Don't make people read 140 notifications to find out what matters
A simple approach to leadership communication after summer vacation: filter the noise, tell people what changed and give them three priorities for what comes next.
August is quiet.
As it should be.
People take vacation. Leaders take vacation. Calendars thin out. Not everybody reads every email, follows every Teams conversation or sits in every meeting.
But companies don't stop.
Decisions get made. Priorities move. Projects progress.
Something that seemed terribly important in July suddenly isn't.
Something else is.
And somewhere in there are probably three things everyone actually needs to know when they come back.
So tell them.
Don't make people reconstruct the story themselves
First Monday back.
Laptop open.
Inbox: ridiculous.
Teams: 140 notifications.
Calendar: apparently everybody missed you.
And now we expect people to work through all of that and somehow figure out for themselves what changed, what still matters and where they should focus.
Why?
Do the filtering for them.
Before the inbox. Before Teams. Before the first meeting.
Here's what you might have missed.
Here's what actually matters.
Here's where we're going next.
Not everything that happened.
Nobody needs the minutes of August.
They need the important stuff.
And the important stuff shouldn't get lost in the noise.
Please don't turn this into a campaign
This is the point where a very simple idea can become a communications project.
Concept. Script. Backdrop. Lighting. Graphics. Approvals.
Three weeks later, we have a beautifully produced 4:37-minute leadership video that nobody particularly wants to watch.
I'd do the opposite.
A phone. AirPods. One espresso.
Or a drink of your choice. Hydration is key.
Three priorities. Under 90 seconds. Straight to camera.
Living room? Fine.
Back yard? Fine.
Still sitting on a vacation terrace? Even better.
Because guess what? Leaders take vacation too. As they should.
It doesn't need to look polished. It needs to feel real.
Positive side effect: essentially zero budget needed.
And I know this works because one of my favourite examples happened when we had almost none of the channels we take for granted today.
My favourite espresso was the very first one
First Monday of the pandemic lockdown.
Essentially day three.
Millions of people were suddenly stuck at home. Millions more were put on short-time work schemes. In Germany, Kurzarbeit became part of everyday vocabulary.
And so were 250+ people across our global team, around half of them in Germany.
From one day to the next, many weren't just working from home.
They weren't working at all.
And that meant they no longer had normal access to their work environment or the usual corporate communication channels.
But they still needed to know what was going on.
They needed to hear from their leader.
So Bernd Heinrichs recorded what became our first little leadership espresso.
From his living room.
Saxophone in hand.
Short. Personal. Human.
We put it on a private YouTube channel.
Then came the slightly more interesting problem:
How do we actually get it to everyone?
The answer was: however we could.
Private email. WhatsApp. Whatever contact details we could find.
We weren't debating channel strategy. We were trying to reach people.
Was it polished?
Absolutely not.
Did it work?
Absolutely.
Because when almost everything around people had suddenly changed, their leader showed up and talked to them.
No stage. No script worthy of an autocue. No campaign.
Just communication when it mattered.
What worked then works even better now
Coming back from summer vacation is obviously not March 2020.
But the principle hasn't changed.
When there is too much information, leadership shouldn't add more.
Leadership should filter.
What changed?
What matters now?
What can we safely ignore?
Where do you need people focused next?
The big difference is that today there really is no excuse.
We have the channels.
Teams. Email. Intranets. Employee apps. Video. Smartphones. Internal social platforms. Pick yours.
Back then, we were hunting down private email addresses and WhatsApp numbers just to get a short video in front of 250+ people across multiple countries.
Today the infrastructure is already there.
So use it.
Not to produce more content.
Not to fill another channel.
And definitely not because September needs a campaign.
Use it to create clarity.
Then let people get on with their jobs.
Because the goal isn't to tell people everything they missed.
It's to make sure the important stuff doesn't get lost in the noise.
