To make sure that your employees are aligned with your goals, you need to constantly and repeatedly communicate with them. Scorecards are a great way to visually communicate progress. As the CEO of your company what you say is amplified many times. Set the tone carefully. At a minimum, you should be communicating with your employees weekly.
If you are uncertain how your communications are being received or if you feel that your employees are not listening to you, reach out to me. Call me at +1 (604) 721-5732 or Contact Me to book an hour so we can discuss what’s working and what you might try differently to keep all your employees informed and pulling in the direction you want the company to go.
Audio
Transcript
How often should you communicate with employees?
Hi Everyone. I’m Coach David J. Greer.
Today I want to talk to you about communicating with your employees. The easy answer about how often you should communicate with them is all the time. Let’s try and get a little more color on to that answer.
When I was President of Robelle, one year we set a goal of saving $100,000 in expenses without letting go any employee. For this goal we setup a scorecard. A simple temperature thermometer on the wall in the lunchroom. It was updated weekly. You could see how the mercury was climbing in the thermometer to our savings for the year. There were visual numbers so that people who liked to be visual could easily grasp the goal. People who liked numbers, and we were a software company so that was a lot of us, could easily grasp the numbers. It was updated every week. I think that is the base line updating that you want to do for any goals that you have with your employees is weekly.
Another way you can communicate with employees is a weekly email. You have to get a balance with this in terms of employees are not going to read it if it is too long. If you make it too short it won’t have enough information.
If you believe what I’ve talked about in these videos about strategic planning or in my book Wind In Your Sails, to set yearly goals, no more than five, and to set quarterly goals, no more than five then you want to be communicating with your employees at least every week on how you are doing with those goals. Especially the quarterly goals.
You know a quarter is only 13 weeks long. Employees need to hear the progress that you are making towards those goals. Like the thermometer example that I talked about in saving expenses at Robelle, I think it’s really helpful to have a score card of one sort or another. It can be really simple. That thermometer was just hand drawn. Today we have many more digital visual tools and you can make the scorecard be digital, instead of physical. Especially if your team is virtual and is distributed across the country or the world. You need to have a way to make sure that everyone is looking at it at least once a week.
Finally, whatever you say as CEO and the owner, leader of the business gets amplified. Literally gets amplified a hundred times. If you are having an off day and you say things a little negatively, people can take that the business is really struggling. Be careful with that. On the other hand, you don’t want to be overly positive—you want to set [say] the truth. You want to get right sized in what that communication looks like.
If you are sending weekly emails, a screen and a half is probably about right. No longer. I would not do big PDFs. It’s short, sweet, and to the point.
Also remember that if you are a bigger company with more employees, you also have your entire senior leadership team. At your weekly meeting with them, you should be communicating and strategizing what it is that they should most importantly communicate at their weekly meeting with their team leads. And how all of that filters down to the individual employee.
The rule of thumb is that you need to tell someone something seven times before they really remember it. If you have five goals for a quarter and 13 weeks in a quarter, you need to repeat that message a lot of times. If in doubt, over communicate, not under communicate.
If you would like to talk about how you can communicate better with your employee, how often you should do it in the context of your business, give me a call, send me a text or send me an email. I would love to set up a call with you and we can go over what your communication strategy is with your employees and how you can verify how it is working. And how you might want to adjust it in
