Mastering Notification Overload as a Business Leader

This is a written Transcription for the Leadership Hustle episode about Mastering Notification Overload as a Business Leader, from Season 1 Episode 24.

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Andrea Frederickson: Are you drowning in the dings, pings, and other random communication notifications? In this episode of The Leadership Hustle, we'll talk about the pros and cons of all the different communication channels. Hello and welcome to the Leadership Hustle for executives whose companies are growing fast and need leaders who are ready. This is a hot topic. Yes. Oh my gosh. I was um, a month or so ago. I was I literally asked a corporate group, a senior group, I think there were 16 in this group. And I said, okay, how many different communication channels do you use on the. And every day. Yeah. And they started listing them off. So we're looking at email, text teams, chat teams, video zoom, slack the telephone. And face to face. They just started listening all these things, and they had some of their own specific that were unique to their industry. I'm like, where is that a for what? I was like, do you find. And I literally looked at them and I'm like, do you find this a problem? And like exhausting of every one of them is like, yes, it was like this, this chorus of yeses with this is a problem. And so just think about that. You know, in this, in this episode of, you.

Michelle Hill: Have to check everything. That's the point. Otherwise you're missing something. Because if you don't check this or check that or check this and then it gets posted over here now, two days later, you're like, what the I?

Andrea Frederickson: So in our effort to make sure that there is a way for everyone to get the information that they need, you know, and we're not even talking about having an intranet or, you know, SharePoint where people share all kinds of other chats and things like this. What we've done is we've made communications so much more complicated, like it wasn't complicated enough, right? Correct. They were giving me reasons. Well, well, if I'm in the office, then they find my this phone versus my cell phone. But sometimes they'll send me an email and then they'll send me a text. Hey, I sent you an email. So all these pop ups and things and, and I know these friends of mine that maybe you're one of them, um, that when they look at their phone and they see a little red dot, it's like they can't have any oh, I can't.

Michelle Hill: Handle the dot.

Andrea Frederickson: These little notifications, it's like, become obsessive about I had to turn them off. I have to turn them off or they have to clear them and I turn them. They're reacting all the time. That's drama. So okay so let's talk about the cons.

Michelle Hill: Oh that's easy.

Andrea Frederickson: Of all of these different pings, dings and and other random notifications.

Michelle Hill: Well first con there's got to be some anxiety to this. It's got to be a time waster. It's got to be a stressor and it's got to be a huge distraction. So when we think about if you are working on that focused work and your focus, which means you need to be really being able to think, well, right. And if you have those little pop ups, notification, if you have the little, you've got another new email or one, two, three or message, let's say in teams there's one, two, three. Those are distractions. And we naturally what's down there. We want to go down that rabbit hole. And now we are we're we're killing our creativity. Um, that's like a whole side. That's a whole other issue when it comes to productivity and being creative. Um, but then you have the whole loss of, um. I didn't know this. Well, we put it in this. Well, I didn't read that. And then you also have productivity issue here. Um, well, I better put the same message in five different types of communication because I know Andrew wants it this way, and I know so and so wants it this way. Just because you want to make sure everyone gets it right. So now people are literally I had this conversation. I had this conversation. People are literally putting sometimes the same message in 3 or 4 different types of communication things, um, tools that they're using. And that's a huge time waster. Well, and even.

Andrea Frederickson: When you put it in those things, each of them has their own distribution list. So you don't know who within each distribution list gets what information. And you might have 2 or 3 conversations going on with a few here and a few there. And so the amount of wasted time from just one and putting it in different places is one.

Michelle Hill: Well and distribution list. So that's a whole other issue. Don't use it if you don't know who's in it. For the love of Pete, you don't need to bother other people that don't necessarily need to have the information, right? Right. Just make sure that you're using the right list, or you create your own for whatever it's relevant for. And I interrupted you. Sorry, but it's like, why? You know, because that's a that's a waste of time. People get it. They're like, well, what do I need to do with this? Do I need to follow up on this? You know, it's it creates some confusion in itself.

Andrea Frederickson: So, you know, again, we've talked about time analysis studies and almost every episode of this, I'd be curious to know when a person does their time analysis study how much time when they say I'm checking emails, are they are they also documenting? I'm responding to teams, a text message, a slack message, a I'm on this video call and I'm like listening, but I'm not really participating. Whatever methods that we're using to communicate are you are we recognizing the amount of time that is being wasted now, recognize we still want to have methods for people to communicate.

Michelle Hill: Yes. Okay. We need that.

Andrea Frederickson: So.

Michelle Hill: Organized though.

Andrea Frederickson: So one of the the. So the biggest issue with all the various different kinds of communication methodologies is the waste of time. Okay. Second bad thing is who's seeing what, because we don't know which method to pay attention to. And we may not have been in front of our computer at a certain time. And so we didn't see the team's chat, but maybe somebody sent it in an email. And so now we're responding to an old message that has been already taken care of, but we didn't see it in teams. Um, I think the other part is people don't necessarily know how to use all the tools. They know how to use it. To communicate like they know how to put the words into it, or they know how to pick it up and, you know, dial the number or, you know, are we leaving messages these days? Are we not leaving messages these days? I've got people who will do anything they can possibly do without picking up the telephone. And so, you know, I know people who have blinking red lights on their desks because their, their phone hasn't listened to them. We haven't listened to the messages, you know, for months at a time. And so, you know, the. The the idea of one we're wasting time. Two we might have gotten the most recent messages. We aren't up to date or current. We may not need to be involved in this communication. Right. We're getting information being pinged at us all the time.

Michelle Hill: Yeah. Do I respond? Do I need this?

Andrea Frederickson: And how do we turn it off when we leave?

Michelle Hill: Well, and how do we know? I mean, that gets into how do we prioritize to all that information. And you're right. It's a lot of people don't turn off when they leave because it goes when that little portable phone with theirs that. So now, you know, my phone has teams, my phone has text, my phone has email. So as long as I got those dang bubbles showing, I can see when stuff's happening, right? Right.

Andrea Frederickson: And so we never get to turn it off, which adds to another, another layer of stress and maybe some anxiety. And, you know, some company cultures are you need to respond or there's a fear of missing out if you don't respond or look or pay attention. So we we need to talk about what are some of the techniques or methods that we can offer people and or organizations, especially leadership team, because so says the leader, so says the rest of the organization.

Michelle Hill: They set the example.

Andrea Frederickson: Right? Yes. What are some tools and techniques that we can offer to help people reduce some of the dings, pings and random notifications?

Michelle Hill: Well, one of the things I'm often having conversations and it's for various reasons, is it, you know, oftentimes I'll find it's because there's a change initiative or, you know, creating clarity and expectations. But I'll ask, what's the communication strategy? Because any time, right. It's it's what's that communication. And we have to do different means. We have a communication strategy. But it's creating clarity in what we use each tool for. Right? So if we have these tools it's like okay, you know we use email for this. We use this for this we use you know, it's identifying what to use. It's just creating some clarity in the expectations of the different, um communicate tools that we have access to and why we use it and when to use it. I mean, even we're we're a small company, right. And Courtney and I have identified that when her and I are communicating, if I have information that she's to work on, I send an email because she uses her email. Now, granted, you're not going to do that. Personalize that for every person in a large company. But, you know, she uses email to organize herself and it will get lost in teams, right? So I and I don't totally disagree with her on that, because there's times that we have gotten into an exchange and we've sent each other something and I'm like, damn, going through I'm literally filtering through the team's messaging, trying to find it because I know it's somewhere, but it's somewhere in all these jokes and whatever else, right? Yeah, it gets lost in there. Right. Uh, but creating that clarity of when we, you know, we're communicating things that are business related, what are we using? And you may have some agile teams, or you may have some cross functional teams that they have their own group in 360 or SharePoint. Yeah. Where when we're communicating regarding this X project, all the communication goes through there. Well that makes sense. Let's not put it into an email now. Let's but it's it's creating clarity of what we use it and why we're using it. When to use it.

Andrea Frederickson: Right. I think that, you know, if, if you're a person who's sitting behind a computer all day long, then having. What works for you is completely different than the person who is either out in the field, right, or in front of customers most of the day, or behind a cash register. Off and on.

Michelle Hill: What? Yeah, whatever. We all are in different places, right? And so we use it differently. And if as an organization, if we don't create that clarity, everyone's going to use it to how they feel fit is best. And. It's going to be all different, right?

Andrea Frederickson: I have a I have another client that we were talking about, the distribution list, that they had a couple hundred distributions lists in a company of less than 200 people. So, um, what they did is they got rid of all the distribution lists, and then they put in a communication strategy about who gets to create a distribution list for, you know, and it's not going to work for a company that's got 6000 people. I get that right. But in a company of 200 people and, you know, the same people tend to get certain bits of information. They actually went a month without using any distribution list at all. They said, we're not going to create any distribution lists. You have to select who is going to be put on an email, and whether that person goes into the, um, regular email or is it a carbon copy, and what does it mean in every company if you get CC'd? Do not respond.

Michelle Hill: Yeah, well, you have great clarity on that. You have.

Andrea Frederickson: To create the.

Michelle Hill: Rules, but some people will still respond. And CC is just for your information, I don't want your opinion. I didn't ask for it. Right.

Andrea Frederickson: And so I was just working with a gentleman yesterday and we were talking about, you know, how are we? Um. Helping those that we lead. Take the responsibility, and maybe even their peers, recognize that they have the responsibility and the authority to do something. So the story goes that, you know, it started off that the senior executive was talking to the owner of the business, and they had created clarity on we're agreeing on the process, right. We're agreeing on whatever the project was. And so this senior executive was working with a group of people inside their organization, and then someone on the team copied the owner later. I was like, why did that happen? And he was like, I have no idea. And I said, so what did you do? And he did it right where he he called the person he had to recognize who put them on the distribution or the, the email because it was they weren't on there to begin with. Right? Owner was not on the email. Why did this person add and what was causing that? And once he did that, he's like he had to educate her as opposed to getting on the email, responding to everybody, which would have created a whole bunch of confusion and taken away the authority of the senior executive who was completely okay with what was going on.

Andrea Frederickson: Right. So just recognizing just because you get an email does not mean you respond to the email. Yes. As a group, you you take out either you pick up the phone and take make a phone call or you send an email separate to the individual, say, hey, I'm not sure what's going on here. Tell me more about this. Now we get clarity. Now we don't have to confuse the rest of our audience. Again, I'm telling you this story and it's probably, you know, a lot more complicated than than it sounds. But the point is, we as leaders. Are telling people based upon our actions how to communicate. Right? So if if we respond to carbon copies, then everybody else is going to respond to carbon copies because they're afraid of not being like, not. Being assertive enough or not interjecting themselves when they could be doing stuff on the backside and coaching from the backside and working it just fine. So just recognizing, don't get involved, don't interject. Which is just one portion of this big topic, right? Correct.

Michelle Hill: Well, and also as you talk about leaders, you're also setting the example of the culture. And in regards to the expectations of how people when people communicate. Right. So if if we have off hours, if our business is closed for X hours, but yet as that leader leaders in the organization, if we are constantly responding to emails and sending emails out, we can create the perception that it's expected. Right now we may say, oh no, you don't have to respond, but people respond and they get rewarded for responding. They get noticed for responding. So then there's this this pressure during off hours because you mentioned how do we turn it off. Right, right. And that's something within an organization. You have to identify what kind of impact do we want to have on our what kind of environment we want to create. And if we want to give them downtime where they are off work, they're off work, then we need to make sure we are doing that as well, like we're not sending them out.

Andrea Frederickson: So one of the things I love about outlook, and I know that you can communicate via email through teams and all that stuff, but from outlook, that's what most people are using. They have this tool. When it goes outside your regular business hours, it asks you, do you want to send this now or do you want to delay it? Well, I've gotten into the habit because I know people will start checking emails at night. I'm like, it's not important that you check this tonight, so I won't have it delivered until 6:00 the next morning. So whenever they decide they want to get up, log in. That's fine. But it's not like they get to spend the rest of their evening doing the things that they need to be doing, which is recuperating, spending time with their family, doing the things that make them happy. And in that regard. So there are tools that we as leaders can use to help reduce. One is communication. Is email the tool that you're going to use and when are you going to use it. Um, is teams or other chat technique. When are we going. When are you going to use that? Um, I know that for me, in our world, I'll send a text on the weekend if, like, I don't know how to fix something, something's broken or something is like, uh, something's weirded out.

Andrea Frederickson: But it's rare that I'm going to send a text related to work through a on the weekend because it's it might be a joke. It might be a joke. Might is a completely different thing. But but it's more, you know, if it's work related. But we've got most of our routines are set up, like where do you communicate this and where do you communicate that? There's a couple that we still, um, might need a little extra attention, give it a little extra attention. But it's really about let's figure out if we can reduce the number of methods, because we're making it too complicated to whatever methods we as a company are choosing to use. What are the rules correct? What are the parameters? What what are the the the systems that we're using. And three, really pay attention to whatever kind of distribution or groups you have set up, because there are people that do not put me on this or take me off, you know, just like a newsletter list, like, please take me off this newsletter list or whatever it is.

Michelle Hill: Or make sure I'm on it, damn it.

Andrea Frederickson: Or make sure I'm on it because people.

Michelle Hill: Unintentionally get left out too, right? And I think that's part of the problem with those lists. You get a new person or now the dynamics have changed. We need to include so and so, but we get in the habit of selecting that list and that I assume that person's on there.

Andrea Frederickson: So, you know, it's almost like in this episode we're talking about having a meeting to have a meeting. But in this case, what we're doing is we want to communicate on how we're going to communicate so that there's a strategy that everybody knows. And we teach that during our orientation and onboarding. Yes. So thank you for listening to this episode of The Leadership Hustle. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.