Tom O’Neil equates e-mail
communication to a candy bar: It’s quickly consumed, easily digested and leaves a temporary feeling of fullness and satisfaction.
But once you come down off
the sugar buzz of instant gratification, you don’t feel nearly as
satisfied.
O’Neil, managing partner of
Ernst & Young’s 230-employee
Cincinnati office, says e-mail
does serve the purpose of disseminating information quickly,
but as quickly as you can hit your delete button, the message
is lost. Just as you can’t subsist
solely on sugary treats, your
company would not be healthy
if you tried to rely solely on
electronic communication to
relay messages and keep
employees in the loop.
O’Neil says you need to find a
balance, and if you have to err,
err on the side of too much face
time. Employees want to give
you feedback and want to know
that their ideas and opinions are
helping to shape the future of
your company.
Smart Business spoke with
O’Neil about employee engagement and why the best way to a
healthy company is to engage
people face to face.
Don’t use e-mail as a communication crutch. E-mail and voice
mail are effective forms of
communication, but it can’t be
the only form. When you do
that, you’re just generally
sending out information. It
doesn’t really give you an
opportunity to get reaction
and feedback.
There is a lot of need for
face-to-face communication
because it gives you that
opportunity to get people’s
reactions. You get different
ideas from people, you get live
feedback from people because
they have that ability to interact and ask questions.
I think, at the end of the day,
you end up with a better
process, and people feel more
engaged and empowered
when you communicate with
them that way. They feel like
they contributed to an idea or
project and that their voice
matters, as opposed to just
being directed by an e-mail.
Bring people together. We use a
town-hall environment quite a
bit. We’ll bring large groups
together from a communications standpoint.
One of the key things is to
do as much face-to-face communication as you can. It
enables you to be very clear
and consistent. Everybody
hears the same message at
the same time. It gives everyone the opportunity to ask
questions and have interaction if you can do that. The
biggest challenge is always
to try to personalize what
we’re trying to get accomplished. It’s one thing to get
up and talk about a vision or
a strategy, but you have to be
able to personalize it with
everybody in the room. You
have to show how they’re going to fit in, show them
how they’re going to be part
of the initiative or strategy or
whatever we’re trying to get
accomplish.
So you really have to personalize it on all levels and make
sure everyone feels that
they’re empowered and a contributor to the process.
You personalize communication by giving examples.
Some of it may be talking
about best practices, where
we’ve seen success with this
strategy — give some examples that people can relate to.
Then you have to talk specifically about what they’re going
to be able to do, and get very
specific on that.
That’s the best way to make
sure they understand that
they’re a part of the process.
