Reducing the Noise: Sending Personalized, Timed and Effective Communications

The idea of protecting our time and attention is nothing new. Nearly 50 years ago, Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon suggested that when information is plentiful, attention becomes the scarce resource.

It seems technology advancements have made this problem worse, especially in the workplace.

Here’s more on the impact of information overload, attention challenges and how LumApps Campaigns addresses these issues.

The Information Problem (and Why It’s Time Consuming)

Decision fatigue, the paradox of choice, information overload. Decades of research have validated these terms. 

For example, one study selected a group of mall shoppers and asked how many purchase decisions they made that day, and the length of those deliberations. Participants were then asked to complete math equations. Researchers found that participants who spent more time making decisions on what to buy, did worse on the math problems. 

Consider how this same scenario plays out in the day-to-day life of a worker at a large company. 

There are likely multiple ways to find a single piece of information. According to a Coveo report, 60% of employees have to search within four or more data sources every day for the information they are looking for. An additional 18% navigate between seven or more sources daily. 

They also receive an exorbitant amount of information across email, chat, app notifications and more. The Coveo report found workers spend more than 3 hours daily sifting through information to do their jobs. This impacts productivity, adds unnecessary stress and negatively impacts the employee experience. 

The Attention Problem 

Information overlord has a sister problem, the attention challenge. Employees face an overwhelming amount of distractions in their personal and professional lives. This forces us to constantly multitask, which has the same negative impacts as information overload. Working from home and changes in the way we work have exacerbated this attention problem.

According to research by psychologist David Meyer, brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone's productive time. 

Author Cal Newport deep dived into this topic and discussed the cost of switching tasks, 

“This switching creates an effect that psychologists call attention residue, which can reduce your cognitive capacity for a non-trivial amount of time before it clears. If you constantly make “quick checks” of various devices and inboxes, you essentially keep yourself in a state of persistent attention residue, which is a terrible idea if you’re someone who uses your brain to make a living.”

- How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing, New York Times

Most advice related to this issue is at the employee level, what can we do to reduce distractions and concentrate longer. 

But what about at the employer level? Is there anything managers, directors, and our companies can do to help combat this problem? Internal communication teams and anyone in charge of sending alerts and notifications should consider the idea of deep work before hitting send. 

For example, avoiding the much maligned “@channel” in Slack, or the classic reply-all email. For large organizations, this doesn’t go far enough. 

Creating segmented, timed and personalized communications can help employees retain important information and lower their cognitive workload. 

Here’s how LumApps Campaigns is designed to do just that. 

 

Protect Employees’ Time and Attention with Campaigns

LumApps creates features to emphasize this point and to help our customers personalize their employee experience. 

The latest milestone in this mission is LumApps Campaigns. 

 

What is LumApps Campaigns? 

LumApps Campaigns is an integrated tool within the LumApps employee experience platform. It allows internal communicators and other stakeholders to send targeted and personalized communications to employees through the tools they use everyday. 

LumApps Campaigns helps companies align their workforce with targeted messaging and timed delivery, bringing marketing automation technology to the employee communications world.

LumApps Campaigns is a better way to deliver relevant information to the right people at the right time. LumApps Campaigns allows communications teams to plan, build, broadcast, monitor, and improve their communication strategies. 

Here’s how you can use LumApps Campaigns to protect your employee’s time and attention. 

Segmentation - Talk to the right crowd. Reduce unnecessary information in an employee's daily communication and feed by delivering messaging to the right people based on parameters like activity history, location, department, tenure, and more. 

Multichannel, Any Device - Every company communicates in its own way. LumApps Campaigns allows communicators to meet employees where they’re at. Furthermore, communications can be sent to any device, allowing messaging to be effective for office and deskless workers. 

Strategic Communications - With built-in analytics on open rate, reach, and engagement - communication plans can be monitored, adjusted and iterated on. This improves communication effectiveness and personalizes the employee experience.  

Insights - Both the attention and information problem are illustrative of how employees are over solicited with notifications throughout their workday. And Campaigns is responsible for sending notifications. So how does Campaigns help? The ability to track and measure success. Over time, you’ll be able to refine your communication strategy, with monitoring and control throughout the delivery cycle. 

 

 

Campaigns in Action 

Here’s how to use Campaigns in practical scenarios. 

Planning a Company Retreat - Use Campaigns to send company-wide alerts on preferred devices, along with pre-travel requirements while ensuring messages are received and opened. Send the event planning or executive committee a separate stream of communication and updates. 

New Tool Training - Send out tutorial updates for hand-raisers only, making the campaign useful and relevant. Tutorial communication can also be personalized based on the employee’s skill level and preferences. 

Regional Updates - Global companies can send localized updates to various countries or regions, reducing the noise for those outside of the relevant area. 

Investing in the right digital tools is an investment in your employee’s experience. Prioritizing the right communications to the right audience, via the right channels, helps each of your employees preserve their most precious commodities: their time and attention. 

We would love to know more about your goals. How can we help?