Leadership Communication

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.

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.

Change is hard for organizations, for employees asked to change, and for leaders responsible for guiding employees through the change. Each person must process their own feelings and work through the stages of change in their own way. However, leaders have an important role in the process.

As a leader, you not only must provide guidance and information to employees; it’s equally important that you listen to people’s concerns, show support, and serve as an anchor for them throughout the process.

Serving as the Change Navigator

Following are tips to remember as you help members of your team successfully navigate change:

The “big quit” continues to accelerate in the U.S., with another 4.4 million workers reported to have resigned from their jobs in September, bringing the total to more than 24 million since April 2021. This historic departure of workers isn’t expected to abate any time soon—a recent McKinsey & Company survey found that 40% of employees are at least somewhat likely to leave their employer in the next three to six months. Perhaps even more telling, it identified a disconnect between employers’ perceptions and the actual reasons why employees are leaving.

What is most important to employees? Being valued by their manager and organization; a sense of belonging, and yes, work-life balance. The study showed employees were more likely to prioritize these and other relational factors of work life, including caring and trusting teammates and potential for advancement, while employers looked more at the transactional aspects such as workload and compensation.

When the pandemic hit, leadership teams figured out really quickly that effective communication was essential to business continuity and helping employees through the transition to the new reality.

Part of why companies were so successful during the early days of the pandemic is because communications were hugely focused; what wasn’t critical was stopped to make way for the most important communication about the business and plans for the pandemic. Leadership communication was purposeful and relevant, and therefore, positively influenced engagement, including on critical topics like the safety and well-being of employees.

For as much as has changed in the past 19 months, in some ways little has changed. Organizations and employees are still going through tremendous change and the communications team, working closely with leaders, will continue to be essential to leading employees through the change to the new reality. They need to remain focused and resourced as such.

Federal officials are getting close to finalizing the rules that will be used to implement the Biden administration’s decision to mandate COVID-19 vaccines or frequent testing for all employees at companies that employ more than 100 people. The rules will affect approximately 80 million U.S. workers.

Is your company ready to lead a successful vaccination campaign? If you’re not quite there yet, two companies in particular, Tyson Foods and United Airlines, serve as great examples of how to do it right. Tyson has reached a 91% vaccination rate for its work force, while United is at a 99% vaccinated.

How Tyson Foods and United Airlines Achieved a
Higher Than 90% Employee Vaccination Rate

Employees are on the move. A recent US Pulse Survey from PwC found that 65% of employees are looking for a new job. What’s more, 88% of executives surveyed said they are seeing higher turnover than normal.

The top four reasons, in order, that employees say they’re looking:

1. Wages/salaries
2. Benefits
3. Career advancement
4. Flexibility

We all know that change is part of business and isn’t going away any time soon. Yet that reality can be hard on employees, who are constantly bombarded with so much information of all kinds that they can’t digest it. That’s why it’s so important to place any big change in context to help employees adjust.

By context, we mean the “why,” or the background and reasoning behind a change that needs to take place. For instance, the context could be industry or financial concerns that put pressure on the business. Most recently, the pandemic and racial unrest presented new and obvious challenges, prompting significant changes or adjustments to the overall strategy and approach for many businesses.

Leaders have been through an incredible year, marked by profound change and uncertainty with the pandemic and mounting social unrest. That period of crisis, though, has as silver lining – as many leaders have risen to the occasion and learned a lot in the process.

To uncover some of those learnings, I conducted a series of interviews with more than 30 leaders over the past several months. Many of their insights will be shared in my upcoming book, Heart First: Lasting Leader Lessons from a Year that Changed Everything.