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Face-to-Face Employee Communication
Improving Your Competitive Advantage through Dialogue
Joseph Donner, director of internal communications at Novartis Corp., on communicating a new vision, strategies and expected behaviors
Novartis Corp.'s director of internal communications maintains that relationships represent the key to understanding how to reach employees. When Novartis sought to convey its new mission to its workforce, its internal strategy was based on relationships. "All internal communication relates to the employee's relationship to the company/management, the job or other employees," he explains. "We've adopted the philosophy that these relationships involve trusting the people you work for, having pride in what you do and enjoying the people you work with.
"Effective communications helps drive these practices. Satisfied employees foster increased productivity and decreased costs," Joseph believes. "The end result is increased customer loyalty and company profitability."
When communicating a new vision internally, first explain the purpose of the vision. Employees need honesty and transparency about why the company is instituting the vision and what the personal impact is to them. Strategic internal communications also involves understanding that multiple internal audiences exist and that there's no such thing as "one-size-fits-all communications."
Novartis' new vision came with behavioral expectations that it realized wouldn't happen overnight. Joseph notes that for employees to adopt some of the changes, members of senior management needed to demonstrate they were making the same adjustments and were open to communicating with anyone with questions.
The company's overall long-term communications strategy includes transparency of the corporate story, access to senior management, continuous outreach to employees and frequent repetition of messages.
Tim Stentiford, communications strategist at Hewitt Associates, on the importance of face-to-face communication
The communications strategist at Hewitt Associates considers face-to-face communication critical to interpret messages through facial expression, tonality and the spoken word. As electronic communication has the potential to lose meaning, face-to-face is making a dramatic comeback. One area that benefits from face-to-face communications is the delicate discussion of escalating health-care costs, which represents America's number-one internal business challenge today.
Tim offers practical advice and real-life case histories about the revival of face-to-face communications as a corporate priority to combat the impersonality of today's technological age. He stresses that measurable changes in business results and employee behavior occur when managers first listen to employers before adopting change. In terms of health-care coverage, he emphasizes that all companies are dealing with the same issue but many fail to speak directly with their own employees.
He cites some trendsetters like Continental Airways, which has recognized the "new" way of communicating wasn't driving required business results. The airline integrated more face-to-face communications into its overall strategy while setting measurable goals. "Continental needed to integrate cost-cutting with cost-sharing," he explains. "We employed simple yet effective tactics to explain our new health-benefit program including a no-nonsense address from the CEO, focus groups, manager trainings and numerous employee meetings."
Tim sums up the importance of face-to-face communications with a challenge to communicators that includes auditing current communications channels, identifying key business issues that require measurable results, listening to key stakeholders and building a plan to address them, providing manager training and support and, finally, "walking the talk."