable for bigger organisations, both communicating between teams and within them.

Here’s the system we adopted:

• Hold 15 minute stand-up calls twice a day. All day-to-day collaboration and decision making happens in those standups

• Use a no-notification messaging tool to share articles, ideas or information to discuss at standups (we use Twist). Never share anything on this tool that needs a reply.

• Use a shared task management platform like ClickUp solely to plan projects and share documents - no instant messaging

• Call on the phone if you need something urgently between standups. Importantly, this is a higher friction way of communicating (especially for millennials like us) which means you don’t just end up shifting all your email and Slack comms to phone calls

• Set two slots a day to reply to external emails. Close your inbox between.

There are two key things to note about this system. First, you’re freed from having to constantly check for messages and there’s no pressure to reply to anything quickly, meaning you can fully shut off from communication to do focus work. Second, for it to work, team members need to be able to make progress between standups without constantly communicating with colleagues. It therefore forces you both to plan ahead and give people proper autonomy in their work.

You don’t need to use this exact system, of course. The point I’m making is that it is possible to reshape how you communicate to cut out a lot of communication overload - but to do it you’ll need to make broader changes to how teams work and make decisions. Happily, those changes have positive benefits in and of themselves too.

Start by acknowledging the problem

As we wrap up this deep dive into the murky waters of communication overload, you might be feeling a mix of recognition and frustration, but perhaps (I hope) a small glimmer of optimism too.

The solutions I've proposed aren't silver bullets - they're more like the first steps on a long journey. But that’s how all change begins; acknowledging the problem, understanding its roots, and taking those initial steps towards something better.

If you’d like to talk about how I could help your team overcome communication overload, drop me an email (yes, the irony isn’t lost on me) at alex@modernchange.uk