The Dreaded Internal Comms Decay: Everything You Need To Know

As internal communicators and employee experience professionals, we often take on the role of ‘gatekeeper’ of the content landing with our people. Sure, we can’t – and shouldn’t – have complete control over every single communication that employees receive. But we should be able to take a macro view of the messaging being shared with people across the organization to ensure it’s relevant, consistent, and engaging.

Because when we take our eyes off the ball and stop paying attention to the high-level quality and consistency of internal messaging, we leave the door wide open for an old enemy… communication decay.

Unfortunately, your dentist isn’t going to help you in this instance. And, if left untreated, it can cause frustration and confusion, and can even damage organizational trust.

Here are some easy ways to avoid it.

What is communication decay?

‘Communication decay’ is a gradual deterioration of the impact or effectiveness of a message. It was born out of the world of sales, where the term ‘advertising decay’ refers to consumers becoming less responsive to advertising messages, leading to decreased brand recall and a consequent decline in sales.

Communication decay is just as relevant, and perhaps even more concerning, when applied to internal comms.

It occurs when your internal communications lose credibility with employees, often due to a perceived, or actual, lack of quality or relevancy. And it can apply to a particular topic, such as comms relating to a new corporate strategy, a particular leader, such as any messaging coming from the CEO, or even all central company comms.  

When communication decay strikes, the effectiveness of the communication deteriorates to the point that it does not meet its objectives. In short, people tune out. Interaction and content engagement drop through the floor. CTAs are ignored. Important messaging is missed.

It’s the stuff of internal comms nightmares, RIGHT?!

Aside from making us lose sleep, a decline in the efficacy of our internal communication has serious organizational impacts. It can result in a disconnected and disengaged workforce, often damaging productivity, innovation, and customer satisfaction.

But that’s enough doom and gloom for one blog post. Let’s turn this ship around and look at how we can make sure none of us fall victim to the dreaded communication decay.

3 easy ways to mitigate communication decay in your organization

The good news is that communication decay is relatively easy to avoid or mitigate.

Keeping these three things front-of-mind will help ensure your internal comms remain as relevant, engaging, and impactful as ever.

1. Make content relevant by targeting your comms

When absolutely everything is shared with absolutely everyone, people begin to ignore internal comms. And when internal content gets a reputation for being irrelevant or unnecessary, employees will stop listening and inevitably miss the important content and information that they do need to know about.

This is a form of communication decay.

The easy way to avoid this is to target communications to the relevant audiences. Do your operations teams in Slovenia really need to hear about a renovation of the sales office in Dublin? And do all US-based team members really need to be sent a monthly update with the canteen menu for the Head Office in Australia?

Taking a bit of extra time to segment your communications really does make a difference. Because while it might not matter that Sarah in Seattle knows what Steve in Sydney is having for lunch, it does matter if she concludes that none of the information in the monthly update is relevant to her or her US colleagues, and therefore stops reading it altogether.

Targeting the most relevant content and updates to the right employee groups is key to protecting your internal messaging from communication decay.      

2. Use the right platforms and channels

While seemingly ‘irrelevant messaging’ can have a hugely negative impact on the effectiveness of your internal communication, so too can defective platforms or channels.

Relying on outdated, disengaging, or overly-complicated channels is another clear cause of communication decay.

Employees eventually get frustrated with never being able to find the information they’re looking for, or feeling overwhelmed by a myriad of different internal platforms. This strangles the efficacy of internal communications, as people will just simply stop using the platform.

Sure, there are always ways to force employees to visit your EX platform or intranet every day, but that’s not the point. The point is to have a platform your people want to use and choose to visit every day.

It should be viewed as the digital heart of your organization, where people go to connect with colleagues and access important information. A platform like Workvivo amplifies the impact of your internal comms by taking a human-centric approach and prioritizing ease of use.    

3. Don’t cry wolf

The impact and effectiveness of an organization’s internal comms diminishes dramatically when people feel bombarded with non-urgent company messaging.

This is – you guessed it – one of the most common causes of communication decay.

So what do I mean by ‘don’t cry wolf’?

If you’re continually publishing high volumes of content and information, without considering how overwhelming and impossible to keep up with it might be for your internal audiences, employees are going to miss key information. In other words, if you ‘cry wolf’ by sharing daily ‘MUST READ’, ‘IMPORTANT UPDATE’ or ‘URGENT DAILY NEWS’ communications that aren’t actually that critical, you lose the ability to grab the attention of your internal audiences when something important does need to be communicated.

But it doesn’t have to come to this. You can steer clear of bombardment-induced communication decay by embracing your responsibility as a gatekeeper, which we touched on at the start of this blog post.

Developing a clear understanding of the volume of content landing with different employee groups prompts us to cast a more critical eye over every pre-publication communication. As I talked about in a previous blog post about tackling content overwhelm, we need to continually ask ourselves questions like ‘is this content of value to the audience?’, ‘am I publishing this content to the most appropriate channel?’, and ‘am I sharing this content at the right time to ensure maximum engagement?’.  

So there we have it!

The risk of communication decay can be largely mitigated by keeping a watchful eye over the relevancy of your messaging, the platforms and channels being used, and the volume of content being shared.

And if you’d like to find out how the world’s leading employee experience platform can elevate the impact of your internal communication to new levels, why not book a free Workvivo demo?