What informal communication is
Informal communication is the movement of news between employees outside the approved channels and the chain of command, so that it spreads along people’s relationships rather than along their positions in the structure.
It exists in every organisation, and it is neither created by a decision nor abolished by one. An organisation that believes it has no channel other than the approved ones is really saying it cannot see the other one, which describes what it knows, not the state of the organisation.
One caution comes first: calling it “informal” describes the route, not the truth of what travels on it. It may carry accurate news days before the approved channel does, and it may carry things with no basis at all. The task is to weigh both possibilities, not to dismiss it wholesale.
What it buys and what it pays: speed against accuracy
Its one advantage is that it needs no approval step. Its inherent weakness is that it passes things on by retelling, and every retelling loses something. Suppose each relay keeps 90% of the content:
- After five relays: 0.9 to the power of five, or 59% of what was first said.
- After eight relays: 43%.
If more care were taken at each relay, so that 95% survived, what remained after eight relays would be 66%. Halving the loss at every relay still would not stop a third of the news disappearing.
The implication is that the number of relays decides more than the care taken at each one. An organisation that tackles this by reminding people to check their facts is working on the factor with less effect. One thing works on the number of relays: getting the news to the largest number of people in the fewest relays, which means saying it once to everyone rather than to one layer that passes it to the next.
What is lost is not spread evenly either. The first things to drop out in retelling are the condition, the exception and the timing, because they are the hardest to hold on to. The bare decision survives: “the department is being moved” stays, while “in the third quarter, if such and such is completed” falls away.
These retention rates are assumptions, chosen to show the effect of the number of relays. They are not a measurement and are not taken from any source, and we put no figure on how much of what circulates informally turns out to be accurate, since that depends on the subject and the organisation.
The gap rule: what is not said gets filled in
The content of the informal channel is not independent of the approved one. It is whatever the approved channel left empty. News announced with the “what” but without the “why” travels with a “why” supplied by whoever spoke first.
Timing is decisive here. A statement that needs three approvals of a day and a half each comes out 4.5 days after the news arose, while the informal channel carries it the same day. In most cases, then, the approved statement is not the first thing people hear. It is a correction of what they heard, and it is read that way.
That is why dealing with informal communication belongs to change management, not to discipline. The practical rule drawn from both calculations together: say what can be said early, even if it is incomplete, together with what has not yet been decided and when it will be addressed. An early, incomplete announcement fills the gap; a complete one a week later finds the gap already full.
Early disclosure is not right in every case, though. Some news is subject to restrictions on when it can be announced that lie outside the control of whoever manages communication, and we reach no conclusion about those restrictions.
Informal communication does not carry all news at the same speed
News that affects an employee’s own position travels much faster than anything else, followed by news that people fear, with news that has no consequence for anyone last in line.
Put that together with what came before and the result is the worst combination possible: the fastest thing to travel is the sensitive part, and the first thing lost in retelling is the condition and the timing. So what reaches people is “the department is being moved” without “if such and such is completed” and without “in the third quarter”, and it reaches them early, and it stands alone for days until the statement comes out.
The implication is that an announcement plan is built on one assumption: the heaviest part of the news will arrive first, stripped of everything that softens it. So the statement leads with what limits the decision, not with what prepares the ground for it, and the condition is stated before the decision rather than after it.
The carriers are not the people at the top of the structure
News does not travel along reporting lines. It travels through the people who cross between units. They usually fall into three groups: people in support functions who deal with everyone, people whose long service means they know someone in every unit, and people who moved between two departments and kept their connections in the one they left.
The practical effect comes down to one step: the list of who is told first is built on who connects to others, not on who ranks highest. A manager who talks only to other managers passes the news to nobody, while someone in a support function spreads it within the hour.
A second, less visible effect follows. When one of these people leaves the organisation, a link between two units is cut that the structure does not replace. The number of relays between the two ends of a piece of news rises, and the loss rises with it, by an amount that can be worked out as above.
Informal communication is also the organisation’s fastest sensor
Anyone who treats it as a pure burden is mistaken. It carries to management what no report does: that a team works in a way other than the one written down because the written one does not work, that a new tool is not being used, and that something happened in a unit before it was escalated.
That is why a weak informal channel is not a sign to celebrate. An organisation where nothing arrives except through the approved channel is one in which nothing is said that was not asked for. The first thing lost when engagement falls is the raising of problems, after they have been raised repeatedly with no response.
Measures that shorten its effect
- Name the source. News whose author is known can be referred back to when it is disputed. News with no source travels as “they say” and cannot be corrected, because it belongs to nobody.
- Give the reason with the decision. This is the item that, if missing, gets written by people outside the decision, and it is neither the longest nor the hardest part of the statement to write.
- Set a date for the next update, even if its content is that there is nothing new. A wait with no end date is what produces the most speculation.
- Provide a channel for questions. A question asked and answered in the open does the work of ten rumours, and the lack of anywhere to ask is the first thing that pushes talk onto the other route.
None of these is expected to abolish the channel, which is neither possible nor desirable. They shorten the time a piece of news stands alone, and reduce the number of relays it passes through before it is heard in its correct form.
Neighbouring terms it is not
A suggestion scheme is a declared channel with a body that reviews what arrives and a period within which it replies. Informal communication binds nobody to anything: nothing that moves informally reaches a body that will review it, no reply is expected, and nobody knows whether it reached anyone at all. Corporate whistleblowing is a report about an incident, with its own procedure and confidentiality. The same incident passing between colleagues in conversation is not a report, carries none of a report’s consequences, and may even work against the person it concerns.
Organisational culture is what governs how work actually gets done, while informal communication is a channel that carries news. The channel reveals the culture without creating it: what travels fast on it tells you what people care about, and what is kept quiet on it tells you what people are afraid to say. Organizational politics, for its part, is about the aim being pursued rather than the route news takes, and the informal channel is one of its tools without being the same thing.
Whether a particular disclosure of the organisation’s information is permitted is a separate question. Confidentiality and its limits are read from their own sources, such as the clauses of the employment contract, which the English guide to clauses restricting competition and protecting confidentiality under the Saudi Labor Law explains, and we draw no legal conclusion about them from this concept.
What spoils the way it is handled
- Trying to stop it. Prohibition does not stop news moving. It moves it out of places where it can be heard into places where it cannot. The news remains, and management loses the ability to hear it.
- Holding the carrier to account. That ends news reaching management before it ends news moving between people, because the first connection is the easier one to cut.
- Treating what it carries as employees’ opinion. What travels is not what people believe but what reached them after several relays, each of which dropped part of the original. Acting on a relayed complaint without checking what actually happened is acting on a late version of the news.
- Treating its silence as reassurance. When less reaches management, that does not mean nothing is moving. It may mean that what is moving has become something people will not say in front of management. The difference between the two does not show in anything measured; it shows the first time management learns of something after everyone else.
- Answering it on its own channel. A correction spread the way the error arrived enters the same cycle and gets passed on as incompletely as the error was. A correction is made in the open, with its source named.
Before a change is announced
The most useful test before an announcement is two questions: how many relays lie between whoever issues the news and the furthest person it concerns, and what will be left of the news by that relay? If the answer to the first is more than three, a written version that reaches everyone at the same moment is more accurate than a cascade, however carefully the cascade is run.
Then look at the conditions and timings, which, as shown above, are the first things to drop out. Write them on a separate, visible line, and give the date of the next update with them even if it will bring nothing new. An announced date spares people from filling the gap with guesses; without one, every day that passes becomes a piece of news in itself, waiting to be interpreted.
A standalone Saudi HR system
One employee file holding the contract, the documents and their expiry dates, the attendance record, leave, salary and end-of-service entitlements. End-of-service, overtime and leave-balance calculations are built into the system.
A standalone system on its own subscription. The connection to Qoyod Accounting is now available.