We live in an attention economy, both outside and inside companies. The rules that apply to B2C marketing largely apply inside companies as well.
Despite that we still have people that assume “I sent an email and I’m important therefore everyone got the message”. Try running those emails through some tool like Mailchimp and you’ll probably find less than 40% even opened the email, let alone read beyond the first paragraph.
I’ve done a lot of organising events for engineers inside companies where there are like 500+ engineers. You need email, slack, calendar invites and more to get people paying attention. And often they’re paying more attention to LinkedIn than what’s happening on the “inside” … you can run campaigns on LinkedIn that target your own people…
> “I sent an email and I’m important therefore everyone got the message”
I see a similar flaw in programmers. "I said it once, and therefore everyone has it memorized", as if people are computers who store every utterance in a file system.
I met someone who did that all the time. Turns out it was a learned behavior from having gotten pushed aside for coming across as too nit-picky one too many times. They turned in to the kind of person that would let other people make mistakes and just watch - and believe it or not, it worked for them! In their environment, that was a bad lesson well-learned.
There is some merit to that approach though. For example, I moved IT support requests from a messaging system to an actual ticketing system. The number of requests actually dropped because if they aren't getting help instantly they'll actually try something rather than just giving up immediately and calling IT. Many many issues just went away because if you have to wait a bit all the braindead "click the button" or "turn on your monitor" issues go away.
There is a distinction between "I said it once, and I'm not obligated to say it again", and "I said it once, and therefore I can assume that everyone knows it". The difference is in whether you need everyone to know it (accountable for the result), or only need to CYA (accountable for your job).
This is more of a response to people not paying attention. If all this time is being spent on email and chat and meetings it gets frustrating continually covering the same ground where it is obvious not much attention was paid the first time.
These dynamics are why centralized release orgs or enfoced code review/merge blockers are so powerful. People ignore all the email till it is explaining why the thing they want right now can’t be given to the, unless they do steps a and b. Not sure there is a public health equivalent. If you are trying to move 100% of a dev org to stricter standards, say due to some new security discovery, you benefit from this centralized approach.
Despite that we still have people that assume “I sent an email and I’m important therefore everyone got the message”. Try running those emails through some tool like Mailchimp and you’ll probably find less than 40% even opened the email, let alone read beyond the first paragraph.
I’ve done a lot of organising events for engineers inside companies where there are like 500+ engineers. You need email, slack, calendar invites and more to get people paying attention. And often they’re paying more attention to LinkedIn than what’s happening on the “inside” … you can run campaigns on LinkedIn that target your own people…