7 ways Amazon hooks distracted employees

Editor’s note: This story is taken from Ragan Communications’ distance-learning portal Ragan Training. The site contains hundreds of hours of case studies, video presentations and interactive courses.

Twelve hours, says Kristin Graham, is the amount of time per day your employees are connected to technology for work.

Don’t think you have half a day to lecture them, however. Seven seconds is the amount of time you have to capture their attention with a given message, the head of employee communications for Amazon Web Services adds.

When busy humans receive a communication, she says, “We want to instantly know what it is; is it relevant to me? And if not, you are not going to get my attention.”

For those who grew up in a world of words, it’s hard to make the adjustment. Yet we have less time and fewer words to grab people’s… oh, look! A funny picture of guilty-looking dogs that tore the house apart while their owner was out.

Where were we?  Oh: “Internal communications is not a department,” Graham says. “It’s an expectation of our employees, of our people, and it’s because we live in the world of perpetual conversation.”