Mike is the Director of Human Resources for a 120-employee family-owned manufacturing firm. Mike has been quite busy the last year reforming the benefit offerings to comply with recent changes in healthcare laws. Given the many changes, Mike took the opportunity to completely overhaul the employee benefits program including replacing the old medical plans with three brand-new plans. Mike is preparing to tell employees about their new benefit offerings a few months prior to the benefits open-enrollment period. Given the number of employees, he decides to design a nicely formatted PowerPoint slide deck explaining the changes and to send this presentation via email to all employees. One day into the open-enrollment period, his inbox is flooded with over 50 emails from confused employees. Mike is puzzled, but realizes he may have made a mistake in communication. Which of the following BEST describes the primary communication mistake he made?
a) Assuming that employees would understand the content of the PowerPoint slides.
b) Failing to match the communication medium (or channel) with the intended outcome.
c) Failing to develop core ideas that adhere to the rules of "sticky" communication.
d) Forgetting to alert managers that the communication was "coming their way."