The other day I was talking to a friend who works for a large organisation. We were just chatting about work and we found ourselves discussing the issue of communication. It reminded me that many of our survey results suggest that getting organisation-wide communication right for everyone is a careful balancing act – some employees may consider that they receive too much communication, feeling swamped with no quick way to filter what is relevant and then there are those who consider that they receive too little, feeling totally out of the loop, like they don’t count. Given that high employee engagement often relies on good communication I thought that it might be useful to review some ways to get top down communication right…
One of the key rules for encouraging employee engagement is to provide open and honest communication. So for example, if you are running an employee engagement survey the communication around this needs to be open from the start and clearly supported by the leaders of the organisation. There should be timely communication of the results to employees too – communicating the good messages along with the…not so good.
In terms of action, then goals should be set and they should be communicated to all employees. This might be via an employee forum, roadshows, presentations, regular meetings and then perhaps supported by emails, posters or other electronic or printed material to ensure the messages are sent out to staff. It is key for leaders to ensure that promises are kept and that should timelines slide or priorities change that this is communicated to staff, ensuring that messages remain open and honest to encourage trust in all further communications.
The above is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of ways to get communication right, but I just wanted to share with you some of the key things which we have found help get communication on the right track and ultimately feed into improvements in employee engagement. We have many more suggestions for getting employee communication right, please get in touch if you want to find out more…