Keeping employees and stakeholders in the loop is crucial for any organization, especially during times of change and uncertainty. It helps to build trust, alignment, and engagement among your team and your external partners. But how do you communicate effectively and efficiently without overwhelming or confusing anyone? Here are some tips to help you keep everyone informed and involved.
Before you start any communication, you need to have a clear idea of why you are doing it and what you want to achieve. What is the main message you want to convey? What are the key outcomes you expect from your communication? How will you measure your success? Having a clear purpose and goals will help you tailor your communication to your audience, choose the most appropriate channels and tools, and avoid unnecessary or irrelevant information.
Different groups of employees and stakeholders may have different needs, preferences, and expectations when it comes to communication. You need to understand who your audience is, what they care about, what they already know, and what they need to know. This will help you segment your audience, prioritize your messages, and customize your tone and style. For example, you may need to use more formal and detailed language for your board members than for your frontline staff.
Reading the room is important! Everyone communicates different. In a work environment, you will need to adjust between formal and professional communications. As well as sometimes conversational or personal conversations. Being able to read through these different types of communication can ensure that you are not incorrectly matching the tones of the conversation.
There are many ways to communicate with your employees and stakeholders, such as emails, newsletters, intranet, social media, webinars, meetings, surveys, and feedback forms. You need to choose the channels and tools that best suit your purpose, goals, audience, and budget. You also need to consider the frequency, timing, and duration of your communication. For example, you may want to use a weekly email update for regular information, but a live webinar for a major announcement.
Ensure that the communication funnel is appropriate for what information you are conveying. Long (Email, PDF, Meeting) vs. short form (slack, teams chat, etc). Each will be different, and a balance of both approaches is normally needed.
One of the most important aspects of communication is clarity and consistency. You need to make sure that your messages are clear, concise, and accurate, and that they align with your vision, values, and strategy. You also need to avoid contradicting or changing your messages without explanation or justification. If you have multiple communicators or channels, you need to coordinate and synchronize them to ensure a coherent and unified voice.
Clear communication is a hard skill to achieve, especially depending on your role (if you are an individual contributor vs. team leader). Practicing communication is something everyone should do, as well as requesting feedback on how you communicate.
Communication is not a one-way street. You need to engage and interact with your employees and stakeholders, and invite them to share their opinions, questions, concerns, and feedback. This will help you build rapport, trust, and loyalty, as well as gather valuable insights and ideas. You can use various methods to encourage engagement and interaction, such as polls, quizzes, Q&A sessions, forums, chats, and comments.
The last step of communication is to follow up and evaluate. You need to check if your communication has reached your audience, if they have understood your message, and if they have taken the desired actions. You also need to assess if your communication has met your goals and expectations, and if there are any areas for improvement. You can use various tools to measure and analyze your communication, such as analytics, reports, feedback forms, and surveys.
Follow up! If you are not getting responses, this could be a variety of reasons. By following up you can identify areas of improvement or that need adjusting in terms of what and how you communicate.