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Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from an internal comms pro.

This week’s question comes from a member of The Curious Tribe community. I thought it was a great topic and one that you will find useful to consider if you work with senior leaders including your CEO.

This may also give you a good feel of the kind of conversations and discussions we have in the tribe in case you were thinking of joining. Here's the question:

In this newsletter I'll share the advice I gave to this tribe member as it might be helpful to you as well.

Start with gratitude

First things first, let’s look at this situation as an opportunity rather than a problem. You have something that many internal communicators would kill for: a CEO who genuinely WANTS to communicate regularly with employees. I’ve worked with plenty of organisations where getting leaders to communicate at all feels like pulling teeth, so having an enthusiastic communicator at the top is actually a great starting point.

The challenge isn’t stopping your CEO from communicating but rather it’s channeling that enthusiasm into something more structured and effective. You want to help your CEO communicate in a way that achieves better results with less disruption to the workforce.

Because this kind of ultra-frequent communication (up to 4 times per DAY!) is disruptive. It's distracting and it's costing the business. And your CEO probably has no idea.

Y'all know by now I'm a big nerd for data, evidence and metrics.

That's why I'm so proud to say that 90% of The Curious Tribe members renew their membership for a second year or more, which far exceeds industry averages for professional communities.

And not just that, but the tribe has a Net Promoter Score of +75 which puts it into the 'holy grail' territory for customer satisfaction.

The numbers don't lie. Members stay because The Curious Tribe delivers exceptional value that transforms their careers and working experience.

Don't take it from me - listen directly to Tribe member Jen Ballantyne who is in her second year of membership. She has never found a single membership that delivers so much and at such high quality.

Ready to join us? Use this letter to convince your boss to fund your membership.

🚨 PS The VIP membership tier, which includes 1:1 coaching sessions with me, is going up in price for new members in the middle of August.

Okay let's get back to our CEO situation.

Calculate the cost of impulsive communication

Here’s the thing that maybe your CEO doesn't realise: when he sends a company-wide message, employees are very likely to stop what they’re doing to read it. Because it’s the CEO of course, this message must be important! But of course people are stopping their work four times a day, switching from work to consuming the message and back to work again, and this task-switching comes with a genuine productivity cost.

​Research shows that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. Think about that for a second. Every time your CEO sends a message to all employees, he's potentially disrupting the concentration of your entire workforce for nearly half an hour. And this is happening up to four times a day!

You can use this knowledge to estimate the financial impact of this in order to convince your CEO that change is needed. Here’s a sample framework you can adapt for your organisation:

• Let's say you have 500 employees in your company. And each person spends 5 minutes reading the CEO's message, plus there's the 23 minutes they need to refocus afterward. That's 28 minutes per person, per message. With 4 messages daily, you're looking at 933 hours of disrupted work time across the company EVERY SINGLE DAY.
• You can take this a step further and convert that to a financial cost using the average salary in your company. So for example if your average employee costs €50 per hour, that's over €33,000 in lost productivity daily, or roughly €8.5 million annually. Even if you halve that calculation to be conservative, you're still talking about serious money.
• You can show these estimates to your CEO and then the conversation is about this: Are we getting value for money in our current style of communication? Are these frequent impulsive communications to all employees worth €8.5 million to the business??

The numbers are pretty compelling when you lay it out this way. Most senior executives respond well to seeing the financial impact because it makes the abstract concept of “communication effectiveness” very concrete and measurable.

That's one way you can come at this. That’s just the direct productivity cost, the cost of interrupting people so often with needless messages. You could also consider the cost of notification fatigue; having way too many notifications can lead to employees tuning out and not listening anymore. Then they might miss a genuinely important communication from the CEO when he needs them to listen - but he has trained them to ignore him.

Here’s what you can suggest instead

Once you’ve put together a good case for why this communication approach needs to change, it's time to come up with an alternative proposal instead. Because we don't want to stop the CEO communicating with employes, not at all. We want to adjust the frequency and mode so that he can communicate with more intention, be more effective and reduce disruption.

For example, you could consider suggesting a weekly CEO digest approach instead of daily scattered posts. Your CEO could bundle all their thoughts, updates and insights into one comprehensive weekly message to be sent at the same time via the same channel each week. This maintains regular communication but reduces the constant interruption factor.

You could set up a simple Notion template for your CEO to use for this, they can write out their thoughts there instead of publishing them to all employees at random moments during the day, and then you could compile it into one communication per week. Or if you really want to make it super easy for him and take the load onto your own plate more, you could ask him to send his draft posts to you via email / Teams / Slack and you can collate them and prepare the digest for each week.

And for anything genuinely urgent, of course it should go out immediately. But you’d be surprised how much of what feels urgent in the moment can actually wait for the weekly roundup. A good question to ask is: If we didn't send this out today, what are the risks to the business? (The answer is usually a blank stare and a reluctant reply of "nothing".)

Leading with curiosity will help you solve this communication problem. How is impulsive frequent communication impacting employees? What is the cost of so many distractions each day? What is this potentially costing the business on an annual basis? How could we change this to make it better?

Questions and curiosity are, as ever, your best friend in a situation like this.

Find this helpful? Come join us in The Curious Tribe. We have in-depth discussions about these topics every single week. Plus, everyone is super nice and I've made some incredible new friends - you can too!

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

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Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

Want to work together?

• Join The Curious Tribe. This is my membership community for ambitious, curious communicators who want to achieve more in their roles and have fun at the same time. Membership allows you to work directly with me for 12 months, make deep connections with other communication pros who 'get it' and improve your skills through training and learning. More info here.
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