Q&A: The psychology of employee communication

All employees deserve the knowledge they need to do great work every day. But why exactly is access to information so important? 

We sat down with Dr. Wendi Adair, Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Director of the Culture at Work Lab at the University of Waterloo, and Co-founder of icEdge, a communication assessment and empowerment tool for organizational development, to learn about the psychology of employee communication, what uncertainty does to frontline employee wellbeing and how information can boost retention and help make employees perform better. 

What does information—or a lack of information—do to a person’s mental and emotional well-being? 

Adair: Information is power. Having information makes you feel capable and able to do what you need to do. It makes you feel able to help other employees. And that gives you a sense of well-being. We talk about it as power, but it’s really feelings of capability, competence and confidence. 

And then on the flip side is when you don’t have enough information. Maybe there’s something about your role that’s ambiguous. You don’t know exactly how you’re supposed to do a certain procedure or task. Or you have role conflicts—different supervisors asking you to attend to different things and you haven’t been given clear instructions on prioritizing. That lack of information leads to feelings of uncertainty, which leads to stress and decreases employees’ psychological well-being.

There are a lot of theories on this—like the AUM Anxiety and Uncertainty Management theory—that explore how we are motivated as humans to feel like we have a good sense of what’s going on. Our brain is trying to figure out what’s going on around us and find ways to feel like we have a sense of control. Not that we can necessarily control everything around us, but we want to know what to expect. So when there are feelings of uncertainty or ambiguity, we’re motivated to reduce those feelings.

When we’re not getting enough information, when that uncertainty kicks in, what exactly is happening to our brains?

If you’re experiencing uncertainty, that is going to create a stress response. That can be anything from minor impacts, like your heart beating a little bit faster or your palms getting a little sweaty, to a more serious sort of panicky, fight-flight stress response. Employees who are chronically feeling uncertainty at work could be experiencing chronic stress, and we know that chronic stress over a long time has massive impacts on psychological as well as physical health.

How can organizations improve the overall effectiveness of employee communication? 

So, what we say when we’re teaching effective communication in the workplace is that clarity is really important. Try to keep it as concise as possible. 

And then respect—there’s got to be that interpersonal element to it. Whatever the message is, start with some kind of greeting. Those are the little things that, in corporate communication, people aren’t going to do naturally because it’s all about the message, it’s about the task, it’s not about the socio-emotional connection. But the socio-emotional connection helps employees connect with an organization and foster loyalty and commitment.

For decades, we’ve known that it’s not just about how many widgets you make. It’s about creating a good work experience; it is about humanizing it. There has to be attention to interpersonal respect. We call it socio-emotional communication. 

What can organizations do to boost retention of the information they’re sharing? 

From the cognitive side, there really is no such thing as multitasking. Unless it’s a totally automatic cognitive process like walking or anything else that demands our attention, we can only attend to one thing at a time. What that says for organizations is that it’s important to make time for employees to have opportunities to communicate, get information, ask questions and receive feedback. It’s not going to be as effective if they’re getting a massive update that they’re supposed to read while doing their job. It’s going to be more effective if they are allowed, permitted and encouraged to take time to read and absorb. 

What about feedback? How can it mitigate—or compound—these feelings of uncertainty for frontline workers? 

Everyone wants to feel heard, and like they’re connected to others. In a grocery store or restaurant, people are going to be interacting regularly. But in, say, a car factory where the distance between people on the line can be half a block long, you might not have that sort of interpersonal connection as part of your daily work routine. People need that and want that. They want to feel heard and to know that they’ve not only been heard, but they were understood.  

In industrial organizational psychology, we talk about psychological safety. That is when employees feel that they are secure enough in their job, work environment and with colleagues that they can speak up if they think something could be done differently or if they have dissatisfaction about something. That sense of psychological safety, that their voice is valued and they’re not going to be punished for saying something is something that all organizations should foster. That has a lot to do with leadership, organizational culture and, of course, communication.

It’s also really important to make sure employees know what the norms are for both receiving feedback and giving feedback. What is appropriate if they get a message and they want to give some feedback? Do they just send a message to their direct supervisor? Do they reply to all 100,000 employees that got the message?

If the processes and channels are made clear, communication can happen. But when people don’t know, that just feeds more uncertainty. Then, they won’t ask questions, give feedback or seek it. That’s when there’s going to be a disconnect.

Why does more information make employees perform better? 

There’s this thing in psychology that we call the common knowledge effect. Anytime you get people together and a communication is sent out, people start talking about it. And what they do is share information that others have already shared. 

The example that often comes up in research is solving a murder mystery. You have a group of people, and everyone gets a different set of information, and then they come together and have to solve a case. What happens is that someone will share some information. Well, I heard that John was not even near the scene of the crime on Saturday night. And then, Oh yeah, I have that information too. John was nowhere near the scene of the crime. Then, Oh yeah. I have information that John was with his children that night or whatever. People tend to narrow their conversation to focus on information that they have in common—even though we know that in terms of making good decisions, solving problems and coming up with creative solutions or innovations, it’s the unique information that is key. 

There are lots of reasons that people don’t share unique information. One is that everyone is rushing and you don’t want to be the person who raises your hand. There’s also pressure for conformity. You want to agree with what everyone else is saying. You don’t want to be the person who stands out or thinks differently. And then, especially in a group setting, trying to reach a course of action. We know it’s going to be hard to reach a consensus, so we just want to move towards that. We don’t want to keep bringing up pieces of information that might derail the path to the decision.

And so what the common knowledge effect means in a workplace setting is that if there’s a piece of information that one employee has that could lead to some sort of a better way of doing something or could alert someone to something bad that’s going to happen down the road…that information is unlikely to be shared unless there are procedures in place to encourage it. You might get that information in town halls, forums, discussion boards, surveys—places where the organization overtly encourages employees to share. It’s related to psychological safety, too, people speaking up. But you need to have that channel in place, otherwise it just won’t happen.

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Thanks to Dr. Adair for her insights on employee communication! For more on her work, check out the Culture at Work Lab at the University of Waterloo and icEdge.