In many businesses, one of the biggest employee complaints is about the lack of communication.
“Nobody tells us what’s going on around here!”
I hear it all the time. We all talk about the importance of communication. Some of us even brag about how good we are at it. But, shouldn’t we go beyond ‘communication’ to create true employee engagement and commitment?
Ask yourself – Are your staff in the dark, informed or fully committed?
Sadly, in many businesses, ‘communication’ is a one-way street. It’s the process of telling employees what management has decided to do and then asking, or telling, the team to ‘get with the program’.
Exercise: Involve your team in creating clarity about these 5 things.
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– What is your point of differentiation?
Ask your team to help you define the extraordinary value and customer experience that you commit to deliver. How will you communicate that in everything you do, in a way that clearly differentiates you from your competitors?
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– What is your company vision?
What are you, as a business, going to commit to become? Do you want to be the biggest agency? The most knowledgeable? A specialist?
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– What is your company mission?
What are your going to implement to get you to that vision? There is little point in dreaming about an extraordinary future if you don’t have any idea how to get there.
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– What are your profit goals?
Be honest about the healthy bottom line you commit to generate. If there’s no bottom line, there’s no business. Sadly, some of your employees may think that making a profit is a bad thing. If this is the case, they need to be disabused of this foolish notion. If there’s no profit, there’s no business and no jobs…including theirs.
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– How are you going to demonstrate this to your clients?
Document your commitment of how you want to behave along the way. These become your company values, your business ethics, and your customer experience standards.
Going from Informed to Committed & Engaged
One of the best and easiest ways to move your team from merely ‘informed’ to “committed and fully engaged’ is to involve them in these important conversations.
They know stuff…and they hate it when you don’t ask. When you don’t ask for their ideas, they assume that you don’t care…and if you don’t care, why should they? By asking and listening you’ll get more and better ideas, you’ll honour them, reduce turnover, improve commitment and find out who ‘gets it’ and, therefore, who might be promotable.
The ’They Won’t Listen’ problem
Over my career, I’ve taken a lot of flights. Whenever I see an airline doing something customer ‘un-friendly’ or just plain stupid, I ask the front-line staff, “Why do you do that? It doesn’t make sense.” The reply is always the same. “We know it’s wrong and we keep telling them (head office)…but they won’t listen!”
In that kind of environment, the best people leave in frustration and the mediocre people stay and take ‘I don’t give a damn pills’.
How many people are taking ‘I don’t give a damn pills’ just to survive in your business?
Maybe more than you think.
The 2023 Gallup Employee Engagement survey showed that just 3 in 10 employees in the US think their opinions matter at work. Only 1/3rd of US employees are actually engaged in their work. When taken to a global scale, engagement levels drop to 21%. Those figures are staggering.
Always explain ‘why’
The simplest way to move your team from blind compliance to engagement, commitment and creativity is to always explain ‘why’. Whenever you’re assigning a project, discussing a policy, coaching team members on a particular process, or trying to improve some part of the business, always tell them ‘why’ we’re doing this.
Explain to them the desired outcome
Tell them what you want to achieve and, more importantly, why. It might take a little longer, but the results will be significant better.
Keeping quiet comes at a cost
When we don’t explain the business reason (the ‘why’) for doing things a certain way, many of our staff will simply assume that we’re insisting on high standards of performance, appearance, efficiency and behaviour because we’re old and mean and cranky. They’ll resent us and resist us.
When you communicate ‘to’ your people by just telling them to ‘do it’, they’re informed and the best you can hope for is ‘blind compliance’.
Now for the magic
When you truly involve your team, few of your brighter folks will say something wonderful like, “Oh, if that’s the outcome we’re looking for, I have a few thoughts on how we might do it even better.” Now, we have engagement, passion and creative input!
Will you shoot for ‘better informed’ employees… or will you commit to creating a more engaged, more committed and more creative team?
The choice is yours.