It’s understandable to be budget-sensitive, of course. But too often, this question gets overlooked: What is the cost of poor communication?
Why Company Communication Plans Fail
9 Ways Leaders Can Use Communication to Build Trust
More Than a Mission Statement: How a Mantra Can Build Your Brand and Culture
Words and images are powerful tools for building a company’s culture. And yet they are too often underused in business.
While mission and values are at the center of an organization’s culture-building language, a mantra can flesh those out. If, for example, excellence is one of your values, a mantra can focus attention on how excellence occurs.
14 Tips on Communicating with Employees During Layoffs, Mergers, or Other Times of Change
Are you in the midst of layoffs? Budget-cuts? A merger or acquisition?
If you are downsizing, then you know the anxiety it produces among employees and the way it impacts morale, productivity, and customers. Communication during these times is a powerful tool that can help keep your employees engaged during difficult times. Here are 14 internal communication tips we’ve seen work during difficult times:
How Communication Can Build a Values-Driven Culture
There’s no better way to bring your mission and values off your walls and into your halls than by showing your leaders and employees walking the talk.
And there’s no better communication tool than video to build a values-driven culture. Video can capture symbolic moments in which people bring values to life in authentic ways—and spread the role-modeling throughout the organization.
8 Ways to Create Authentic Patient Video Stories
In today’s market, video marketing is an essential—and nothing works like a riveting patient story.
But not all patient video stories are created equally. Some feel flat, boring, too promotional or too predictable, while others depict a relatable experience and compel the viewer to feel connected to the organization.
Trust of CEOs Has Never Been Lower: Here Are 9 Tips on Communicating to Build Trust
Trust is the currency of leadership. It’s what inspires others to follow, support, and engage in a leader’s vision.
But there is troubling news on this front: this precious asset is in steady decline, with only 37% of the general population saying that CEOs are credible, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, a global study with 33,000 respondents
This general mindset of distrust filters into the workforce of every organization—even into those with high trust factors. That’s why understanding how to use communication to build trust is such a timely skill to cultivate—and one that almost every leader can improve upon.
17 Top Internal Communication Channels [Infographic]
![17 Top Internal Communication Channels [Infographic]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/520ae1d7e4b0734e32e175ff/1644349392378-0W244HZWPTH6YYLTJLAD/Internal%2BCommunication-2+comp.jpg)
The days of a one-size-fits-all channel are gone. As many as five generations with diverse communication appetites make up today’s workforce—making the job of the communicator increasingly complex. Some workers are at desks and access email, while others rarely do. Reaching them all requires using a wide range of channels and multiple deliveries of the same message. Here are the most popular channels being used for internal communication.
What Kind of Communication Do Millennials Want at Work?
When it comes to millennials, one of the most important actions employers can take to improve their engagement is to offer routine feedback. According to a recent Gallup report, only 19% of young workers state that they regularly receive feedback, and just 17% acknowledge that the feedback they get is meaningful.
This type of internal communication could involve technologies like Slack or others that connect managers and their teams with real-time feedback.
You can read more about the Gallup survey and how to engage your workforce here. The bottom line: millennials have grown up in a world of continuous feedback, which has deeply shaped their employment expectations. Employers who understand and respond to this will see higher employee engagement among this demographic.
5 Reasons Your Company Stories Aren’t Growing Your Business
You already believe in the power of story. You’ve seen how it can sell, persuade, compel, inspire—even better than a well-crafted argument. But are your stories helping you build your business?
If not, here are some possible reasons—and tips on what you can do about it:
How the “Customer Is Always Right” Mindset Can Destroy Employee Engagement
When Vineet Nayar joined HCL Technologies as the CEO, he vowed to transform it into a company where employees were first—and customers were second.
Nayar believed that if he could inspire his people to pursue a vision which they owned and which still aligned with the company’s, magic would happen. And his experiment proved him right.
On this premise, he set to work to make it one of the fastest-growing and most profitable global IT services as well as one of the 20 most influential companies in the world.
But it required challenging the conventional wisdom that the customer is always right.
While at some level, this commonly heard business maxim speaks truth, in application it can lead to deadly results for employee engagement if we don't talk about where the line drawn on customer behavior.
As Alexander Kjerulf, author of Happy Hour is 9 to 5, tells it, Southwest drew a line with a frequent flyer who consistently complained about things that were simply part of their business model—like no assigned seats, no first class, no in-flight meals, and the casual atmosphere.
Wearied by her repeated tirades, Southwest's customer relations people eventually sent her comments on to then-CEO Herb Kelleher, who replied: "Dear Mrs. X, We will miss you. Love, Herb."
“Believing the customer is always right is a subconscious way of favoring the customer over the employee which can lead to resentment among employees. … Put employees first and they will be happy at work," says Kjerulf.
It is not too low of a bar to expect civility of both employees and customers, and yet most of us have witnessed the lack of it too many times in the workplace. As is often the case, the challenge is in the execution. It can feel a lot like refereeing siblings in a "he started it, she started it" squabble. But, as leaders, we're called to adjudicate these situations to determine whether an employee's behavior wrongly incited a frustrated customer, or whether a customer is being unreasonable, rude, or insulting.
To preserve a workplace with high engagement, a business must live its values—not just talk about them. This could mean walking away from some clients if their behavior does not allow the company to live up to its values of treating its own people with respect. Tolerating rude, insulting, or abusive behavior by customers drains the energy of employees and lowers morale. It effectively tells the employee that they do not deserve better treatment from others.
It's important to think about where popular ideas like "the customer is always right" reach their limits. Intuitively, we know that treating people well and providing a work environment that isn't hostile can help them flourish. This kind of environment unleashes loyalty, creativity, and the desire to take better care of the customers. In the end, respecting and retaining top employees not only impacts engagement, but ensures that your customers have the very best people attending to them.