It’s all too much: communication overload in today’s workplace

Today, I’d like for us to consider communication overloa... hold on, I’ve got a text coming in. OK, sorry about that. Today, I’d like for us to talk about communication overlo... wait, someone is calling me, give me a second. Whew, wow, so sorry. Today, I’d like for us to talk about communication overl... goodness, an urgent email alert just popped up. I need to respond to that. Oy, geez, I feel so bad we keep getting interup... wait, what the heck?! Now someone is knocking on my office door. “Yeah, it’s fine, come on in, what’s up?  My TPS report?  No, I haven’t done it yet. Yes, I will take care of it.” OK, now, let’s get to it. I’d like for us to talk about communication over... OH. MY. GOD. IS THAT A MESSENGER PIGEON OUTSIDE MY WINDOW?! 

It has never been easier to talk to one another. We live with a glut of communication channels. Social media, texts, emails, voice memos, voicemails, phone calls, woofs, in-person, virtual, synchronous, asynchronous.   

It has never been harder to listen to one another. Checking emails while on the phone with someone. On the phone while sitting across from someone in the same room. Sitting with someone in the same room but saving what you two really need to talk about for an email later. An endless loop of miscommunication, misinterpretation and missed connections.   

And we are all exhausted because of this. There’s a term for what we are all experiencing.  It’s called communication overload. Understanding this overload is important as you work to improve your own communication power skill. 

What is communication overload? 

The American Physiological Association defines communication overload as “a condition in which more information is presented to a person or a computer system than can be processed or otherwise effectively utilized by the person or system.”  

Take a moment and consider how you reacted after reading that definition. Did you sigh with a sense of knowing relief, discovering a name for an inchoate feeling? Did you loudly say “YES” and gesticulate toward the screen with that universal hand gesture that indicates, “Yeah, what they said”? We are operating in environments with too much information and too many ways to deliver it. We are operating in organizations that often don’t have policies or procedures regarding effective communication strategies to use when trying to get collective work done, such as informing people of an issue by phone while needing to submit a work order for action to take place, sending an email that leads to confusion and multiple replies instead of talking with the person face-to-face,  s meeting about email or an email about a chat exchange.   

Consultant and author Francesco Pecoraro describes the physical reaction we have to communication overload in his 2024 article “Managing Communication Overload.” “When communication overload occurs, the brain struggles to filter important messages from distractions,” he writes “This leads to decision fatigue, where individuals feel mentally drained from making too many choices about which messages to respond to and how to prioritize them. Over time, this can contribute to burnout, a state of emotional and physical exhaustion caused by prolonged stress.”   

Why does communication overload matter? 

Communication overload doesn’t just make our brains seize up; it makes our organizations seize up, too. There are real financial implications to communication overload and ineffective communication practices within institutions. According to their 2023 report, The State of Essential Workplace Communication, AxiosHQ explains that ineffective communication “costs businesses over $15,000 per employee every year and $2 trillion annually across the U.S.” If your organization has 100 workers , your organization is losing $1.5 million due to ineffective communication, whether those losses manifest through missed sales, rework or employee burnout/turnover. 

When information is coming to an employee through multiple communication channels, just knowing where to go to retrieve that information becomes a task in and of itself.  

 According to a 2012 McKinsey & Company report, workers "spend an estimated 28%of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20% looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.” For a 40-hour workweek, that translates to 11 hours managing email and eight hours looking for internal information. For a five-day work week, that translates to two hours a day managing email and one and a half hours a day looking for information.  

Let’s do a thought experiment and think about these statistics in a health care setting. The average time a cardiologist spends with their patient or the average amount of time an X-ray takes is around 15 minutes. That means the 90 minutes an employee spends simply looking for internal information translates into six cardiologist patients visits or X-rays performed per day. Whether we are talking about stressed-out employees or thousands upon thousands of lost dollars, communication overload has real-world consequences that are unsustainable and counterproductive. 

How to decrease communication overload 

Walt Kelly’s Pogo once reminded us that, “We’ve seen the enemy, and it is us.” It is easy to think of organizations as cold, synthetic creations, but at their heart, they are a group of people coming together with a group of tools to achieve a group of goals. People, processes and purpose. And because organizations are made up of people, people can make the conscious choice to wallow in dysfunction or work collectively to communicate more effectively with one another in a work setting.    

A 2023 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Reducing Information Overload in Your Organization” offers some practical advice for decreasing the likelihood of communication overload. 

First, organizations need to establish a low-burden culture when it comes to determining what tools to utilize to communicate and the norms around those tools. Establish governance about what is appropriate to communicate over Slack or Microsoft Teams, what needs to be communicated by email and what requires a phone call or face-to-face meeting. Establish the governance and then communicate it to current and incoming employees so that the burden of figuring out the company’s communication culture isn’t left to the individual.   

Second, hold everyone accountable for following that governance, from the top down. If the governance states that employees should not respond to emails sent by colleagues over the weekend, hold the director accountable for sending Saturday morning missives and then getting frustrated that they aren’t responded to by Sunday night. If face-to-face meetings are required for decision-making, hold the vice president accountable for trying to rally people to make a decision by email. Norms only hold value in a culture if they are abided by all those working within that culture.      

Connect to communicate  

It is easy to fool ourselves that we live in the fantastical future — video calls and “Soylent Green,” gene slicing and make-your-own-soda at home, hoverboards and artificial intelligence partners. But our brains and bodies were built to survive in the savannah, avoiding getting eaten, hunting for dinner and gathering for breakfast.  

Our brains and bodies work best to communicate face-to-face and in-person, looking and listening. Connecting deeply with the person we are communicating with so that there is strong, reinforcing feedback taking place. You can make the choice to make this ancient, almost instinctual method of communication your default —to seek to connect when you communicate, to choose the most impactful channel available to convey meaning between minds and do your own part in the battle against communication overload. The choice is yours.   

Now, if you would excuse me, I need to figure out how to attach this tiny, scribbled message back onto the leg of the messenger pigeon sitting on my windowsill.   

Adam Bazer, MPD, senior director of thought product development, ASHE.