Editorial
In 2007, Joshua Bell, one of the finest violin players of our times, played his $3.5 million Stradivarius outside a major subway station in Washington D.C. during rush hour for 43 minutes. The arcade where he played had surprisingly passable acoustics.
The Washington Post asked Leonard Slatkin, at the time music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, about the hypothetical outcome of a top violinist busking in the subway for a rush hour crowd of around 1000 people.
He said people would certainly recognize the value of the performance, at least 150 people would stop, a crowd would form and earnings would be around $150-$200.
During Bell’s performance, seven of the 1097 people who passed him stopped to listen for any length of time, one recognized him and he collected around $32.
In contrast, a single ticket for his previous fully-booked concert in Boston averaged around $100.
What Internal Communications Professionals Can Learn From This Experiment
Commuters during rush hour have very similar behavior to people at work. They’re focused, and if you try to get their attention, even for a few minutes, it is damn hard!
Slatkin’s poor estimates of the Bell experiment suggest we, as internal communicators, also fail to correctly assess the effect of digital noise and improper timing.
Have you ever witnessed a situation at work where a company had the best people, the best tech, all performing their best and yet ... their impact was far smaller than anyone would have predicted?
Attention Is Scarce
When Bell plays in a concert setting, he has the audience’s undivided attention. And this is why everyone ends up loving his performance. Both parties benefit from this ‘transaction.’
In the subway, Bell was competing for the attention of the passersby — he was no longer their focal point. As any IC professional can tell you, you seldom — if ever — control the attention of all the employees. Your message is just one of the many different messages from peers and other communicators competing for people’s attention.
The one moment when you can have an employee’s undivided attention is when they want to do something. That is when they pay attention to all the information provided because they want to save time by doing it right the first time.
The Venue Matters
A concert hall is designed specifically for an artist to perform for an audience. An entrance to a subway station is designed for traffic, not for highlighting the occasional buskers.
An inbox or a traditional intranet are similar to a subway station: there is a lot of competition between messaging and there is no one dedicated place where an internal communicator can perform.
Topic owners need their own digital equivalent of a concert hall, a place where the internal consumer can go to consume whatever the topic owner has to offer.
Each type of art has its ideal venue — whether it's a concert hall, an opera house or a theatre. Similarly, every internal topic deserves a dedicated space where the expert can connect meaningfully with their internal audience.
This can translate to a section of the intranet or a team in Teams, administered by each topic owner to connect with their internal audience. While the ‘stage’ for a product manager communicating with the Sales department might be different than the one a maintenance manager uses to support people on the factory floor, you can design them following the Why, How and What model.
Timing Is Key
In internal communications, timing matters.
Push Communications
Much like Bell’s subway performance, most of the comms in a company are push comms, something you send out with the hope that people will pay attention. While communicators may argue they can find better hours to push their messages, the improvement is marginal.
Pull Communications
Going to a concert is an example of pull comm. People go when they are in the mood to experience a certain performance. This is when the performer, and the spectator get the highest return for their work.
The same is with internal communication, you want to be able to engage with your target employee when they are interested in your topic.
Beware the (Digital) Noise
While the entrance to the subway had decent acoustics, it was far from an ideal concert setting. We are all equipped with an incredible system called the reticular activating system (RAS). This network of neurons in the brainstem acts as a filter for sensory information, determining what is important and needs conscious attention while filtering out distractions.
In the subway a distraction can be a talented violinist. At work noise can be anything that comes at the wrong time: countless email, notifications, phone calls, interruptions from peers or all of the articles in the intranet newsfeed.
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Workers receive information from four main sources within an organization (this isn’t even including the messages from external partners):
- Messages from their operational teams
- Messages from any project team they’re a part of
- Messages from all internal business service providers such as expense reimbursements, travel, work safety, product managers, etc
- Messages from leadership
IC professionals handle most of the leadership communication and are the only ones formally trained in effective communication.
However, every effort they make to structure or prioritize leadership comms is negated by the person who ccs 10 people in an email instead of posting a Teams message in the right channel and targeting only a few of the recipients.
This continuous noise numbs employees at all levels of the organization, hinders information flow, and has a direct effect on how the organization performs and how it adapts to internal and external changes.
Reducing the noise involves employing the right communication tool for each scenario and moving as much as possible from a ‘push’ communication to a ‘pull’ one.
Think about the years of practice and performances that led up to Bell’s $32 payday. Now consider the time, effort and attention you put into your messaging, only to have it go unnoticed. Isn’t it time you turn your internal comms approach into a concert hall?
Editor's Note: Read more tips for internal communications professionals below:
- Internal Comms Needs a Single Source of Truth, But Don't Stop There — If internal communications ever felt like playing a game of telephone in your workplace, you might want to create a single source of truth. Here's why.
- Internal Communications Is the Glue That Binds Hybrid Work — Effective internal comms keeps employees informed, included and engaged, no matter where they work. So design communication strategies for today’s reality.
- Want to Design a Better Digital Workplace? Go to the Mall — What can digital workplace and employee experience designers learn from shopping malls? A surprising amount.
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