Your Employees Are Drowning in Communication: How to Cut Through the Noise in the AI Era

I'm here in Leavenworth, which is a beautiful mountain town here in Washington. Leavenworth is kind of like the Christmas town of the United States. You may have heard of it. It's a Bavarian village — the city basically decided to save the town at some point by becoming Christmas Town, which is really funny. But we're all here as a team together. It was fun to be off-site here in a co-working space in Leavenworth.

It's great, if you're a hybrid or remote team, to be able to get together with your team at least once a year in person and have some fun, and get some brainstorming sessions in.

We did a murder mystery party last night that we put together for our team using AI, which was really fun. We did an escape room, and we had two teams, so it was kind of like a competition — it's been really fun.

But yeah, I want to hear where you all are. In the chat, we've got about 10 people right now, which is fantastic. It's going to be a really interesting topic — I have a lot to cover, so we're going to get into it soon. I'll give it maybe an extra minute, but please tell me where you're calling in from, maybe where you work or what you care about. Tell us something about you — even if it's just where you are or what the weather is. Then we'll get started talking about how to help employees stop drowning in communication.

I think we're going to cover some really interesting ideas — shifting the conversation from "why is nobody paying attention to me" and "why does nobody care" to "what's actually going on here?" People do care, actually, but we're drowning in communication.

So again, I'm here in Leavenworth, Washington, in the mountains with my team. It's been super fun to have Jess here with me, right at the table. Kansas City, love that. Winnipeg, thanks so much for coming. We love our neighbors to the north and south. It's always fun to see people from Canada, being close to Vancouver here in Washington, we're up there a lot.

The World Cup was in Vancouver, which was really fun — I was there, and there was a lot of energy. Also here in Seattle, which was really fun, a lot of energy happening with the World Cup. But yeah, we're excited to jump into it. With five more people in, let's go ahead and get started. Arizona, awesome. Massachusetts, love it. Bangladesh, I love that; one of our customers is actually based in Bangladesh.

Awesome, let's jump into it.

How many messages have you gotten today so far — on SMS, Teams, Slack, email, or your intranet?

If you're like most people, it's probably a lot. And if you're experiencing that, so are your employees. That's exactly what we're here to talk about today: the flood that's hitting people every single day.

Here's my promise for the next 45 minutes or so. We're going to do two things. First, we're going to give you real data — things you can bring to your leadership team, actual numbers. Some of it comes from telemetry rather than just surveys, so nobody can deny it. Second, I'm going to give you some actions you can start this week. We're going to talk about how we can help managers, and how we can help HR.

This won't just be a 45-minute session of "communicate better" platitudes. We're going to get specific and practical. By the end, you'll have a 30-day plan, along with a way to measure results from that plan.

Sounds good? Let's go ahead and jump in.

A Bit About Me

I'm Alex Grande. I'm the CEO of Recognize. We work with HR and people teams to build cultures of recognition, clarity, and trust, which means I spend basically every day, for many years now, meeting with HR leaders. And there's something I've noticed over the years:

In conversations around engagement, morale, culture, recognition, and communication, people don't know what matters. People tune out, people miss the one message that actually matters, and it gets buried under the next 40 that didn't. And then you're left wondering why people missed that one important message.

So what I'm going to share today is a mix of what I'm hearing in conversations, plus research from Microsoft, Stanford, Harvard Business Review, Gallup, KPMG, and more.

I'm going to make a claim today, and there will be a source behind it. I'll give you those sources in this presentation, and we'll email the deck to you afterward so you can borrow the information for your own decks.

Okay, enough about me — let's get into the agenda.

Agenda

We're going to go through about seven or eight things, based largely on data. First, I'm going to show you telemetry information, not just self-reported surveys — this can help convince even a skeptical executive to make changes. Second is why people tune out. Third is how AI ties into this, and there's a concept called "workslop" that I'll explain — what a terrible word, right? After that, we'll get practical with clear-messaging principles that hold up for remote and hybrid teams — communication habits that build the trust we're looking for. I'll also give you manager playbook items and HR playbook items, and finally, what you can do in the next 30 days.

Poll: How Overloaded Do You Feel?

Is this a good time to do the poll? Let's do it. This is all about being overloaded with communication — how overloaded do you feel?

We already have a handful of responses coming in. It would be great if everyone could answer: one means "you're fine, all good," five means "oh my gosh, I am so overloaded with communication." I'm pretty sure everyone's going to say five, but let's find out.

Great, we have six people so far — if we could get one more, that'd be great, just to get a bit more data.

There we go, seven. Let's go ahead and end the poll. We could keep going, but I think we'd see the same trend: most people are overloaded — some are pretty loaded, some are very overloaded. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone say "no, I'm not overloaded"? There's probably not a single person in your company who would say that.

The Paradox

Here's the paradox: it's never been easier to send a message, and it's never been harder to actually be heard. Sending is easy; being understood is hard.

Over the last decade, we've solved a lot of problems around communication, but mostly around the speed of sending messages — Slack, Teams, mobile, and now AI drafting tools. Sending has changed, but whether people actually understand — or even care to — is a different question.

We all want to know what's going on. But just because AI is faster at writing doesn't mean we're faster at understanding — there's been no "human attention upgrade." And for every new channel we add — chat, email, wiki, video — none of them replace the old ones. They just stack on top of each other.

Now I have five places to check, five places I can miss something. "Hey Alex, I didn't see you respond to that." "Did you see my note?" It's insane. Some people assume others aren't working when really they're just overloaded. And now, with AI, it's effortless to create even more content — we're inundated with it. If you're in hiring, you know cover letters have never been longer.

So here's the reframe I want you to hold onto for the rest of the session: the crisis in our organizations isn't access to information. Nobody is information-starved — everyone in your company is actually buried in information. The real crisis is comprehension: knowing which three things, out of the pile of 300, actually matter.

Everything we talk about today comes back to one shift: we don't solve a clarity problem with more volume or more communication tools. We have a clarity problem, and that's what we need to focus on.

The Research

Because "our people feel overwhelmed" doesn't move a leadership team — but numbers often do.

Microsoft analyzed its Microsoft 365 usage data — trillions of signals from real workdays — and found that the average employee receives 117 emails and 153 Microsoft Teams messages every single day. That's 270 things demanding their attention before they can even start real work. This obviously compounds at larger companies.

Here's the number that personally stops me: employees are interrupted, on average, every two minutes during core work — that's about 275 interruptions a day. Let that sink in. When was the last time your team had 10 uninterrupted minutes, let alone multiple hours? Meetings after 8:00 PM are also up 16%, so for many people the workday never really ends.

Atlassian studied 12,000 knowledge workers and found teams spend a quarter of their week searching for information — a full day every week hunting for something someone already sent. Add up the cost of miscommunication, redundancy, and wasted searching, and it comes out to roughly $1–2 trillion in lost productivity — and that's before AI enters the picture, which I'll talk about next.

Why Now?

Why are we hitting a breaking point now? A lot of it comes down to AI dropping the cost of writing to nearly zero. A polished update used to take 20–30 minutes to write, and that time requirement was a natural filter — if it wasn't worth 20 minutes, it didn't get sent. Now the same update takes 10 seconds to generate, so the filter is gone and far more information gets sent.

Second, hybrid work adds channels on top of old ones — we rarely decommission a communication channel; we just keep stacking them.

Third — and I'm curious if you agree — visible output has become how we judge communication. Sent an update? Great, you communicated, you were seen, therefore you're seen as productive. That green dot in Teams or Slack.

That's why Microsoft found that one in three employees say the pace of work over the last five years has become impossible to keep up with. Sixty percent of meetings are now ad hoc — unplanned, thrown on the calendar same-day — and the whole system runs on constant interruption. That's why this is a tipping point. So what do people do when they're drowning? They stop swimming. That's what's happening now.

Why People Tune Out

Up to 71% of employees don't read company emails. Think about the last all-staff email you sent — you worked hard on it, wordsmithed it, got approval, sent it at the optimal time. Statistically, most of your employees may never have opened it.

But it's not just about volume. When researchers dig into this, employees happily engage with messages that are timely, useful, and specific to them. What they tune out is the repetitive, generic stuff that isn't clearly written with them in mind and has nothing to do with their actual job.

In other words, people aren't ignoring communication — they're ignoring what feels irrelevant to them, and protecting their time. It's not that they're disengaged; they're just trying to get through their day productively and filter out the noise. The risk is that in doing so, they may also filter out important information.

The second pattern: messages are constantly flagged as urgent, and if everything is urgent, nothing is. Here's something you can do today: before you hit send on a group or all-company message, ask yourself three questions — who needs to act on this, what do they need to act on, and by when? If the honest answers are "nobody," "nothing," or "never," maybe the message doesn't need to go to everyone — or doesn't need to be sent at all. Applying that one filter consistently changes everything downstream, and people will respect you more for it. Often, less is more.

The Illusion of Alignment

Ask leaders whether their employees are aligned with company goals, and 27% say yes, fully aligned. Ask the employees themselves, and only 9% agree — a 3-to-1 reality gap.

I think this happens because leaders attend the town halls and read the follow-up emails and Slack posts — but do employees? Fifty-six percent say they only get key project information by physically asking someone or booking a meeting. Only 20% feel confident in their team's process for sharing decisions. And Grammarly (which I personally love) found that 100% of knowledge workers experience miscommunication at least weekly — and a quarter experience it multiple times a day.

I think we all know what that's like.

What do I believe can help fix this? There's no silver bullet, but a single source of truth helps enormously: every major initiative should have one page with the decision, the owner, the key dates, and a link everyone knows about. One well-maintained page beats five different channels of scattered information. Create that link, train people to go there, and make the documentation easy to consume.

Poll: Communication Tools

What communication tools are you using? (Select multiple.) I actually trimmed some less common ones from the list so it wouldn't get too long.

Looks like about 80% are using Microsoft Teams, with some SharePoint usage too. A smaller share are using Slack and Confluence. We use Notion at our company — it's incredible what it can do: forms, kanban boards, lists, notes. Every document is essentially its own folder. It's become the darling of Silicon Valley.

My heart goes out to everyone using Google Drive — I find the folder system really hard to navigate, though Google Docs and Sheets are great tools. And poor Zoom is really trying to step out of video and offer more, like docs. So yeah, most people are using multiple tools, with the Microsoft 365 stack being most common. Thanks for sharing.

The Trust Problem

Does this sound familiar? Noise builds up, a message gets missed, mistakes happen, deadlines slip, work gets duplicated, someone gets blindsided. Leadership gets nervous and sends more messages, more reminders, more all-hands, more "per my last email." That creates more noise, and it goes around and around.

The cruel part is the natural instinct when people miss something: send it again, send it louder, send it across three channels — which actually makes things worse. You can't email your way out of a problem caused by too much email.

Now we can quantify the damage. Gallagher surveyed over 1,300 communications and HR professionals across 40 countries and found that high-volume communication environments show a 30% increase in leadership trust risk and 24% higher audience burnout. Layer that with Gallup's numbers: only 1 in 3 employees strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership, and 29% say they lack clear, honest, consistent communication from leaders.

If you take exactly one slide from today into your next executive meeting, make it this one: more volume measurably erodes leadership trust.

How AI Is Making This Worse

AI has made writing effortless, which is incredible. Anyone in your organization can now generate a polished, professional-sounding update in seconds — even an intern's status update can read like a McKinsey memo.

On the surface, that's a productivity win. But we still all have to read it. Content volume is growing faster than the time available to consume it, and reading time is fixed — attention is the one resource we can't scale. The effort didn't disappear, it just moved from the writer to the reader. When someone generates a five-paragraph update in 10 seconds instead of thinking for 20 minutes about what actually matters, they save 20 minutes — and every reader now has to spend extra time trying to extract the point.

I've definitely gotten some AI slop myself, and I've literally told someone, "just send me the prompt you used to create this." Ease of production is not ease of comprehension. Gallagher's research showed that 75% of communication functions are experimenting with AI, which means we've deployed the volume machine at full speed without deploying any brakes — and it feels like we're just getting started.

The Cost of "Workslop"

We've probably all received AI-generated content that says nothing — you're left wondering, "what are they actually trying to say here?" I call this "workslop": AI-generated content that masquerades as good work. Don't worry, no judgment — we've probably all sent it too. We're all learning AI together, at the very beginning, the same way we all had to develop new etiquette around smartphones (like "phubbing" — ignoring someone in person to browse your phone).

Here are the numbers: 41% of full-time U.S. employees received workslop from a colleague in the last month. It can take an hour to figure out what someone's actually trying to say, and it's genuinely awkward. Researchers found it costs about $186 per employee per month — and that number is likely to rise. For a 10,000-person company, that's roughly $9 million wasted per year. 53% of people are annoyed to receive workslop, 22% are actually offended, and about half view the sender as less creative, less capable, and less reliable afterward.

So think about what that means: the time AI saved the writer gets paid back by the reader with interest, and the sender pays a second time in credibility.

Here's a twist: KPMG and the University of Melbourne surveyed 48,000 people across 47 countries — the largest study of its kind. 57% of employees hid their AI use and presented AI-generated work as their own. Two-thirds of AI users admit they rely on outputs without checking them for accuracy, and almost half have pasted potentially sensitive company information into public AI tools.

It's easy to get judgmental about this, but it helps to ask "why" a few times. Only 47% of employees have received any AI training, and only 40% say their workplace has an AI policy. People are hiding their AI use partly because nobody told them the rules — it's not a character failure, it's a governance failure, and that's something we can fix.

Remote and Hybrid Teams

A quick reality check for remote teams: everything I've talked about gets amplified when teams are distributed. In an office, communication has a built-in safety net that you don't notice until it's gone. A confusing email gets clarified at the coffee machine; a weird tone in a message gets explained when you see someone's face in the hallway and realize they were just rushed. These informal repairs happen constantly, instantly, and for free.

That safety net disappears with time zones — a 30-second question can become a 24-hour round trip, and long Slack or Teams threads can get heated for no reason when a quick call would resolve it. I'll talk about when and how to use different mediums.

To be clear, this doesn't mean remote work is broken — I don't believe that at all, since we're a remote team ourselves and see real benefits. What it means is that writing quality is no longer a nice-to-have — it's core infrastructure, since everything happens in writing, especially on a remote team.

Five Principles for Clearer Writing

Clear writing is a skill, just like empathy — it's learnable. Most people aren't born knowing how to write a good status update. Here are five principles:

Lead with "so what." State what's going on in the first line, then give the backstory after. The military calls this BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front. You can teach your team this in about 30 minutes; just search "BLUF" online. If you bury an action request inside a general status update, the action usually doesn't happen.

Be specific. Names, dates, owners, next steps. Vague phrasing like "someone should look at this" means nobody will.

Write for skimming. People are going to skim — stop fighting it and design for it. Use short paragraphs and headers. Bold key phrases so people can scan quickly. Try labeling messages "Action," "Decision," or "FYI" in the subject line so people can triage effectively.

Match the medium to the message. If it's urgent or personal, pick up the phone or start a huddle — hear their voice rather than getting into a long Slack or Teams exchange. If it's important with a lot of context, write a structured update (maybe an email), then send a quick note on Teams saying "I sent you an email" so they can read it when ready. If it's low-stakes FYI, don't @-mention anyone — that signals it doesn't require an interruption, and people can get to it in their own time.

Document decisions with an owner and deadline. Atlassian found that 77% of workers say they frequently have meetings that end with a decision to have another meeting — which isn't ideal. A concrete fix: publish a one-page channel charter — which channels are for what, expected response times (e.g., a few hours on Slack, a day on email), and so on. Review it if you already have one. You don't have to be overly strict, but communication should keep moving. One good practice: keep a running list of lower-priority items to discuss with someone, rather than sending each one immediately and causing constant interruptions. Put the charter in your wiki so everyone knows the norms — it reduces communication anxiety.

Listening, Not Just Broadcasting

When employees go quiet, it's usually because they're overloaded — not because they're disengaged or indifferent. People stop reading long before they stop caring. If your open rates drop, the right interpretation usually isn't "nobody cares" — it's "there's too much noise." Those are very different problems with very different fixes.

Build actual listening infrastructure: pulse surveys, AMAs with leadership, office hours, skip-level conversations — anything that turns a broadcast into a dialogue. Measure not just "did I send it" but "did it land — was it understood?"

One great pulse survey question: "Do you know what your top priority is this month?" The answer to that single question tells you more about communication health than open or click rates ever will. And the fastest way to build trust is to close the loop publicly: "You said X, we did Y." If you ask something in a survey, be prepared to act on it.

Managers Matter Most

Employees trust their direct manager's voice far more than the company at large. The CEO's all-hands might get skimmed, but a manager saying "here's what this actually means for our team" gets read, remembered, and acted on. Gallagher found that 87% of communication professionals call manager communication capacity a significant risk — meaning the most trusted channel in the company is also the least supported.

Share this with your leadership and managers — five things that help managers communicate more effectively (I won't go through each one here; we'll send the notes afterward).

Managers who master communication see an 18% engagement lift on their teams. Here are five things managers should stop doing: forwarding emails without context, and only communicating when there's a problem (if a message from your manager just says "got a second?" it shouldn't strike fear into your heart — ideally they'd say "got a second, I want to talk about X"). If it does strike fear, that may point to a psychological safety issue worth addressing.

Also, stop sending unedited AI responses — employees could just run the prompt themselves. Instead, managers should translate company messages for their team, use AI for research rather than final output, and confirm the team actually understands messages rather than just receives them.

What HR Can Do

Run a communication audit. Inventory every recurring email, newsletter, all-hands, and channel — from SharePoint to Teams to Google Drive — and check actual engagement. If something's under 30% engagement, consider removing it. There will always be more channels added later, so do a "spring cleaning" at least once a year.

Create a communication charter. Define channel norms, response-time expectations, and quiet hours. Employees should be allowed to send messages anytime, but it's on the recipient to say "I'm muted, not receiving notifications" — and that should be culturally okay. (I once had an employee who was responding to every single Slack notification because she hadn't turned off alerts — we fixed that in her settings. Make sure your employees know how to manage their own notification settings.)

Govern the calendar. Set standard meeting lengths (e.g., 25 or 50 minutes), require agendas, and make it culturally acceptable to decline a meeting with a reason. If every meeting has an agenda and a set time, it's a real boost to productivity.

Consider a "no-meeting day." If you already have one, share it in the chat. Imagine how much more focused and happier your team would be with one day fully protected for deep work. Microsoft found that clustering meetings, requiring agendas, and protecting deep-work blocks reduced "bad days" by 25%.

Build an AI policy and provide training. Set norms now — this isn't going away. Give managers a toolkit: templates and talking points before announcements, so they know how to communicate with their teams. Gallup found an 18% team engagement gain when managers are trained on communication — a huge improvement, and it doesn't require specialized training, just the basics: how to communicate, how to be empathetic, how to check in.

Your 30-Day Plan

Week 1 — Audit: Inventory your channels, kill what's not needed, kill what's not read. It's mostly about subtraction — trust me, nobody will miss the channels you remove.

Week 2 — Charter: Publish your communication norms (or review existing ones). Include guidance like Action vs. FYI labeling, and your AI usage policy — one page, in your wiki, reinforced in training. A decent charter shipped in two weeks beats a perfect one shipped next quarter. Done is better than perfect, and you can always iterate.

Week 3 — Managers: Run manager training and ship your first toolkit so managers can use it in a real announcement.

Week 4 — Listen and learn: Launch a pulse survey with the question "Do you know your top priority this month?" Compare it to previous months and report the results to leadership.

You'll notice the first two weeks focus on HR, the third on managers, and the last on measurement — though a single month may be too short to see the full impact; you may need a quarter to see real movement in the survey results.

Wrap-Up

I planned this for about 45 minutes, and skipped a few less-critical points, but I hope you found the information useful. Do one thing today or tomorrow, start that checklist.

Next week we have a guest speaker, Corey Crapella, founder of Core Coaching and Consulting and an HR leader — we'll be doing an interview-style conversation with him. It's on Tuesday, July 14th at 1 p.m. Eastern (there goes my no-meeting Tuesday). Please come — I think you'll really enjoy it.

I'm glad people are finding this useful and relevant, that's really all I can ask for: no yawns, no confusion.

We also run a live product demo every month for Recognize, our employee recognition and rewards platform. We work with communication and HR teams to help make companies better places to work, and to help communicate what "winning" looks like inside the organization — we've been doing this for over 10 years, with companies large and small, local and international.

Whether you're driving a specific mission, going through an acquisition, trying to improve retention or engagement, managing an ad hoc recognition program, or just don't know how much your managers are spending on spot bonuses, a structured recognition and gamification platform tied to your company's values can make a real difference, and helps employees actually understand what those values are.

A one-on-one demo can feel like a big ask, so instead you're welcome to join a group demo with David and Jess, and you'll have a good chance of winning a $100 gift card (we won't be offering that much longer, so take advantage while you can; we often have 20–30 people join, so the odds are good).

We also offer gift cards, live event and concert tickets, and swag, redeemable with points earned through work anniversaries, challenges, or recognition — and rewards can be redeemed in Canada, Bangladesh, the U.S., and elsewhere. If you sign up for a subscription, we'll give you $1,000 to start. Subscription pricing is reasonable and scales down per user as your employee count grows, happy to go into details in the demo.

Please join if you can, and feel free to reach out to me anytime. I'm Alex Grande, alex@recognizeapp.com. No sales pressure. I just love talking with HR leaders about this stuff.

Thanks so much for joining, and I hope you have a wonderful Thursday afternoon!