leadercommunicator blog

In today’s digitally connected yet often geographically distributed workplace, it’s especially important that leaders cut through the clutter and ensure their messages are effectively reaching their employees.

Even then, the work doesn’t stop with ensuring messages are simply received. Effective communications also means that the messages are understood.

How Leaders Can Ensure Messages Have Meaning

While there is no single formula to ensure the one-two punch of receipt and comprehension, there are some specific strategies a leader can use to cut through the clutter and turn messages into meaning:

In advertising and communications, effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to a message before a response is made. Theories have ranged from three to twenty times, leading to countless spirited discussions amongst academics and practitioners alike looking to identify the magic number.

Whatever the answer, and it varies by person, the fact remains that recipients of a message can only retain a limited amount of information per exposure and it often takes someone hearing a message multiple times to transition that person from awareness to understanding, and finally, to action.

That’s why development of clear, concise, credible and compelling messages is critical to effective communications. Stopping there, however, is like ending a sentence without a period…you must be consistent with your messages to effectively close the loop.

Welcome to my round-up of the best-of-the-best recent leadership and communication blog posts. 

This Round-Up of Leadership and Communication Blogs:

• 10 Failproof Employee Engagement Ideas
  By Roxi Bahar Hewertson via SHRM (@SHRM)
  
  Employee engagement should be top of mind for every leader and communicator. Try these 10 ideas.
  
  “No matter your specific business, if your employees aren’t engaged, your customers won’t be either and that is going to negatively impact productivity and your bottom line. Employees who are happy and excited about the work they’re doing have an infectious energy that makes people unable to resist doing business with you. Emotions are more contagious than Covid!...”
  Read more >>

Whether or not you’ve spent some quality-time with a child as of late, you’re likely familiar with the “why” game. No matter the topic at hand, the adult shares information and the child responds with “why?”—it can be a never-ending and sometimes maddening exchange. Still, it does serve an important purpose in development for both children and in the workplace as well.

It’s never easy to communicate difficult information to a group of employees. With today’s distributed workforce, those challenging moments can feel even harder. Though difficult, it’s these messages that sometimes stand out the most in employees minds and can impact morale moving forward. That’s why it’s important to prepare for tough conversations rather than shooting from the hip.

6 Steps to Deliver Tough Messages to Employees

You can start by knowing and applying these six essential steps:

Every leader will at some point be responsible for leading their organization through change. And when that happens, it’s not uncommon to discover that the experience is far from business as usual.

Leading change requires different mindsets, skills and techniques than many leaders practice regularly. Responsibilities like managing budgets, milestones and metrics are only part of the process. It’s understanding and managing the people side of change that is the key to adopting and sustaining any change.

Leaders: Some Food for Thought as You Lead Change

Through the "Great Resignation," employees are sending a strong message that their needs aren’t being met at work. The demands and challenges of the pandemic have led people to reexamine their lives and priorities and one topic in particular comes up often: burnout.

What is employee burnout?

Burnout results “from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” according to the World Health Organization, which updated its definition in 2019 to classify it as an occupational phenomenon and not a medical condition. Burnout is characterized by:

Welcome to my round-up of the best-of-the-best recent leadership and communication blog posts. 

This Round-Up of Leadership and Communication Blogs:

• 12 Internal Communication Trends & Challenges for 2022
  By Tim Vaughan via Poppulo (@PoppuloSays)
  
  12 communications experts provide their insights on what to expect in the year ahead and how to successfully meet those challenges.
  
  “What's in store for workplace communication in 2022 after another year dominated by the epochal fall-out from Covid-19? And how can employee comms be deployed more effectively to meet the challenges organizations face over the next 12 months...”
  Read more >>

Since the start of the pandemic, organizations of all sizes navigated unprecedented challenges and changes along with their employees. Some were surprised at what they were able to accomplish during this critical time. In fact, we heard several examples of multi-year change programs that were accomplished in a matter of months after the pandemic upended everything.

So how did they deliver change at a pace they didn’t know was possible? The circumstances of COVID-19 were a big driver; ideas that may have seemed optional or not time-sensitive before the pandemic became necessary and urgent.

What do employees really want from their managers? The answer may seem like a mystery, as employees don’t always feel comfortable sharing their true thoughts with the boss. While the answer varies from person to person, our research and experience gained from decades of work in this area reveal some common themes, so we’re pulling back the curtain on a collective “wish list” every boss should know.

Here are some of the most common employee wishes and those that come up most often as unmet: