Are You Improving Communication? Measure from Employees’ Perspectives

In a data-driven society, leaders are inundated with facts and figures aimed at helping them make informed business decisions on everything from new products and services to whether or not to enter a new market. Yet many focus on these external considerations and fail to measure what’s working and what’s not from an organizational health and employee engagement perspective.

Low Employee Engagement Negatively Affects Business Performance

In fact, the ramifications of low employee engagement extend well beyond morale issues. The cost of poor organizational health spans the gamut of business impacts, including:

• Losing your best employees
• Lack of compliance
• Injuries
• Legal problems
• Unplanned downtime
• Poor customer service

The benefits of an engaged workforce improve your organization's overall performance. However, employees can’t do their best work and achieve performance goals if they don’t understand the organizational strategy, if they’re not getting the information they need to do their jobs, or if they don’t feel like their input is valued. 

Today’s employees have needs that go much deeper than a paycheck and link to company policies. Whether they are expressing those needs directly or indirectly, research shows that successful, productive teams:

• Understand where their organization is headed
• Hear regularly from both senior leaders and their direct supervisors
• Have an understanding about the overall organizational strategy and how they fit in
• Are clear about how they contribute
• Feel inspired

Assess the Health of Your Communications

Ever asked someone how they’re feeling and they reply “fine,” though you can clearly see that’s not necessarily the case? To get to the heart of how that individual is truly feeling, you have to dig deeper through conversations, targeted questions, and personalized interactions. Figuring out how your employees are feeling is no different and it all starts with good communications. Since communication is a system, to assess its health you need to understand multiple components, and how they work (or don’t work) together:

• Do employees understand the strategy and how their job fits into the overall mission, goals?
• How are the CEO and senior management communicating?
• What is the effectiveness of communication from supervisors?
• How is information flowing (or not)?
• Which messages resonate?
• Which vehicles are most useful?
• Are employees advocating for the organization or not?

Whether measuring your own business unit/function or the overall health of communications inside the organization, leaders (with the help of their communications experts) can make precise decisions about what communications to start, stop or continue to get employees engaged in the strategy and drive performance.

At the end of the day, communication is in the eye of the receiver.

Do you know how your employees rate the state of communication in your organization?

—David Grossman