A practical guide to fatigue-proof internal comms cascades

Internal comms cascades are designed to make messaging clearer. However, when every piece of communication becomes part of a cascade, or when cascades are composed of inflexible checklists, communicators run the risk of fatiguing their employees. This is because when everything is cascaded without intent, there’s a good chance many of your messages won’t apply to end audiences. The message might get there in practice, but it runs a significant risk of not sticking with employees mentally.

But luckily, there is a solution. It involves carefully engineering cascades with intent and a sense of restraint.

Lisa Claybon, vice president of corporate affairs at a global foodservice company, told Ragan that fatigue doesn’t come from overcommunication — it stems from poorly constructed cascades that aren’t steeped in intent.

“You get fatigue when communication isn’t intentional,” she said. “When people don’t understand why they’re getting a message, who it’s for or what they’re supposed to do with it — that’s when they tune out.”

Here’s a rundown of what an internal communicator needs to know to build a fatigue-proofed employee comms cascade.

1. Decide whether or not your message needs a cascade in the first place. Before you come up with a channel plan for your message, take a step back and ask yourself a few questions.

• Is this a change comms message?
• Does it require employees to do anything differently from what they’re already doing?
• Does the audience need context from their leaders or managers to understand or trust it?

If the answer to all three of these questions is no, don’t force a comms cascade. Doing so will only risk fatiguing the audience long-term. When everything feels like a major announcement, nothing feels important.

Lauren Stephens, executive director of internal communications at MGM Resorts International, said that her team takes a careful look at every message before deciding whether to implement a comms cascade to the company’s employees.

“At our organization, the weekly employee dining room menu — that doesn’t need to be a cascade,” she told Ragan. “That just needs to be posted and it’s done. But when we’re rolling out a new system for employees, then yes, that needs a very cascaded approach to get people in the loop at the right time and understanding how the change affects their roles.”

2. Create an audience segmentation map.

When people get a message that doesn’t directly affect them, they’re likely to tune out not only that message, but future communications that may be more relevant. One way to avoid that is with an audience segmentation map.

Stephens said at MGM Resorts International, each piece of communication has an audience field they can select to send the message to, so the internal comms team doesn’t cascade communications to people who don’t need them. “The channel and the tactics and even the messaging itself change based on who we’re talking to,” she said. “Managers need different information than frontline employees. Leaders need context that hourly employees don’t necessarily need.”

For example, when a major organizational change happens, Stephens said that the audience map looks like this:

• Senior leaders get the context and rationale.
• Managers get team-specific talking points.
• Frontline and hourly employees get information that applies directly to them.

“Audience clarity is what allows the cascade to move with purpose instead of just volume,” Stephens said.

3. Prepare leaders and managers to carry the message.

Once they’ve decided to cascade a message and have identified the audiences, internal communicators need to prepare the leadership and managers for their roles in the cascade. When those sharing the message are confident, clear and knowledgeable about the message, employees stand to have fewer questions, which reduces the need for repeated, fatiguing comms.

Claybon said that internal comms needs to go beyond just telling managers that a message is important and instill why it matters for an individual team. “Build them some FAQs so they can create a real conversation,” she said. “Otherwise, it just feels like something that was sent to me to tell you.”

Stephens said that her team ensures that leaders are not just familiar with the comms cascade, but their role in it as well.

“Before we even start formally communicating broadly, we ask ourselves about what senior leadership knows,” she said. “That leadership socialization has to happen first. For really big announcements that are cascaded, we do a leadership call — and we’ve branded it. When that comes up, leaders know this is something they really need to pay attention to.”

4. Listen for fatigue while the cascade is happening — and course correct if you need to.

Comms fatigue usually builds in the background through ignored messaging and disengaged audiences. Internal communicators need to actively listen to employee audiences while the cascade is in action, rather than unpacking afterward.

“People just tell you,” Stephens said. “Through conversation they’ll say things like, ‘Hey, you sent out too many emails,’ or ‘You put too many attachments on the email.’ I get that a lot — and that kind of word-of-mouth feedback is really important. That would certainly signal to us that maybe we’re putting way too much on a certain channel — and that’s insight we take back when we’re building the next comms plan.”

She added that structured listening is also an important part of her team’s testing strategies.

“At a minimum of once a year, we do focus groups with each of our properties and corporate, and we ask them about our main communication channels,” Stephens said. “We ask them, ‘Does this still work? Is it too much information? Is it the right amount?’ If people tell us they tune out when they see something on a certain channel, then when we’re putting a comms cascade together, we’ll say, ‘OK, this group told us that channel doesn’t really work for them — so maybe we don’t use it.’”

Stephens also shared that her team uses real-time analytics to see how messages are being received. At MGM Resorts International, many employees are deskless, and text messages are a key part of the cascade that provides a valuable pathway to employees — and key metrics too.

“For text messaging, we look at what time of day people actually respond or look at it,” she said. “We’ll say, ‘Historically, people pay attention to this type of message at this time of day,’ and we’ll send it then — so it’s not seen as, ‘Ugh, here’s another message.’”

Fatigue-proofing a cascade is about building the right infrastructure that ensures the right people deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. When comms cascades are built intentionally, they feel less like noise and more like a reliable comms system employees can trust.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.