Overly optimistic communication makes employees nervous
Some 84% of executives say their communication is intentionally “optimistic.” That’s a mistake.
Withholding bad news makes employees feel uncertain. That uncertainty can be worse than the bad news itself.
Indeed, research by David M. Schweiger and Yaakov Weber shows that communicating bad news as well as good decreases employees’ uncertainty and stress.
Bad news increases employees’:
- Job satisfaction
- Commitment
- Trust in the company
- Intention to stay at the company
How can you improve employee relations by communicating the bad along with the good?
Get to the point faster
Because web visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold
Consider the numbers:
- Web visitors spend 80% of the time above the fold, or on the first screen of a webpage, and just 20% below the fold.
- Material near the top of a webpage gets 17x the attention of that near the bottom.
- The average difference in how users treat information above vs. below the fold is 84%.
But where’s the fold? Content that shows up above the fold on a 30-inch monitor can take as many as five screens on a smartphone.
Reach readers where their eyes are.
So how can you reach your readers where their eyes are?
At Writing for the Web and Mobile — our two-day hands-on web-writing master class on June 12-13 in Chicago — you’ll learn how to:
- Pass the 1-2-3-4 test to put your message where web visitors' eyes are. Tip: Try this simple test on your smartphone for best results.
- Make it a mullet — and 4 more steps for writing effective web heads. (No. 5 is the most important thing you can do to improve the ROI of your site.)
- Optimize webpages for Google and humans with our three-part test. Note: If you're still using SEO tricks you learned in the 'oughts, Google may be penalizing your pages.
- Don't drop the deck. Learn to make the most of the best-read element on your webpage.
- Steal headline-writing tips from the BBC — the source of the best news heads on the web, according to Nielsen.
Learn more about our
Chicago master class.
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Sources: TJ Larkin & Sandar Larkin, “Communicate the Good and the Bad,” Larkin Page No. 46, October 2006
David M. Schweiger and Angelo S. Denisi, “Communication with Employees Following a Merger: A Longitudinal Field Experiment,” Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1, March 1991, pp. 110-135
David M. Schweiger and Yaakov Weber: “Strategies for Managing Human Resources during Mergers and Acquisitions: An Empirical Investigation,” HR – Human Resource Planning, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1989, pp. 69-86
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