Episode 66 | The Four Cs of Better Communication
Episode Introduction
Tired of communication overload? Niamh presents her Four Cs framework to help you send better, more impactful messages. Learn the practical steps to cut through the noise, avoid costly errors, and ensure your communication is always effective.
Episode Summary
The Real Cost of ‘Big Comms’ and Human Biases
Many people feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of modern workplace communication, or what Niamh calls "Big Comms.” This challenge is broken down into three main elements: volume (too many messages and emails), variety (too many channels, such as text, audio, and visual), and velocity (the speed at which messages arrive).
Poor communication can have a huge financial impact, with some reports suggesting it costs up to $1.2 trillion in the US alone each year. While the technical challenge of "Big Comms" is significant, the human element is just as crucial, including our biases, personal preferences, and assumptions about how others communicate.
Two key biases affect communication: the email urgency bias, where we feel we must reply faster than is necessary, and the email length bias, where short, to-the-point messages are sometimes perceived as incomplete, leading people to add unnecessary “fluff”.
Niamh suggests overcoming these challenges by simply asking colleagues how they prefer to communicate rather than assuming, which can lead to a much better dynamic. She encourages everyone to be a role model and make a small but significant change: try moving 10% toward a colleague’s communication style instead of expecting them to adopt yours.
The Four Cs Framework for Better Communication
To help listeners overcome these hurdles and communicate more effectively, Niamh introduces her Four Cs of Communication: Clear, Concise, Complete, and Considerate.
- Clear means avoiding jargon and acronyms, speaking plainly so everyone can understand.
- Concise means being as short as possible, but no shorter.
- Complete involves giving all the necessary context upfront to reduce follow-up messages. A helpful technique for this is to draft your message, move it down, add the missing context you forgot, and then refine for clarity and conciseness.
- Finally, Considerate means thinking about the receiver: how they will feel and think, and how you want them to act when they receive your message.
Implementing this three-step drafting process alone can significantly improve the quality of your messages and reduce the overall volume of communication.
5 Key Takeaways from the Episode
- Challenge the Urgency Bias: You don’t always need to reply to a message as fast as you received it. Talk to your team to agree on a reasonable response time and slow down a little to improve your message quality.
- Ask for Preferences, Don’t Assume: Stop guessing how your colleagues like to communicate. A quick, open conversation about preferred channels (e.g., email vs. Teams) can significantly improve your dynamic.
- Move 10% in Their Direction: Instead of expecting everyone to communicate your way, try to adapt your style by just 10% to meet others where they are. This small shift can lead to huge positive changes.
- Be ‘Complete’ with Context: Before hitting send, make sure your message or email includes all the necessary context. This prevents follow-up questions, reduces the overall message volume, and saves everyone time.
- Be a Role Model: You can start communicating better today. When you start applying the “Four Cs,” others will notice and follow your lead, creating a positive ripple effect in your team.
Resources and Related Episodes
About the Host and Podcast
Welcome to The Better Workday Podcast with your host, Niamh Moynihan. Niamh is the founder of Better Workday. She will challenge you to think differently about how you manage your time, energy, attention and relationships at work to be successful while supporting your well-being.
In each episode, Niamh shares new insights and practical ideas to help you create a better workday.
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Episode 66 Full Transcript
Hello, hello, you’re listening to the Better Workday Podcast with me, Niamh Moynihan.
What impact do you think poor communication has in the workplace? According to some reports, poor communication costs up to 1.2 trillion US dollars in the US every year. And that's just in the States. I found that stat baffling when I read it, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it if I'm honest.
But the one thing I can take away from that is if you've ever felt that poor communication is slowing you down, you are definitely not alone. And so today we're going to take a look at why communication feels so hard sometimes and practical ways that you can make it easier both for yourself and for the people that you work
Now, when I was thinking about this episode, I was reminded of a lecture I attended many years ago when I was studying for my masters. I'm going to assume for a minute that you don't know me, or at least that you don't know me for that long because it's been a while now. My background before Better Work Day was in primarily operational roles in the IT sector and my masters was in data business. so I was in a lecture with this fantastic guy. His name is Tom Davenport.
And he is an expert in the areas of big data and AI. And he was explaining that big data had some really specific attributes and that was volume, variety and velocity. And when I think of communication in the workplace today, I'm like, he was onto something not just for big data, but what I'll call big comms. know, volume, too many messages, too many emails, hundreds of emails in your inbox.
a variety, too many channels, many different types of communication, ⁓ images, audio, visual, text space, and velocity, the speed at which communication is coming at us. I know many people who can't step away from their desk for a minute without being greeted by a Teams message or an email on their return. But while that analogy is good,
to a degree, it leaves out a crucial part when it comes to comms and that's the human layer. You know, the biases that we have, our own preferences and our assumptions both in terms of how we communicate, but also, you know, how other people communicate with us. And so before I go any further, I'd like you to take a moment to think right now, you know, which of these elements do find the most challenging? Is it the volume, the variety or the velocity, like the speed, or is it the human side, you know?
different preferences and assumptions that we're making. And again, we're not going to be able to solve it all today. You know, I never make those promises because they are very hard to keep. Almost impossible, I would say. But I do think that after today's episode, you should be able to communicate slightly differently in a more positive way. OK, so I would be delighted if that was the result of you listening to the podcast today. I want to next take a look at the human side of communication, because, we are human and
It doesn't matter how many tools that we deploy to help us with our work day.
At the end of the day, when you're communicating at work, it's between you and me, between one person and another. And so we have to put this first. And I know that a lot of teams that I work with ask questions around communicating and working with different generations. You know, if you work in a place that have a mix of Gen Z, Millennials, I'm a millennial by the way.
Gen X and Boomers, you will probably have seen the differences between communication. know, on the one hand, on the one end, rather, we have people who prefer, you know, short, snappy direct communication. At the other end, you've got people who prefer, you know, live face to face conversation. Somewhere in the middle there, we have people who prefer, you know, visual direct comms. So it does depend on the generation you're in.
I just think that's useful only as a starting point and it's not the whole story. And the reason I say this is because my communication preferences have evolved from when I first started work to now. And it's been a mix of both my generation influence, but also the different companies I've worked in over the years. What I liked and what I didn't like, the people who I worked with, you know, the type of work that I did and all of that.
ends up shaping how we communicate. And so, yes, of course, people who are newer to the workplace, you know, are going to have more raw versions of their preference at the moment, but that too will evolve over time. And so I just like to kind of use that more as a starting point to say, well, you know, how can we better understand our current communication styles and what's the best we can take from each one and maybe apply different styles to different situations and things like that.
I always say that, you know, if you're able to move 10 % in someone else's direction, instead of expecting everyone to come completely over to your way, you will see huge positive shift in the dynamic. And look, that goes beyond generational preferences, it's also different personalities, different cultures in terms of your background or even the team culture that you're in. So, you know, instead of us trying to get everyone to communicate our way, I always encourage people to say, well, you know, could you move 10 %?
in their direction. And if everyone does a little bit of that, you will be amazed what would happen. So one of the nice things you can do about this and it won't cost you anything except a quick conversation is to ask the people who you work with most, the people who you are engaging with most on a daily basis, ask them how they prefer to communicate rather than assuming. And every time I ask people this in workshops or on webinars, I'm kind of just getting feedback in the chat.
We see differences in terms of how people think that others like to communicate and the reality. And it's lovely because, you know, if you had always thought someone prefers email and you've discovered that they actually really like teams for whatever reason, then you know, and you can meet them more where they're at. You might find that you've more in common than you think, or you might, you know, have a newfound understanding of why they prefer different channels. So either way, it's a good thing to do. All right.
Now, even if we all, you know, had the same personality type and the same cultural background and were from the same generation. Well, first of all, that would be really boring. Like, I don't know how well we'd get along. You know, we get under to the skin, I think, but too fast. Like we definitely need variety in groups, you know, just to kind of appreciate other people and appreciate our own traits as well. So we need the mixer and we absolutely need it. I always say
that you can't be everything, but everything you need should be in your team. know, but anyway, even if we kind of got around to all that, then there is some biases that we have to deal with again, just kind of part of the human psyche. So there is the email urgency bias, which is where, especially today, where communication is frictionless, like it's so smooth, it's so easy, where we reply faster than needed. So because you get a fast response, then you believe you have to respond just as fast or faster.
where in fact the other person doesn't need your response right away. You know, and it's interesting because again, when talking to groups, none of them want to be communicated or replied to as quickly as what's happening. In fact, they'd all like a little bit of breathing room. But yet we fall into this trap, you know, because comms can be fast that people think it should be fast or that others want it to be fast. And that's just not true. So again, maybe it's just having a chat with their team and saying,
Look, you know, what is a decent response time? You know, and what would happen if we slowed down a little bit? Maybe what would happen, by the way, is you would think your comms through a little bit better and the quality would be improved and well, wouldn't that be lovely? And then on the other end, or the other side of things as well, another bias we have is email length. So on the one hand, we don't want long emails.
and long reports and long this because it feels bloated and we're worried that no one's going to read it. Which by the way is true in many cases because I know lots of people who don't read long emails even though they've asked for the detail and look again that's due to number of factors including our attention spans, other workloads, competing priorities and lots of other things. So we're not judging here. I'm just saying it happens. But then also if someone gives you a short answer or a short report or a quick summary
Some people feel that it is missing something, right? That it is incomplete and that it hasn't been fully researched or something like that. And I wonder, you know, as you're listening to this, can you think if you've ever added fluff to a message just so that it looked complete? I was definitely guilty of doing this when I was writing blog posts when I started my business. I said that's way too short, surely. But actually people like it when you get to the point. Some people. So again, you know, it's about you taking a look to see what
the hidden rules or the accepted ways of communicating are in your workplace comes the day to day stuff. And is that still fit for purpose? know, in some roles fluff is wanted and that's fine. If that's what's also, I suppose, if it's valuable, if people actually read it and if it adds context, I'd be hard pressed to see people writing just for the sake of these days when there's so much going on.
And so look, this brings me to
some practical tools that we can take on today to improve how we communicate. Like even what I've just discussed, there isn't all the reasons that we have a communication problem. It's just some of them and we've just scratched the surface. But I'm all about, you know, taking a look at what we can do today at work to try and improve things. You know, you don't need to always understand every single cause of something to just start acting better from now on, you know.
So, with that perspective in mind, here are my four Cs to being a great communicator. So the four Cs are clear, concise, complete and considerate. Clear means avoiding jargon and acronyms outside of the core working group in which they're normally used. You might think that everyone else knows what you mean. Don't assume that they know it. OK. Speaking plainly as if you're speaking to a really smart, bright
12 or 13 year old is a surefire way to improve your comms because it means everyone is going to be able to understand what you're saying. OK. And I've had plenty of experiences with acronyms, you know, causing problems over the years when it comes to things like definitions of things and stuff like that. So just to try to, you know, take the extra step of even putting the full title in a bracket or something like that. Then to be concise. that's to be as short as possible, but no shorter. All right.
And the balance of this then is to be complete. So give the context upfront so people don't have to reply back or, you know, follow up with you in other meetings to get the details. And I always say for this is to do your first draft of an email or presentation deck or meeting agenda or whatever it is, and then take a look at it and say, what am I missing? You know, once upon a time I was songwriting more actively and I went to songwriting course at the Grey Peace Advice.
They said once you have the first verse of the song written, take it and move it down to the second verse and then go back to the start and add in all the context that you forgot. I was like, that was really good for songwriting, but it's even better for communicating at work. So what that means is we do our first draft and then we move it down a little bit and, you know, assume we've forgotten points or information or context, whatever it is.
and we add that in to create the fuller version. then, you know, ideally you put that into your drafts folder for a moment or a few minutes or a little bit longer if you have the luxury and come back and then refine it for clarity. You know, where are you duplicating your point? Where are you adding fluff for no reason? And just clear that out. And imagine if you did that. Imagine if you took that three step process, you know, first draft, then add missing content and then refine for clarity.
If you took that process and applied it to your communication, that means that automatically your communication is going to be of a higher quality, which is going to reduce the amount of follow ups that brings the volume down. And it brings probably a better response for you and a better experience for the person. So it's win-win. And you know, might be wondering, where should this start? Should it start, you know, with the management level? You know, should there be like a big initiative to improve how we communicate? I always say you can just be role models.
Like the fact that you are someone who listens to a podcast like this means that you care about ongoing personal development to being better at work, to, you know, learning and evolving and just being a better person at work and in every other area of your life. Okay. So that's already you because you wouldn't be here otherwise, by the way. So you're already a role model. You know what I mean? Like you're already somebody who can be a good example.
So you can start doing it. And when you start communicating better, others will notice and they will follow your lead. OK, which would be just lovely. look, communication is both a technical challenge due to, as I said, just a huge amount of it and the different types of comms we have, the different channels that we have and the speed at which it comes at us. But it's also a human challenge. All right. And we do have to appreciate both and see what we can do. So, you know.
One thing that you can do after today, you know, if nothing else here has resonated with you is just to challenge yourself to become a better communicator in the everyday. So before your next message, after this podcast, after you stop listening, whatever message you're sending next, if it's a text, if it's a Teams message, if it's an email, whatever it is, just before you do that, before you hit send, ask yourself, why are you sending it? What?
come do you want to achieve as a result of this conversation? And most importantly, the fourth C in the four C's consider the receiver. How will it land for the other person? Right. Think about who is getting your message and how they'll feel, how they'll think and how you want them to act when they get it. So look, I hope you find this helpful. If you do let me know. OK.
and please share this with a friend or colleague who you think might find it helpful. As always if you do find this podcast valuable I would love it if you helped me share it with more people. You can do that by subscribing wherever you listen. And you can also leave a rating or a review, that would be great as well. And until next time, stay well and have a better work day.
