Cascade communication is flawed. Here’s how to fix it.

Asking managers to cascade messages is fraught with problems, so what can be done to support the flow of information across the company?

tl;dr: Cascade communications are flawed — they’re inefficient (take ages to flow down) and sketchy at best (managers often don’t cascade messages — for a host of reasons). Why they don’t work? They often happen in isolation, i.e. they’re the only channel used for passing messages to people at lower levels in an organisation, impacting understanding. How to fix it? A multi-channel, multi-hit approach.

What is ‘cascade communication’?

If something is truly relevant and important for an entire organisation to receive, understand and action, a common approach is ‘cascade communication’ whereby the message starts at the top of the hierarchy and is passed on from manager to team member until everyone has received it.

It’s potentially powerful in principle.

The problem with this approach, however, is that it doesn’t work in the way we all hope it would.

“What the heck does *this* mean?” (Photo from PxHere.com.)

Cascade communications are flawed

• They’re inefficient (they can take ages to flow down);
• They’re sketchy at best (managers often don’t cascade messages for a host of reasons);
• They rely on each ‘cascader’ interpreting the messages in the same way for consistent understanding across the company;
• They assume the ‘cascader’ understands and supports what they’re passing onto their teams — and why they’re doing it.

But why they don’t work?

They often happen in isolation, i.e. they’re the only channel used for passing messages to people at lower levels in an organisation.

As mentioned above, they assume that the people responsible for cascading the messages to their teams understand the messages, support them and can given them the day-to-day context for their teams.

Communication is the transfer of understanding from one party to another. If the line manager doesn’t understand what’s being ‘cascaded’, what hope have they got for helping their teams understand it?

Sure, it’s a simple approach that doesn’t require much effort (we’ve all seen “please share with your teams as appropriate/applicable” at the top of an email), other than the usually arduous review and approval steps, but it’s by no means effective in helping people understand what’s going on.

How to fix it

If you truly want a wide range of people across the organisation to understand something and take some kind of action (the end goal of internal communication), you need a multi-channel, multi-hit approach.

• It’s longer and more involved — something that already-stretched communication teams probably don’t want to hear — but easily more effective.

The principles for this approach are simple:

1. Make your messages punchy: short, simple, easy to understand and to the point.
2. Put it in context: help people join the dots between the company strategy, this particular announcement and what they do on a daily basis.
3. Consider different formats: written (long- and short-form); short video; audio version; images and diagrams, etc. Give people choice regarding how they ‘consume’ the messages, bearing in mind people have different preferences.
4. Give the messages a 24/7 home: stick them on the network somewhere easily accessible and searchable so that people can find them later.
5. Provide support for line managers: a covering note with instructions on what to do; a short guide on how to engage people in what’s being shared; supporting assets such as images, presentation slides and script notes; prompts and tips on how to relate it back to their team’s goals, and so on.
6. Say it more than once using different channels: don’t assume everyone will read that all-staff email, let alone understand it. They won’t. Mix it up: use written and ‘live’ communications activities; open up two-way channels to discuss what’s going on.

Research shows that you need to say things 7 times before it sinks in.

I read a quote many years ago that if you really want people to know something, tell them 5 times using 2 or 3 different channels.

I’d upgrade that quote to say: tell them at least 7 times using as many effective channels as possible… and leave it on a permanent platform for people to find later on, as mentioned above.

“Now, where’s that announcement from last year?” (Photo from PxHere.com.)

Use multiple, *effective* channels to reach people

What do I mean by effectice channels? An effective channel is one that reaches your target audience most easily, consistently and impactfully.

You should know which channels and platforms are best for reaching people, but they’ll all be flawed in some way:

• The all-staff email might reach all colleagues, but that doesn’t mean they actually read it. (Ever seen people’s inboxes with hundreds or thousands of unread email? All-staff emails and newsletters are probably in there.)
• Line manager cascade — as mentioned, these are great if line managers actually cascade it — or even hold meetings with their teams to explain the messages and put them in context for their people (spoiler alert: lots of managers don’t have regular meetings or 1:1s with their own reportees)
• Intranet — it’s a means to an end for most companies I’ve worked with. It’s how you find something you need to do your job. It’s where the canteen menu sits; it’s how you access your holiday request system; it’s where you go to look someone up to remind yourself what they look like just before a meeting (just me? Oh, ok). The idea that your employees go to the intranet just to browse for news is almost a complete fallacy — while there are people who will visit it to see what is going on, most people on a daily basis won’t use the intranet for that.
• Newsletters — they’re browsable at best after the first few issues. While they’re new, they can be effective (people like new stuff), but after a while, they become like wallpaper and join the ranks of the all-staff email in people’s overflowing inboxes. (More here…)
• All-hands calls / town hall meetings — not everyone can attend, they don’t hear everything, they don’t remember everything — and few people listen to/watch the recording.
• Company social platforms — not ubiquitous, they become busy pretty quickly, people aren’t on them all the time, etc.

You will have others that don’t have 100% effectiveness in terms of reaching people.

It’s worth doing an exercise to work out what’s more effective for your organisation/team.

The bottom line: you need to place information and grab people’s attention in the places where they hang out, not rely solely on the line manager cascade.

There’s no point putting something on the intranet if everyone’s chatting on Teams. Your Slack channels are useless if everyone’s working on Confluence. And so on.

So to support the line manager cascade, you need to make sure that the messages are across a number of the most effective channels, combining direct-to-audience with more two-way activity.

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