I am known as a very positive person. When I run workshops, I take pains to encourage participants to focus on what’s working, spotlight bright spots, and celebrate even the smallest victories.

Work is hard these days. I think we could all do with some positive energy to spark and maintain momentum.

And yet, my positivity bias just can’t ignore a pattern I’m seeing everywhere: the pervasive, insidious, and dangerous enshittification of organizational communications.

Mediocrity is having a moment — and the bar for what should constitute excellence (or even acceptable) in organizational communications is moving in the wrong direction. This saddens me, because at the same time I’m seeing executives and communications professionals who work hard and care deeply… yet somehow, efforts at communicating to employees are at best sub-optimal and at worst doing more harm than good.

I’ve been noodling on this a lot lately, and my conclusion is that the decline of quality organizational communications has three root causes:

AI

I’m sure you’ve noticed AI slop everywhere, and organizational communication is no exception. The sanctioned — or more pervasive, unapproved “shadow” — use of AI has become a shortcut to creating messages for employees.

While I am all in favour of the strategic use of AI to elevate communications talent to their highest and best value, what I’m observing right now is a race to the bottom. Think: crappy, generic, and often downright weird images. Word salad, weak copy, and pablum written by committee. Vacuous messaging devoid of meaning or soul.

These tools can be incredible for generating outlines, brainstorming ideas, validating content — but we get into trouble when AI is used to replace the high-value, uniquely human work of communication. (Note: if this use of an em dash triggered your reflex to detect whether it was real or ChatGPT-generated copy, you’ve made my point.)

Noise

Related to AI slop, one of the most concerning patterns I observe is that employees are simply tuning out of organizational messages altogether.

Organizational overwhelm is at an all-time high. Employees are drowning in undifferentiated all-staff emails, random newsletters, Teams chats — and text messages when none of those previous channel messages are answered.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s this: the finite attention and focus of employees should be treated as an organization’s greatest asset. Yet somehow, in a world of frictionless communication, messages are blasting everywhere, all the time. I regularly hear that employees just hit delete on all-staff messages, do their best to ignore newsletters, and default to tuning out of meetings — especially online.

The loss of signal in a cacophony of noise is a costly problem most organizations are facing. And the reality is this: it’s often a problem of their own making. Many organizations have inadvertently taught their internal audiences to ignore their messages.

Fear

We are operating in a time of jacked-up anxiety. We have been lurching from one existential crisis to the next — from COVID to wars, to economic and climate instability, to the much-discussed rupture in our world order.

It’s not surprising that this climate of fear has pervaded every organization I work with. The consequence of that fear, however, is the issue. If we’re being honest, we must conclude that we have become very good at making things worse.

I notice that many leaders facing ambiguity delay communication until everything is buttoned down. Days turn into weeks, and often months — during which time their trust equity craters.

Similarly, executives having to share difficult news such as layoffs or reductions often tend to go quiet. In that vacuum, rumours become rampant and cynicism goes wild. As we have all learned, not communicating is communicating something.

The climate of fear has a particularly disastrous effect on communications teams. Time and time again, I see courageous, creative communications teams come up with solid work that gets either watered down or killed altogether — out of an overdeveloped primal instinct of fear.

These examples are not benign. All of them lead to organizations paying a massive invoice in loss of trust, alignment, and goodwill. And since organizations can only move at the speed of trust, this creates a profound drag on performance and results.

The Way Out

No one is served by degraded organizational communications. It’s irritating to employees, soul-crushing for professional communicators, and costly for leaders.

Here are three moves to get out of this trap:

Subtraction. The first step to improving organizational communication is to cut out duplication, mixed messaging, and fluff. Develop the discipline to remove before adding — and be ruthless about what messages and channels are allowed to reach your employees’ finite attention and energy.

Coherence. Review your organizational communications and assess coherence. Are messages working together as a whole? Is there an established signal with fidelity across channels? Is the context for messaging clear?

Governance. Often what appears to be a communications problem is a governance problem in disguise. Refocus on who is accountable and responsible for acting as steward of your organization’s attention. Hint: it’s probably your VP of Communications, and maybe you should get out of their way.
The path forward isn’t more communication. It’s better communication — with the discipline, coherence, and courage to make it mean something.

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For more, check out this program on achieving more signal and less noise, and explore this brief assessment tool to evaluate your communications team’s positioning to succeed in the attention economy.