21 Apr 2021 · 5 min
Scott McInnes argues that remote work demands a three-level feedback approach: company strategy and transparency, team leaders contextualizing messages, and one-on-ones connecting individual work to organizational goals. He calls this connection the "red thread" and says it's essential for engagement and motivation.
Hi there and welcome to this episode of Scott's Thoughts. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about communications, about how you communicate with your people, because how you communicated with them before COVID and how you communicated with them while everybody was working at home during the, the world's biggest remote working experiment isn't necessarily an indicator of what you're going to have to do in future to maintain a connection with your people when maybe they are working all over the place in different countries, away from offices, and most importantly, away from each other. So the big question is, what do you have to do differently in order to maintain a really strong connection with your people, between your people and your organization, between your people and their team, and between your people and each other? Because it's really important for levels of engagement, for motivation, for productivity, that we feel part of something bigger than self. For me, the best way to find that out is to ask people. When you look at some of the work that was done by Engage for Success back in 2011, one of their four cornerstones of really strong engagement was employee voice, listening to people. So this is a great opportunity to go out to people in your company and ask them, what's working for you from a communications perspective? What isn't working for you? What can we do better? And for me, that's best done from 3 different perspectives. I think first of all, from a company perspective, the really high-level 33,000-foot view, how well are we doing as an organization in how we communicate with you? Do you understand the strategy and the objectives? Do you understand where we're going? Do you understand our values and how they're applied? Do you trust the information you receive from senior leaders? Do we give those messages out in a tone, in a way that's clear and transparent and really easy to understand? Do we use employee and customer stories enough to really bring to life what it is we do in a very, very human way that connects? And what more can we do to really, really make that special for you, our employees? I think the second piece then is our direct teams. And I've said 100 or 1,000 times before, the team leaders and teams are the most important places to get communications right. Because at the end of the day, a team leader is the person who knows their team the best, who can take core corporate information, which is sometimes a little hard for maybe people on teams to understand, they can take that, they can translate it, and they can contextualize it for their teams in a way that nobody else can because they know their teams the best. So wanting to find out things like, you know, understanding if people feel a really strong sense of connection with their team, whether their team leader makes time for regular updates, whether the team leader passes that information on in a way that's easy to understand, is relevant, is clear and simple, is really important. Do your people trust the information they receive from their team leader? And most importantly, from that Red Thread perspective, do they understand the role that their team plays in helping the organization to achieve its overall objectives and strategy? Finally, we've done company, we've done team, now individual, because at the end of the day, everyone is very slightly different in an organization. So finding out how individuals feel about communications in the organization is really key. And much of that is about the relationship maybe they have with their leader. So does their leader make time for those regular one-to-ones that we know are so, so important when it comes to managing people's performance and getting the best from them and giving the best, of course, to them? Does that, does that people leader make time for those informal little calls, picking up the phone? Hi, how are you? I hope you're well. Does that happen? And when it does happen, does my team leader communicate openly and honestly with me? They're all really, really important things to think about on top of that whole, again, from a personal perspective, that idea of red thread. Do I understand what's expected of me at work and how importantly that translates into me doing something which helps the overall organization to achieve its goals and ambitions? So there are the 3 areas: going out, asking for feedback from the organization, from, from a company perspective, from a team perspective, and an individual perspective. And if it was me, I'd be doing that now, going out and finding out what people want as you move forward, because it's going to be a very, very different world, or it's likely to be a very, very different world than it was pre-pandemic, than it was during the pandemic, than it is going to be post-pandemic. So finding out what people want, how they want to maintain connected, and what you can do to maintain that is gonna be absolutely critical to ongoing success. Thanks a million, take care.
