Why Your Team Needs to Hear ‘Ignore That’ Right Now

The internet has drastically reduced the energy it takes to communicate. 

Before Slack messages or email, information had to be printed out and physically transported to the people who needed it. But that slow pace had an interesting side effect. 

The high cost of communicating made people more intentional about when and why they did it. Just think: If you sent your team 20 paper memos over the course of a day, you’d create serious dysfunction.

Compare that to our current situation, where most people don’t think twice about CC’ing an entire department on an email or sending 20 Slack messages in the “general” group every day. The effort to communicate with 100 people is essentially the same as communicating with one person. There’s little built-in friction. 

Today, everyone is inundated with messages and emails all day long. What was supposed to make us more efficient has created a huge distraction problem (and led to massive inefficiency). 

Poor communication also comes with a cost. One study found that companies with more than 100,000 employees lose an average of $62.4 million per year due to inadequate communication. Yet organizations with effective communication programs are 3.5x more likely to outperform their peers. If an employee feels their voice is heard, they're also 4.6x more likely to feel empowered to deliver their best work.

As a leader, understanding how communication impacts your team can help you prevent distractions and direct people to the important work.

Communication clutter makes it tough to focus.

An employee has two main resources at their disposal each day: time and energy. 

Of course, time is finite. You can’t get back the hour you spent messaging back and forth about your role in a new initiative. Energy is renewable, in the sense that you’ll have more of it tomorrow when you wake up. 

But both resources are drained throughout the day. 

At 2:00 p.m., an employee may have more time left in the work day. But if they spent the morning sifting through a mountain of messages and emails, their mental energy for the day may be gone. 

This is why frictionless communication is a double-edged sword—it leads to clutter. And too many work environments require employees to dig through that clutter themselves to find what they need to do their jobs. 

So what’s a good manager to do? 

Incorporate a version of “Ignore that” to manage clutter.

Setting boundaries can help your team conserve time and mental energy for work that moves the needle.

“Ignore that” establishes ground rules for the communications people should overlook each day. You have to remove some of the burden of deciding what they should—and shouldn’t—pay attention to throughout the week. 

To protect your team from being bombarded by irrelevant communication, take the following steps.

1) Set up communication standards. 

There are a number of small, but powerful standards you can create for your employees. 

• Decide who should receive certain types of messages within a team, like specific aspects of new product releases, initiative metrics, or audit reports. A manager can say, “Ignore that,” but it’s a lot easier on your employees if they never get the irrelevant message in the first place.

• Avoid clutter creep by setting a specific time of day for certain messages. For instance, if people are getting slammed with messages and emails about the upcoming company happy hour first thing in the morning, they may end up being much less productive throughout the day.

• Discourage last-minute meetings, and require strict agendas. If you’re working remotely, set aside at least one day of the week that’s free from meetings.

• Empower people to opt-out of meetings if they don’t feel the agenda is relevant to them. Meetings are not inherently a waste of time, but they can contain a lot of unimportant information without clear guidelines.

The goal is to set guidelines that offer your team structure without you having to be involved in every message that’s sent. 

2) Make everyone’s roles in an initiative crystal clear. 

While it's important to not overload your team with too many general messages day-to-day, it is essential to share updates that remind them of the company’s goals, the team’s goals, and their place in all of it. 

If they don’t have that understanding, it becomes difficult to build a strong information filter. They may react to everything because they don’t know what information is actually valuable to them. 

To do this, provide your team with context about every initiative they’re involved in on a weekly or monthly basis. Clearly state what information is relevant to look at, and help them decide what’s important to share among themselves and with cross-functional team members working on the same initiatives. In time, they’ll begin filtering their communication, and messaging overall will become tighter. 

3) Give authority to initiative leaders.

The other problem with information clutter is that the people who really do have important things to say often get lost in the crowd. 

Certain voices need to be heard, not filtered. Team leaders have to be empowered to communicate important information through the proper channels. They also need to be encouraged to source the correct information from the rest of the team. 

Think of initiative leaders as conduits that transmit vital information to your employees. They have to be vocal—communicating the right messages, the key links, the important documents—and become trusted sources of information for their teams. Effective communication from the right sources will also help hone employees’ information filters. Not only do they know what to ignore, but they know what to pay close attention to as well. 

Frictionless communication may have changed the way leaders distribute information in the workplace, but if filtered properly, doesn’t have to be a burden. A company full of employees who understand what to ignore and when to ignore it will be better at executing, meeting goals, and driving growth.

Akhil Kohli is the CEO and founder of MindStrength, the preeminent initiative execution platform for Fortune 500 and mid-size companies. MindStrength's Initiative Platform enables companies to execute against strategic initiatives at scale and with accountability at all levels of the organization.