Pick our brains - Knowledgebase
Question 1 of 32 View all 32 questions
- Q.How do you communicate information to staff?
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- Jamie Greenwood
- NJL Yorkline
A.General information is communicated at our monthly business update forum.
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- Michael Bates
- Walton Bates Associates
A.Email
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- Ian Baggett
- Adderstone Group
A.In person and informal conversation wherever possible. Otherwise email – the least imperfect form of communication after discussion
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A.Talk to them then follow up with email.
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A.One to one, meetings, memo, email and telephone.
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A.Communication is a vital ingredient of leadership and ideally it should be two way. With a small team when you are all together you can communicate face to face, but at Reg Vardy when we had 6,000 staff this wasn’t possible, so email was used at least once every week on the same day at the same time. We also used a monthly team brief and a quarterly newsletter. These methods gave us the opportunity to tell everyone how the Group was performing and gave regular news updates. Communication upwards is also vitally important. It is essential that we hear from the folks that are in the front line of the business so that we take their views on board. One of my sayings was “ with every pair of hands comes a free brain” and we need to use the intellect and intelligence of the entire workforce. I feel it is important to keep the staff up to date, as much as possible, with what is going on. Mushroom management, keeping your people in the dark, does not help the company to grow. Communication presented opportunities for Recognition. Those members that were doing well were praised for their performance. Remember, Information is power! Make it as widely known as possible, dilute the power.
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A.We have a weekly bulletin which goes out to the stores with sales information in it, and it also features people who have been awarded certificates for completing training courses. So it’s celebrating success and also telling our people where the company is. Every three weeks we meet up with the operations team and we talk about what we got right in the last three weeks, what we got wrong and where we’re going to go over the next three weeks. They then meet up with store teams, and the store teams then meet up in the store with their individual teams. Every three months we have a day with the managers, one in the north, one in the south. We spend the day talking about strategy, what challenges face the company and how we’re going to deal with them. We also have a trade show every year where we all get together and suppliers to our company lay out all their goods in a big hall and we have a good day talking to them and learning about their products. And finally we have an annual celebratory dinner in November. We all club together and there are various prizes to be won for stores - trading performance and things like that. So there’s quite a lot of communication with our staff and we do it by e-mail, letter, face to face - the directors spend about 25 days a year on face to face meetings, and lastly, we go round the stores and we talk to our people.
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A.Obviously it’s important to do it through the e-mail medium but most important I think has got to be verbally, via department heads and as an owner manager I do walk the floor at the various offices a lot which is a really good way - one to one communication’s very important.
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- David Stonehouse
- TSG
A.In house newsletter, sharepoint, staff updates, dreaded e mail
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- Tony Whelan
- Whelan Construction
A.Newsletter, tool box talks, get togethers, monthly lunch meeting.
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A.I send the manageress at each branch an e-mail and then mention it again with I see them.
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A.One to ones, Company Council, and a Newsletter
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A.I talk to them as much as possible and I e-mail them as little as possible. I do a mixture of the two but it depends what the information is.
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- David Gillam
- Spinnaka Ltd
A.It depends on the type of information. When we sadly had to make some redundancies the other week I actually did it by calling them all together and personally explaining the situation. Generally we don’t have newsletters or anything like that, we always communicate information with the personal touch.
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- Paul Callaghan
- Leighton Ltd
A.We do it in three ways. One, we have a formal staff meeting where, on a regular basis, we get everybody together and do formal presentations. Primarily we get people within the business to do presentations of their own particular aspects but then also ending up with a question and answer forum type session and then usually going on to a meal and a drink. We’ve got one of those scheduled for a fortnight’s time, so that’s not every month but it’s usually every two or three months. We also do internal newsletters which is effectively using our own communicator technology to let people know what’s happening and then informally, I guess is through the individual section heads in the business. We have a fortnightly group management meeting and we decide if there is a message that needs to go out then they would take it out and talk to those people in smallish groups, but from a formal point of view. We’ve always done this, it’s what the Americans call an all hands meeting so you get all the hands turn up and usually, in the past it used to be me or one of the managing directors do it but increasingly what we’re doing is we’re getting the more junior staff to actually do the presentation because we think it builds their confidence when they’re speaking to a large group of their peers.
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- Martin McTague
- Pical CIC
A.A mixture of e-mails and staff meetings
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- Fiona Raglan
- Dipsticks Research
A.We have staff meetings four times a year which are quite official. There we talk about the business and where we want to take it. We also have monthly recognition awards, Which was suggested to us by Investors in People, at which we again talk about the business over that particular month, and everybody gets together and prizes are given out for the best person that’s been nominated for that month. We also have an intranet constantly running, so any information that we feel anybody should need is then instantly launched onto that.
