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Most CEOs talk about the importance of clear communication. David Natroshvili, founder and CEO of SPRIBE, goes further: he advocates for deliberate over-communication as a management principle.
"What feels like over-communication in a distributed company is probably appropriate communication," Natroshvili said. "Leaders need to repeat messages multiple times across multiple channels and still expect that some team members will miss them."
It's a counterintuitive stance in an era where executives are told to respect people's time and avoid information overload. But after building SPRIBE into a company with 350+ employees distributed across Warsaw, Kyiv, Tallinn, Tbilisi, and the Isle of Man, Natroshvili has learned that the rules of communication change fundamentally when your team isn't in the same room, or even the same time zone.
The Communication Gap Nobody Talks About
The problem with distributed teams isn't that people don't communicate. It's that communication happens unevenly, creating information asymmetries that compound over time.
"In an office, information spreads through osmosis," Natroshvili explains. "Someone mentions a client issue at lunch, it gets overheard, and suddenly three people are collaborating on a solution without any formal meeting. In a distributed environment, if that conversation doesn't happen in a shared channel, it might as well not have happened at all."
This creates what Natroshvili calls "information islands,” pockets of knowledge that exist in some parts of the organisation but not others. An engineer in Kyiv knows about a technical limitation. A product manager in Warsaw doesn't. A sales conversation in Tallinn surfaces a customer need that never reaches the development team in Tbilisi.
The result? Duplicated work, missed opportunities, and strategic misalignment; not because people aren't communicating, but because communication isn't reaching everyone who needs it.
Why Once Is Never Enough
Natroshvili's solution is to assume that any message shared once will be missed by at least half the intended audience, and to communicate accordingly.
"Communication can be tricky without intentional effort," Natroshvili said. "Misunderstandings and silos creep in. We've learned to over-communicate, use clear written guidelines, and keep video calls focused to bridge the distance."
This means important information gets communicated multiple times, through multiple channels, in multiple formats:
A strategic decision gets announced in a company-wide meeting, documented in writing, summarised in a follow-up email, discussed in team meetings, and referenced in relevant project channels. What might feel like redundancy is actually a necessity, ensuring that someone who missed the live meeting, didn't read the email, or was on vacation during the initial announcement still has multiple opportunities to encounter the information.
"The mistake leaders make is thinking that communicating something once means everyone knows it," Natroshvili notes. "In reality, the first time you share something, maybe 30% of people absorb it. The second time, another 30% catch it. By the third or fourth time, you're finally reaching critical mass."
The Discipline of Documentation
Over-communication isn't just about repetition; it's about making information accessible beyond the moment it's initially shared.
"We've learned to document everything that matters," Natroshvili said. "Major decisions, strategic discussions, project updates, if it's important, it gets written down where the entire company can access it."
This documentation serves multiple purposes. It creates a shared knowledge base that employees across all time zones can reference. It ensures new hires can understand context and history. It prevents the same conversations from happening repeatedly in different offices because nobody knows a decision has already been made.
But perhaps most importantly, documentation forces clarity. "Writing something down requires more precision than saying it in a meeting," Natroshvili observes. "If you can't articulate a strategy clearly enough to document it, you probably haven't thought it through completely."
Strategic Silence: What Not to Over-Communicate
Interestingly, Natroshvili's philosophy of over-communication comes with an important caveat: not everything deserves to be amplified.
"You have to be strategic about what gets the repetition treatment," Natroshvili explains. "Strategic priorities, company values, major decisions, these need to be communicated repeatedly until they're embedded in how people work. Day-to-day operational updates? Those can be communicated once in the appropriate channel."
The distinction matters because truly over-communicating everything would create information overload, training people to ignore communications entirely. Natroshvili focuses repetition on the messages that need to become organisational muscle memory; the core priorities and principles that should inform how distributed teams make decisions when leadership isn't in the room.
"I prioritize by impact," Natroshvili said. "Every week, I identify the two or three initiatives that truly move the needle for SPRIBE, and I make sure they're on my desk daily. I also rely on a strong leadership team, delegation and transparency are key."
The Test: Can Someone Two Offices Away Explain Your Strategy?
Natroshvili has a simple test for whether communication is working in a distributed organisation: pick an employee at random from any office and ask them to explain the company's current top priorities and strategic direction.
"If they can't articulate it clearly, you haven't communicated enough," Natroshvili said. "And if employees in different offices give you different answers, you have a communication consistency problem."
This test revealed early problems at SPRIBE. Employees in Warsaw had a clear understanding of quarterly priorities because they were in the same office as much of the leadership team. Employees in other offices had a vaguer sense, relying on information that filtered through their local managers, who might emphasise different aspects or interpret priorities differently.
The solution wasn't to centralise decision-making or require all employees to attend more meetings. It was to systematise how strategic information gets communicated, ensuring every office receives the same message through the same channels at the same time.
Listening as Loudly as You Speak
The flip side of over-communication is creating systems for information to flow upward, not just downward.
"I listen," Natroshvili said. "I make space for regular one-on-one conversations where employees can voice concerns, propose ideas, and feel ownership of their work. When people know they're heard, they're far more engaged and motivated to perform at their best."
In a distributed environment, this listening can't be passive. Leaders can't rely on picking up on team sentiment through office atmosphere or casual hallway conversations. They need to actively create channels for feedback and ensure those channels reach across all offices equally.
For SPRIBE, this means structured feedback mechanisms that work across time zones and office locations; regular one-on-ones, anonymous feedback channels, and deliberate efforts to ensure quieter voices in smaller offices get heard as clearly as those in headquarters.
The Payoff: Alignment at Scale
The investment in over-communication paid off during SPRIBE's most complex cross-functional initiative: the AC Milan partnership.
"That partnership required coordination across design, marketing, legal, and commercial teams in multiple countries," Natroshvili recalls. "The distributed setup allowed us to work around the clock and deliver a campaign at global scale without missing deadlines."
This kind of coordination only works when teams share a common understanding of goals, timelines, and constraints, the kind of alignment that requires, yes, over-communication.
The Bottom Line
For leaders managing distributed teams, Natroshvili's message is clear: if you think you're over-communicating, you're probably communicating about right. If you're worried about being repetitive, remember that what feels repetitive to you as the communicator is often just enough for your audience to internalise the message.
"Leaders need to repeat messages multiple times across multiple channels and still expect that some team members will miss them," Natroshvili concludes. "That's not a communication failure, that's just the reality of distributed work. The failure is assuming that saying something once is enough."
In a world where distributed work is becoming the norm rather than the exception, Natroshvili's approach offers a valuable framework: communication isn't about efficiency or minimalism. It's about ensuring that everyone, regardless of location, has access to the information they need to contribute effectively. And if achieving that requires saying the same thing five times in five different ways? That's not over-communication. That's just good management.