What I've Learnt - Ten Tips

Stephen devised these ten tips following his experience.

1. Be seen

There may be an instinct and additional pressures to keep managers in their offices more in a recession than normally - with no good news to tell people and snowed under with yet more budget revisions it can be easy to get stuck behind the desk. But you need to be out and about more, even if there is nothing particular to say. If there aren’t the obvious good news stories - big new orders or plans to expand - you have to find interesting and helpful things to say.

2. Communicate more regularly than normal

If you normally send out monthly bulletins, then consider doing them weekly.

3. Consult and inform widely

We had put a great deal of effort into explaining the redundancies to those who left the business, but we hadn’t fully realised the impact of the lack of explanation to those who were staying. This led to additional rumour and concern.

Don’t just consult with those involved, make sure straight after the announcement that their colleagues are informed too.

4. Tie and suits can be a barrier

I was really interested to see how much a suit and tie creates a barrier. When I joined the business two years ago, I spent considerable time and effort getting out to all the sites and meeting people.

I realised from my unique experience that no-one really notices or listens to ‘the suits’ and would rarely give them honest feedback if asked for an opinion.

My lesson is that we need to create more informal ways to communicate and listen.

5. Refresh your communications

You can’t standardise communications and need to keep changing them to have an impact.

We saw our notice-boards as the main communication tool but I realised people just walk past them. They have to be constantly refreshed and pictures work best - most of our teams read the tabloids so we need to get our communications to relate to these styles when designing posters and notices.

6. Ask and consult

We are now asking people regularly about how they want us to communicate with them. We have done the survey with a mix of a questionnaires and speaking to people.

7. Demonstrate you’ve listened

We had been consulting on a number of issues, but hadn’t gone back to tell people what we were doing and why. At grass roots level, if people didn’t see any change they assumed we were not interested in their views.

They were often less bothered about the changes that resulted than knowing that we had considered their views and they had been part of our decision making process.

8. Skip level meetings

I realised we had spent a lot of time planning our communications briefings but not checking if they had been carried out as agreed or if the messages had got through.

We have now introduced occasional skip level meetings where managers meet direct with teams two levels below - ie skipping the normal manager in between.

9. Find the right time

Whenever we broke for lunch, I would always be asking questions about why did they do this, what did they think of that. Very quickly I was put in my place. ‘Look mate, can you just stop asking questions. It’s lunch. I want to read the paper.’

It made me think about the need to communicate when people want to listen - not intruding on their space.

10. Develop your managers’ communication skills

I could see at first hand that some managers are not good communicators. This is a skill I really want to develop within our business and strongly recommend all businesses to invest in training to support its line managers.