Communication and Organisational engagement
April 29, 2013 1 Comment
Highly engaged employees are a vital part of a healthy organisation,
but how do we create them, how do we ensure that everyone within our organisations feel like they are actively having their voice heard, particularly on issues that or important or which they are passionate about.
I know this is a little off my usual topics but I have had a couple of weeks in various workshops where the subject of communications and how develop really effective communications with staff so that they feel engaged and part of the larger organisation and have had some very interesting conversations around it. Over the time a couple of things have struck me, the first and I think probably most important one is noise.
What do I mean by noise? I mean the general background noise of the organisation and of peoples day to day work and lives, this constant flow of information and opinion and discussion, and conversation that occurs just because we live in highly complex and connected environments, both at work and outside of work. I was talking about this with some of the other participants in the workshops and the comment was made that maybe it is not necessarily the case that we are not communicating effectively, maybe it is the case that there is simply too much noise, that it is very very easy for even a highly targeted message to get lost, or put to the side and not given the attention it deserves. And this is a problem in both directions from management to staff and from staff to management, background noise is eating up the messages and vital information and knowledge are being lost as is engagement with staff.
The struggle though is what to do about it. I know there are multiple courses and programs and systems out there designed to make us work more effectively, to attempt to allow us to focus on what is important and cut through the noise, and of course doing anything is better than nothing. However for me this is more that just an issue of person effectiveness and focus, because you can be as effective and focused as possible and still the noise is there.
I don’t know what the answer is of course and if I did I would probably be able to make myself very very rich, but I would be very interested to hear what everyone else thinks about organisational noise and how to combat it.