Improve Your Employee Communications to Increase Your Bottom Line

Connect with Professionals Who Support Your Vision and Business Goals

Communicating with employees, especially to discuss their performance, is not something you may enjoy doing as a creative business leader. Whether or not you find communicating with employees to be challenging, it may be worth your time to connect with the professionals who support your vision and business goals.

: Communicating with Employees by Deiter Bohlen at Wikimedia Commons

It’s not just your dating partners (if you’re single) or spouse who appreciates it when you take the time to listen to them and share pertinent events from your day. Your relatives, friends and — yes, your employees — also appreciate when you listen and communicate with them. In fact, regularly communicating with others may send the message that you value people.

Tools Your Can Use to Regularly Communicate with Your Employees

Tools you can use to regularly communicate with your employees include:

Town Halls (Invite your entire employee population to attend town halls. Consider setting up conference calls and/or video conferences if the employee population at your creative business is large. You can lay out plans for large scale projects at Town Halls. Leave time at the end of Town Halls to field questions from attendees. )
Quarterly business review meetings (Cover items like profits, losses, key business initiatives at quarterly business review meetings.)
Weekly staff meetings (As a creative business leader consider asking your department or team leaders to conduct regularly weekly staff meetings so they can pass pertinent information you relay to the leaders to their team members.)
Employee surveys (After results from employee surveys are measured, go back out to employees and let them know how you’re going to respond to the top three areas employees stated they would like to see improvements in. To keep the results of employee surveys confidential, consider hiring an external firm to retrieve and measure the survey results.)
Performance reviews (As mentioned at the top of this article, this isn’t always a favorite “to do” item on creative business leaders list. However, giving employees feedback on their performance can help employees to recognize areas for improvement, identify employee training programs they can take advantage of to increase their learning, etc. You can also use performance review discussions to highlight achievements and performance successes employees have made since the last performance review period. Meet with employees in private to discuss their performance and leave time to address employees’ questions, comments and/or concerns.)

At staff meetings and during new hire training sessions, as a creative business leader you can also let employees know that you’re open to having them stop by your office or schedule a meeting with your assistant to communicate with you. After all, the more your team members feel you’re invested in their well being, the more likely they might be to invest more of themselves into the well being of your creative business.

Get into Spiral online at: https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000841/Spiral.html

Check out Long Walk Up online at: https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000531/Long-Walk-Up.html

Sources:

http://www.shrm.org/Pages/default.aspx (Society for Human Resource Management)

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-04-17/business/ct-biz-0417-top-workplaces-20110417_1_town-hall-meetings-communication-employees (Chicago Tribune: Emphasis on Communication with Employees Brings Good Words About These Companies)