What is the toughest business challenge?  For any company with more than about 25 employees, it is “communication”.  Some even argue this is true for any organization with more than one person.  Needless to say, communication is sticky and does not flow naturally through organizations.  There can be all kind of barriers including: departmental, generational, hierarchical, stylistic, cultural, locational, educational, linguistic, physical in addition to other real and imagined ones.  Communication needs to be free flowing and relevant in order to bridge the gap between strategy and results.

Neglecting to address the  communication challenge hampers productivity, engagement, happiness, responsiveness,  and customer experience while severely damaging your P&L and eroding your balance sheet.

In addition to establishing a meeting rhythm, you need to capture and synthesize the collective brainpower of all employees:  unleash the power and further engage employees.

At SeeMetrics Partners, we believe that ongoing employee input must be regularly collected to identify obstacles and opportunities.  Your company should adapt the 4 following disciplines:

1. All executives and middle managers should have a Start/Stop/Keep conversation with at least one employee weekly.  This creates an environment of continuous improvements.
2. The insights from employee conversations must be shared at the weekly executive team meeting.  This produces shared visibility across all of the functional areas of the company.
3. Employee input about obstacles and opportunities should be collected weekly.  This harnesses the collective power of the whole organization including from front line employees that often have the best ideas for solving operational challenges or identifying opportunities for doing things better, faster or cheaper.
4. A mid-management team should be selected and designated to be accountable for the process of closing the loop on all obstacles and opportunities.  This is to ensure that ideas are considered, prioritized and acted on and communicated as needed to support the company’s goals.

Find out more about this by tuning in to our SeeMetrics Partners Podcasts.  Real results.