Do you allow employees to opt out of receiving company information? Probably not…and you should.

Most of the time we are pushing out information that we believe is important to employees and we are all doing our best to segment the audiences and send people relevant information in a timely matter.

But in our personal lives, we have endless choices. We are allowed to choose which marketing emails we get. Heck, we can choose the style and size of shoes we prefer to receive marketing emails about. And yet, for some reason at work, the same choices don’t exist.

The reason that we are allowed to opt out or set email preferences is to maintain a connection. I know that when I unsubscribe from a marketing email, most of the time, the company is going to ask me if I would like to receive their emails less often. The reason they do this, we all know, is because they don't want to lose me as a contact. I would love for us to use this mindset at work with employees.

We want our employees to engage with our content, but we’re terrified of giving them power.

“But they NEED to know this information.”

Do they?

“If we gave them a choice, they’d opt out of everything.”

What does that say about our content?

We have control issues and yes, it takes one to know one. But we are disempowering employees by not giving them a choice. If we allow them to make choices about what kind of information they receive and when they receive it, I can almost guarantee that they would engage with the content on a deeper level.

We are not empowering employees. We're trying to shove information down their throats. Yes, this might be because you have a boss (or a boss's boss…or a boss's boss's boss) who is telling you that this is the information they need to receive so I challenge you to push back and explain the data behind allowing people to make choices.

If employees would opt out of most of the information we are sending them, we’ve set the bar too high for communication engagement. (Uncomfortable hot take for another time: it's ok for employees to not give a crap about Q3 results.)

The vast majority of employees want their jobs to NOT be the worst part of their day. That’s it. And that might mean that the information we are sending them is simply not relevant or interesting to them.

Let’s try something new and empower our employees to make their own choices, like we get to do everywhere else.