Imagine you’re starting a company. You’ve already hired your first 50 people, you’ve got a clear idea of what to build, and you have the finer points of your competitive advantage mapped out. The problem is that, while you’ve had meeting after meeting about your core values and key differentiators, it seems that members of your team are still at a loss.
That’s likely because of a lack of effective communication. Good communication—even sometimes overcommunication—is crucial for keeping your team aligned, no matter what changes may arise in the business.
We’ll walk you through how to overcommunicate without overcomplicating things, which is especially important in today’s remote and hybrid work environments.
What is overcommunication?
Overcommunication tends to get a bad rap, but overcommunication isn’t just an excess of talking. Rather, it has three important key traits:
- It reinforces important messages
- It relays key information
- It helps everyone stay on the same page
Think back to the last time you had a difficult class in high school. If you had an exceptional teacher, you probably learned a concept by:
- Hearing about it
- Doing homework on it
- Studying it in groups
- Writing about it
After approaching a complicated concept in multiple ways, you were able to better understand it. That’s because you were given enough reiteration for the information to sink in.
As another example of when overcommunication can be a good thing, think back to a time in your work life when you were part of a complicated project. You may have had an initial brainstorming meeting, a kickoff meeting, many tasks, many check-ins, and many standups. If you overcommunicated throughout the project, everyone likely understood the assignment and stayed aligned.
How overcommunication can turn into overcomplication
In the above examples, overcommunication led to a positive outcome. But you’re probably also remembering a time when there was so much communication, that everything felt like it took twice as long. That’s because overcomplication set in.
Here’s what that overcomplication can look like: Pretend you’re in charge of naming your newest product. At the first meeting, you’re told what you’ll be naming and what the deadline is for the new name. Your project manager suggests you work with a naming agency. Then you’re asked to poll internal stakeholders about their preferred names, and you’re told to turn that poll first into a document and then into a slide deck. At the next check-in, your manager asks you to turn a brainstorm into a mood board.
The naming agency, meanwhile, presents you with a spreadsheet of competitive analysis. In the following weeks and months, a fairly straightforward task becomes mired in tasks and last-minute additions and meetings and standups. Worse, every time someone is taken off the project or added to the project, they need to be brought up to speed, which bogs the process down even more. Something that should have taken a week ends up taking a whole quarter.
Overcomplication is when you create extra steps that aren’t necessary.
You may consider using a communication matrix like the one below to determine which steps are necessary and which aren’t.
