SHR Newsletters: Communications

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Can We Talk?

The press release headline: "The Most Desired Skills In New Senior-Level Execs Are Ability To Motivate, Engage & Communicate With Workers." Right Associates's press release is another in a long line of research related to communications problems in organizations. Why? What happens in organizations to stop or hinder effective communications?

At a government contractor, the top executives were outgoing, talkative men with a clear vision of the company's goals. Since they were relatively small, they were certain every employee knew the goals and understood how their job related to each goal. But employees disagreed. What was wrong? Hints:

1. Executives were talking to each other frequently about the strategy.
2. Company strategy and goals were described at an annual all-employee meeting in a large fancy presentation.
3. There were five major goals and each had several sub-goals. Execs were constantly busy trying to build the pipeline, meet with customers, and hire new staff.

Communicating your goals, strategy, business threats, or any other information to employees is not simply a matter of telling everyone. Not only do your messages need to be clear and concise but they need to be tailored to your audience and repeated frequently. Think of your messages in advertising terms -- you need the right message for the target in the right places for the target with enough repetition to get both recognition and action.

Communicating effectively is a critical component of manager's success. Yet rarely are managers trained or coached or even selected for their communications skills. More and more we use newer media which do not involve the face-to-face communications of past workplaces -- yet email, IMs, text messages do not yet have regular etiquette and do work differently. And if your environment involves employees working at locations other than with their managers or travelling regularly, communication challenges rise rapidly.

Schedule some time with yourself and look at your communications patterns. What do you do regularly that is effective? Do you have a plan? Do you actually work your plan? Have you asked employees what they know about the organization or unit's goals and how they fit in? Are you hiring people with good communications skills? Are you developing your managers' communications skills?

There is excellent evidence that such practices directly increase revenues and profitability. So, what's your plan?

Bird Flu and Work -- Hype or...

Some days I am more than tired of the bird fly work impact hype -- and then I think of the day we had a small fire in the basement of the building the company was in. Employees enjoyed the excitement of being outside on the plaza on a lovely spring day -- once they had trooped down way too many stairs. We wondered if we had time to do a little shopping or catch a snack...until we discovered that we could not go back into the building at all. And after figuring out how to get people home who did not have their car keys or much else, management then got the big shock. We could not go back into the building for days until environmental tests were done to be sure that hazardous materials from a transformer had not been spread. Our business! Our services that depended on servers there! Our phone systems! Now what? And this experience is repeated multiple times a day in any metro area. What would you do? And so I prepared this checklist - hope you find it useful.

References

I once had a senior HR executive tell me that HR folks were their own worst enemies in job search. And the outplacement folk confirm that. And now I have one cautionary tale to help you. I recently did an HR Director search and one of the two finalists lost the opportunity because of her references. None of them knew she was using them as references. Their comments were lukewarm and their ability to answer specific questions limited. All told me she was nice. None told me about her contributions to their business. Not the first time I have had some like this, but still startling. And how are yours?

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