Is there such a thing as too much communication?

Normally communication is a good thing, actually a necessary thing in order for work to get done properly and in a timely manner.  In fact, I encourage my clients to evaluate and improve their communication and communication processes with their employees.  This makes rolling out new initiatives (such as Lean, Ergonomics, etc.) as well as general everyday work go smoothly with minimal frustrations, misconceptions or “mis-work”.

 However, there is a flip side to this that I’ve seen happening—too much communication by having too many meetings. What I mean by this is when meetings are held so often that there is no time to actually work.  I’ve seen this occur in instances where there is a “big project” but also in the normal day-to-day tasks.

 I can share with you what is happening right now at a large company whose name you’d instantly recognize if I said who has a big project going on.  The project manager has set up daily meetings with the purpose of finding out of the status of “to-do” items, discuss problems and solutions and assign the next “to-do” items.  You might be thinking this sounds like a great thing—however, each meeting lasts an hour and the team members assigned to this project also have other minor projects each with their own meetings besides their normal daily tasks to do which leaves them no time to get any of the assigned work done.  The result—the big project is behind schedule, frustrated team members and unsatisfied upper management who expect the project to be on or ahead of schedule.

 A similar over-communication is happening at another company, much smaller by comparison, who has implemented daily status meetings in the hopes of getting more accomplished in less time by keeping everyone on the same page.  The daily meetings were intended to be short update meetings but have turned into longer, drawn out affairs.

The intentions of the meetings are well and good but in reality the result is too much communication.  Communications tend to expand exponentially—one meeting begets another meeting which begets another meeting, etc.  After a while, most employees end up spending nearly all of their time communicating with each other.  Little work actually gets done.

This is exemplified by a small business with about 100 employees who decided they needed to improve their communications.  So they hired a communications consulting firm to help them learn to communicate and establish new communication processes.  Initially management level employees attended weekly meetings to learn communication techniques and strategies.  This evolved into biweekly meetings—one for management level employees and then another for the managers to meet with their direct reports to learn better communication skills.  Then team members were encouraged to perform “quick” meeting amongst themselves during the work day.  Of course, other projects and committee meetings were ongoing during this time.  I was facilitating and teaching the injury and error prevention committee at the time and during our meetings I repeatedly heard the operations managers, supervisor and all of the employees complain about how many meetings they were having and how they couldn’t get any work done—and how the owner/leadership was upset at all of the nonproductive time going on!  This was a perfect example of “death by meetings”.  My advice to the operations manager was to apply the same principles I was teaching in regards to incident investigations–analyze the problem, identify the root cause(s) and implement actions steps to prevent recurrence as well as a few Lean strategies such as stand up meetings (less than 10 minutes) and standard work.  It was then that he was able to see that their new and “improved” processes of improving their communications was far from improved and in fact needed to be reigned in.

 For me, the needs to be a systematic communications process, one in which work can be accomplished between meetings.  It needs to support and enhance the work being done–not to take away from time spent working and being productive.  Otherwise what’s the point in meeting?  If no work gets done there is no point in meeting—unless the purpose is not to do any work.