Send It Again, Sam!

Research supports repetition
If you really want to get something done, walk down the hall or pick up the phone, send an email and follow up with a text. That’s what a project manager in a recent study did to make sure that her message got through.

Turns out that the more we ask, and the more channels we use, the more likely we are to get action. Clarity of requests is not as essential as repetition (even though we at Syntax still strongly favor clear requests!).

Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge newsletter reported on the surprising results of a study by professors at Harvard and Northwestern. They shadowed 13 project managers across three industries for a total of 256 hours, examining media, timing, and power.

One interesting aspect of the study was that messages to nudge people into action communicated a threat of what would happen if they didn’t act quickly. These were project managers under pressure. They apparently transmitted the urgency they were feeling. Some spelled out the threat, others made it evident more indirectly.

Authority Is No Guarantee

How often and how creatively the requesters communicated varied first of all with their position power.

The managers with direct authority tended to ask once, or maybe twice, maybe just in an email message.

Their messages told recipients of the negative consequences they wanted to avert. It didn’t work very well. These managers more often had to do damage control because the action they counted on was not in fact done.
Other managers who had to influence without direct authority took more initiative and used more channels to communicate. They were the ones who made personal requests and then used other media.

A nuance in the communication was that these managers often conveyed the threat indirectly, leaving it up to the recipient to recognize the urgency. The number of messages and the use of various media increased the odds of the message getting a response.
Go Ahead, Ask Again

Bottom line is a reminder of the adage we heard many years ago: instructions have to be given at least three times. We follow that to advantage when teaching SYNTAX courses.

As they said in Working Knowledge, perhaps it isn’t nagging. Or maybe it is, and it’s just what you have to do in this overly stimulating world of workplace communication!

Either way: be prepared to send crucial information and requests more than once, in more than one medium, if you want people to respond.