Many organizations take an "always-on, more-is-better approach to communication," which leads to information overload, disengagement, and poor decision making. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, LK Klein, Emily Earl, and Dorian Cundick of Gartner Marketing Practice outline two steps organizational leadership can take to "alleviate the suffering."

What drives information overload?

According to Klein, Earl, and Cundick, information overload drives disengagement and poor decision making among employees.

To better understand information overload, Gartner surveyed almost 1,000 employees and managers. Overall, 38% of respondents said they receive an "excessive" volume of communications at their organization. 

While the average employee is inundated with an inbox full of requests from colleagues, internal communications, meeting invitations, and more, the authors found that information volume is only partially responsible for information overload.

"Rather, the real culprit is the information itself — and specifically the degree to which the accessing and interpreting of the information imposes extra 'work' on its recipient," the authors note. "This is what we call information burden".

The authors define information burden as a set of information that is:

• Duplicative: 57% of employees and managers say they often receive multiple communications about the same topics at the same time
• Irrelevant: 47% say that the company communications they receive are not relevant to their day-to-day responsibilities
• Effort Intensive: 38% say they do extra work to keep up with the amount of information they receive at their organization
• Inconsistent: 33% say that the company communications they receive are often inconsistent or internally conflicting

Each week, the authors estimate that an employee wastes around three and a half hours dealing with information burden. "Executive leaders should regard this as unacceptable, especially because they're impacted too," they write.

In particular, executive management is heavily affected by information burden. In their research, the authors found that 40% of leaders and 30% of managers experience high levels of burden.

Meanwhile, those that experience high burden are 7.4 times more likely to report high decision regret, and 2.6 times more likely to experience avoidant or negative responses to change.

"The stakes are clearly high," the authors note. "An inability to get control of information at your organization cuts to the heart of your ability to set and deliver on strategy."

2 strategies to address information burden

According to the authors, there are two strategies organizational leadership can adopt right now to help "alleviate the suffering" employees face with information burden:

1. Create a culture with clear rules around information

The workplace is full of unspoken communication norms that often leave employees "unsure of what good behavior looks like," the authors write.

Meanwhile, frequent shifts compound employees' confusion about how they should communicate. When employees start collaborating with a new team, they are typically unsure of how — and when — the team communicates.

"Without a mutual understanding of how information should be shared at the organization, employees tolerate dysfunction and feel disempowered to surface dysfunction — and so the cycle of burden continues," the authors note.

To minimize the confusion, organizations should establish clear expectations for information sharing, instead of following employees' individual preferences. "Shared norms are beneficial for a variety of reasons — they improve psychological safety on teams and empower employees to surface and address instances of channel abuse," the authors write.

2. Encourage top-down accountability

Employees' inboxes are often full of announcements from different department leaders, which can create confusion about what information is actually important.

"Part of the challenge of understanding where the burden is coming from is a lack of visibility — each function is narrowly focused on their own pages, apps, or microsites. The second part is the drudgery of administration," the authors note.

According to the authors, information management requires an ongoing commitment from all involved employees. "Establishing shared governance over the employee information experience is a mechanism to address both challenges at the same time," they write. "It allows stakeholders to align on a shared vision of information management and collectively maintain a user-friendly system."

While all employees and leaders are affected by information overload, the responsibility to establish a low-burden culture ultimately lies with the company communicators. "It will require energy, expertise and coordination to architect and reinforce more human-centric communication practices," the authors note.

"Start with the realities of what information is needed and what information is getting in the way in order to nudge your teams toward a series of behaviors where everyone is jointly committed to reducing the information burden they place on their peers and themselves," they suggest. (Klein et al., Harvard Business Review, 5/1)