Communicating with staff

Apparently, UK companies are generally not very good at communicating with their junior employees. Gee, now there's a surprise.

Even in my company, where senior management have made a serious attempt to improve communications, morale and staff engagement, there is room for improvement.

There are a number of factors that help or hinder the process:

• Is communications one-way or is there a forum for staff to generate ideas?
• Are those ideas considered by senior managemet and the good ones implemented! Only if staff believe that their contributions have a chance of making a difference will they feel encouraged to contribute in the first place.
• Are ideas filtered or prioritised? If so, how? I once participated in a session in which some really good ideas came up, but were discarded by the facilitator, because in his opinion they were either too costly, or would take too long to implement. There was pressure on him to select only a few ideas out of the many that were generated, and he selected the ones that were easiest to implement, not the ones that would generate the most benefit. It is important that contributors feel that their ideas are getting a fair hearing, and discarded only because someone else has a better idea.

I have posted before - my God, was that really all the way back in July? - about Workout as a tool for process improvement. It has its uses, but only for specific purposes, and there are better ways of improving things on a larger scale. About which, more another time.

Have a good weekend everyone.