Glasshouse Partnership provides online and offline reputation management and social communication services.
What are your staff trying to tell you?
Communication is critical to leaders at all times. But it’s even more critical in bad times. In a recession, businesses go bankrupt, strategies get ripped up. Staff become unsure of their jobs and suspicious of what management tell them–or should that be even more suspicious than normal? But have a little sympathy for managers: the certainties of a year ago, upon which they built their business and brand strategies, have been thrown to the wind. Forecasting work is in demand because everyone is trying to under what is REALLY happening and HOW this credit crunch ‘thing’ is going to pan out. Faced with these circumstances, who’d want to put their neck on the line by saying too much–not least to employees and colleagues?
Of course, the worse thing to do is to retreat. In fact, we’d argue in a transparent world you can’t stop the market let alone staff conversing asking the tough questions: what is happening out there? Are we going to be OK? Is my job secure? Is the business in good nick? Is our leadership the right team on the right tack? We’d suggest that non-communication is the wrong approach: just look at how the government reacted to the credit crunch. They’re seeking to demonstrate that they are the right team with the right strategy for dealing with the problem. They’re pushing out initiatives geared to demonstrate they will help.
Your option isn’t to opt out of a continued conversation with the marketplace, so why would you opt out of the internal conversations with staff? They’re talking about you either way.
According to PR Week, the demand for internal communications is on the up. That’s a hopeful sign if true. Because no more important time to have an open dialogue with staff if you want to engage them in the business’ objectives, if you want them to understand and support goals and strategy and to support culture change.
Good internal communications, like all good social communications, depends on a clear understanding and insight into what stakeholders really care about and what they want to know, not just on what management wants to tell them. It also requires an understanding of how technologies can help build value and understanding within an organisation.
But how can one get the right feedback to improve his or her organisation’s internal communications?
To give us an independent view of this issue, we’ve interviewed Peter Hutton, a leading market researcher who has worked in the industry for 30 years, and who has just published What are your staff trying to tell you?, a guide to good and bad practice in conducting employee surveys.
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