4 Ways to Ensure Your Messages Get Through to Employees

In today’s digitally connected yet often geographically distributed workplace, it’s especially important that leaders cut through the clutter and ensure their messages are effectively reaching their employees.

Even then, the work doesn’t stop with ensuring messages are simply received. Effective communications also means that the messages are understood.

How Leaders Can Ensure Messages Have Meaning

While there is no single formula to ensure the one-two punch of receipt and comprehension, there are some specific strategies a leader can use to cut through the clutter and turn messages into meaning:

1. Communicate from your audience’s perspective:
   
   Get into the heads and hearts of your audience, and create messages based on their realities and where they’re coming from.
2. Keep messaging simple, consistent, and to the point:
   
   Understanding your audience helps you focus on those messages that will most resonate. These need to be headlines or sound bites, not sound-all-you-can-eat-buffets. When leaders don’t know what they’re talking about, many ramble out loud, losing credibility.
3. Communicate with employees in their chosen medium:
   
   Some people need to hear messages in spoken word; for others, the written word will sink in best; and sometimes it’s a combination of both that works best. Some employees always check their email, while others look to internal social networks for the latest news and communication.
   
   Never assume that one message delivered one way will resonate with everyone; you might need to communicate the same message in multiple ways to reach—and be heard and understood by—everyone.
4. Follow up on your message by collecting feedback:
   
   There’s no better way to know what employees heard than to ask them. Questions work as a means of gathering information, and help you know what’s resonating or not. For more systematic listening, targeted practices such as focus groups, surveys, and meetings with teams offer unparalleled insight into the success of any communication.
   
   Great communication takes hard work up front, and it requires follow through.

Which component above – if you focused on it – would have the most positive impact on how you lead and communicate?

—David Grossman

See how being more purposeful when choosing communication channels leads to less clutter and more effective communications with employees. Click below to download your free copy of the eBook—Use the Right Channels to Communicate with Impact: 21 Channel Guide—today.