I found this blog post particularly helpful. It’s so well written that it’s hard to quote a paragraph that describes the essence. This is what the post is about
[Overcommunication] can dramatically improve your work life, not just in the short term but for the entire arc of your career.
An employee helps take care of their manager by proactively communicating project status and what, if anything, is impeding success. A manager helps take care of their employees by making that communication psychologically safe even when it contains bad news, and by offering constructive support to solve problems.
The writer goes on to describe how communicating more than is strictly necessary helps in the following cases:
- Implementing a new process
- Dealing with a personal struggle
- Working on a long project
- Something awesome happened
- Manager doesn’t understand what you do day-to-day
- Feeling overwhelmed
And ends with describing how to overcommunicate with an example, summed up as ‘great communication is honest. relevant, respectful and concise”. It is also, importantly, distinct from cover-your-ass communication.
I found this important because at the startup we’re now at a stage where multiple things happen independently of each other. There are immediate fixes, current planned tasks, longer-term projects and somewhat more strategic thinking. Across sales, marketing, business development, engineering and operations. While most of the team is in a single location, it’s no longer feasible to keep the entire company apprised of all of what’s happening at a single meeting.
We have to overcommunicate.