What happens to a channel once you’ve used it for a minor process update with the same urgency you’d use for a merger?
Employees stop trusting the alarm. That’s the real cost of over-communicating small things at full volume: the channel loses its meaning right when you need it most. I weigh every initiative against reach, risk and reversibility. Touches the whole workforce, carries real trust risk if misread, hard to walk back, that earns the full treatment: town halls, manager toolkits, intranet, video, FAQs, built-in redundancy in case one channel misses.
Narrower, lower risk, easy to correct with a follow-up, and a lighter touch isn’t a compromise, it’s the disciplined choice. The test I use with clients: what happens if this message is missed or misread. Serious and hard to undo, go broad. Manageable with a follow-up, stay lean and save the big channels for when they’re the only thing that will work.
Which of your channels have you already burned out by using it for things that didn’t deserve the weight?
