Not video, not TV, not email but face-to-face communications will forever be the medium of choice to get buy-in from employees, customers and shareholders. This is what research has shown for years - regardless of advances in technology 1. Does this mean that CEOs soon will have to spend 100% of their time for communications since all multipliers fail?
Ralf von Baer, director of Putzmeister Holding in Aichtal/Gemany recently spent an entire flight with one of his employees who works for one of his direct reports. Both considered the time well spent: "During the flight I found out that the man was missing certain critical pieces of information which his boss should have handed down. Without that particular knowledge it was unclear to him why we had made a difficult decision for the company which, from his perspective, seemed damaging. He did not have a complete business perspective on the matter. As a result of this much broader view, it was not difficult to re-ignite his enthusiasm." Although face-to-face contact gets the best ratings in terms of results, companies have to search for alternative communication vehicles to bring |
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the corporate message to the masses. As companies grow through acquisitions, challenges emerge due to their sheer size. Distributed headquarters, global locations and multi-lingual cultures are just a few of the areas which need to be addressed. The current 20 to 30 percent of time with employees 2 resembles the "average temperature in the hospital" - in reality some get full attention, others none.
Some of the top management take on the burden of writing email messages even though less than a third of the recipients actually read them in their entirety. Some try to gather employees in town-hall meetings with the side effect that multiple meetings create confusion through inconsistent messages during Q&A. Blogging seemed a solution to some, only to realize that serious security issues in terms of shareholder/stakeholder communications emerged. Jochen Malterer, CFO of Siemens Mobile Networks Division sends a mobile radio message about quarterly results to his top 250 employees' mobile phones, created by their 'mobile radio team'. |
