Leadership & Communication

An ongoing issue is effectively communicating to staff that something needs doing and having it done.

This article from Harvard Business Weekly notes that the more times that task-message is communicated, the more likely the task will get done.

An excerpt.

“It's the rare child who follows a parent's order to do an unpleasant task the first time she's asked. Upon second request, she might listen, but again ignore the prod. It's often the third time, a more urgent "Brush your teeth, now," that does the trick.

“Most parents understand that redundant communication, coupled with an escalating sense of urgency, is integral to communicating because it gets the job done. New research shows that getting employees to listen up and deliver isn't so different.

“In a paper forthcoming in Organization Science, professor Tsedal B. Neeley and coauthors delve into why many managers tend to send the same message, over and over, via multiple media to team members. At first blush, this strategy may sound like nagging or a waste of time. But as it turns out, asking multiple times gets results.

“Titled "How Managers Use Multiple Media: Discrepant Events, Power, and Timing in Redundant Communication," Neeley and Northwestern University's Paul M. Leonardi and Elizabeth M. Gerber found that managers who are deliberately redundant as communicators move their projects forward more quickly and smoothly than those who are not.

“Neeley's research evolved out of an ethnography of managers' use of technology used to persuade their team members to meet their deliverables on time and on budget. To do so, managers were engaging in redundant communication.

"We started to notice very quickly that some project managers were sending the same message three or four times using different media," she says, citing an example of a manager speaking to an employee face-to-face, then sending her an e-mail and later a text message about the same thing.

“Research showed that asking employees to do something multiple times, whether in person or via technology, is especially common for managers who are under intense pressure to finish particular projects.”