The Cost of Communication is Too High MOST of the Time

I'm going to throw out a concept that might seem ludicrous.

We need to communicate less.

Before you conclude that I have lost all my marbles, stick with me here.

We send emails. We make phone calls. We distribute reports. We book meetings. We mail stuff. We talk to people. We CC, BCC. We FYI (for your information), BTW (by the way), and CYA (cover your arse).

And we do this without thinking twice about it. Do we consider the cost of all this communication?

Top level costs: the cost of time for people to receive (hear, read) the communication and the cost for creating/delivering communication. If you send an email to your entire team of 50 people. And if the email takes 3 minutes to read, and 15 minutes for you to write - the top level costs are of people's salaries for the 3 minutes and your 15 minutes. Plus the costs of the email server time and space, etc... But the time is the largest cost. You may think this is a small amount, but multiply this times 100s of emails we deal with each day, and the costs add up.

If you book a two hour meeting with 15 people - the top level costs are huge.

But that's the just start of the costs. There are two other important types of costs:

Diversion/multitasking costs: When we are interrupted my emails, calls, or meetings, we lose momentum and focus. This is another cost. Research on the myth of multitasking has showed that it can take as much as 22 minutes for us to get back to the mental place we were at before we were interrupted. Do you want to be the person who wastes 3 minutes plus 22 minutes of the CEO's time so you can share that there are donuts in the break room? Or do you want to be the one to have your entire team spend 3 minutes plus 22 minutes EACH on your FYI/CYA update?

But there's another important type of cost:

Opportunity cost: The cost of doing one thing instead of other things. Think of all the time that we spend on emails, calls, meetings, reports, and stuff in our physical and virtual mailboxes. If you could take all the time in a day that you spend on communication that does not make a positive difference or is so tangentally related to what you need to do - and you could do something else with that time, how much value could you create for your business?

I believe that communicating is one of the most expensive things we do in business.

Many managers feel communication is lacking - I think they mean that the communication is the wrong communication. These same managers tell me that they are overwhelmed with emails, cell phone calls, meetings, and reports.

If your department budget was charged $100 for every minute you spent communicating, would you choose your words more wisely? It is likely that the costs are that high or higher.

Do you see where I am going with this? I think that we ALL need to second guess every communication we send out and make sure it is worth the cost. I would guess that 90% would not make the cut. This is especially true when sending to email or mail distribution lists.

Is it nice to know that Krispy Kremes are in the break room? Sure - but not worth the cost. Well, perhaps just Krispy Kremes.... they are so delicious (and what's this about whole wheat KKs with 20 fewer calories, silly, silly).

Can you justify the cost of asking EVERYONE to read your 10 page report? Do you really think it is a good use of people's time to read every email you send out because you happen to like to CC people?

You might rebut with, "My peer/boss/team member told me they want to be cc'd. What would you say if that same person said, "I am going to buy $300 worth of office supplies EVERY DAY." It is our responsibility to stop the madness and value people's time like the precious resource it is.

Here's my formula for a business revolution:

If you are a senior manager - take this on as your mantra for a month - I will communicate conscious of top level, diversion, and opportunity costs.

If you are a middle manager - take this on as your mantra for a month - I will communicate conscious of top level, diversion, and opportunity costs.

If you are a line manager - take this on as your mantra for a month - I will communicate conscious of top level, diversion, and opportunity costs.

If you are an individual contributor - take this on as your mantra for a month - I will communicate conscious of top level, diversion, and opportunity costs.

If you are a consultant - take this on as your mantra for a month - I will communicate conscious of top level, diversion, and opportunity costs.

If you are a blogger.....oops....I gotta go..

Comments

[David Nesting]

I see this problem a lot in the form of occupational spam. In an enterprise with 100k employees, you get all sorts of e-mail that you could really care less about. Some of this spam comes from someone that actually has a very specific target audience, maybe 10,000 users, but since it would take them a few hours to come up with a list of 10,000 employees, and Their Time Is Important, they send it to all 100,000. If it takes even 30 seconds to realize that the e-mail doesn't apply to the recipient, that's 750 man-hours (tens of thousands of dollars) of work that you've burdened the rest of the company with, because you didn't want to spend maybe 3 hours or a day (hundreds of dollars) figuring out a way to limit your distribution. Not a very good use of company resources, if you ask me.

[Lisa Haneberg]

David - That's a great example, and somewhat tragic because I am sure it happens all the time.

[Thommy Bommen]

I agree on many of your points, especially the ones concerning emails. But what about the information that is spread which actually creates new opportunities. Should one not CC someone just because they possibly do not care? I think much of the information sharing contribute to keeping the organisation somewhat aligned. My tip is to break up the day and have a time slot for reading emails. Turn the push into a pull so to speak.

Thinking twice before sending an email or requesting a meeting is a good idea, and one should try to compress the meetings and keep them focused. Much of the time wasted are in meetings which derives from the agenda and become unfocused.

There are of course the motivational factor of being in the "know". You know what the others are doing, you have a sense of overview and control over your surroundings.

Anyhow, a good post Lisa. Time is valuable!

[Lisa Haneberg]

Thommy - Thanks for your comment. I am not saying that we ought not communicate or CC, but I think we should focus on those messages that will lead to the new opportunities. Those messages come with a high cost too, but might be worth doing.

I think living into this mindset will also challenge us to communicate more mindfully.

Yes, there are motivational factors - and again, let's just consider the cost and be smart about it. I used to "want" to be invited to all the high level meetings because I wanted to be in the know. Now I know this is irresponsible and wasteful - as a leader, I have a responsibility to spend my time wisely and not waste other people's time.

[Mark Shead]

I think part of the problems is that we tend to use email as a solution for communication when there are better solutions. For example, a bunch of people emailing a Word document to each other and trying to collect the changes is much less efficient than keeping one copy of the file and merging all of the changes in right there. People use email because in the short term it takes less time than setting up and understanding other tools.

Another thought--how much important information is stuck in people's email boxes where it doesn't benefit anyone new who joins the organization? If you are having a discussion by email between 4 people, you are pretty much keeping the discussion to your self. However if you have it on some type of organization wide forum, the information is shared and someone won't have to repeat the conversation later down the road.

I'm not sure that people communicate too much, but the certainly don't use the best tool for the job.

Much of the communication that goes on in an organization is creating and refining knowledge. When this information isn't shared the knowledge can be lost. When it is shared with people who don't need it at that point in time, people's time is wasted. The most efficient organizations have a toolset that facilitates communication without bothering unnecessary parties while retaining the knowledge conveyed for other people to use later on.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Mark - I agree, email is used for far too many situations where it is not the best approach. You make a good point about all the lost intelligence due to use of email to communicate information that would be useful to live somewhere more permenent. Intranets and wikis are somewhat designed to solve this issue, but again we have to use the tool for it to do its job.

[annette]

Great post Lisa - I believe all that communication is an avoidance of intimacy - we can be seen to make an effort to communicate but avoid the actual essence of it..