How Transparently Do You Communicate With Your Team?
In general, the main rule for large companies regarding communication is to send a newsletter-like email, hang posters or brochures about a new policy or big company updates… but nobody reads them.
Who decides or designs what to communicate and how? In my experience, working for big companies in the software industry, I have learned that the management team (i.e.: directors, project managers, PMO, human resources, you name it) shuts themselves in a meeting room for a few hours and they end up building a communication plan or some sort of thing (usually they take more than a single meeting to do this).
Then, the rest of the company consumes that communication but it is hardly assimilated by the employees. Yes, you’ll have people who read it and are interested in the topics but most of us won’t even open it. If it’s an email, we already have a rule to move it to trash or to the spam folder. If it’s a poster, you’ll look at it the first time but you’ll forget about its contents 5 minutes later. So, effective communication is important and difficult to achieve.
More importantly, this kind of communication feels fake or pre-fabricated. It’s not honest and it doesn’t involve the employee. It’s like advertising, trying to sell you something that you don’t want.
Here’s where open communication can help you to gain trust with your employees.
Open Communication
In the past decade we have seen a tendency growing across companies. They are more open to communication between the executive level and their employees. They have these open-door policies to talk with your managers and even with the CEO of your company, they started to record videos of informal interviews and publish them on YouTube, sharing their vision with everyone. There’s a whole movement around communication that has changed how things are transmitted to the employees and to the world. More companies share what they do in their everyday work.
Open Communication is great. It helps employees share their point of view with executives. But most managers are still too wary about how to communicate things and how they receive feedback from their subordinates:
- We shouldn’t say this. It will worry people.
- How do you think they’ll take this? I don’t say we should lie, just don’t say anything.
- We should look this over again. We don’t want to send the wrong message.
- My team always complains when I talk about this. I’ll skip it this time.
I have heard these excuses a LOT. The problem here is that the communication is delayed, people start feeling that the message is wrong or that something is not quite what it seems. The trust will be broken if things don’t change.
Now, here’s when a Rough-Cut Communication policy comes handy.
Rough-Cut Communication
The Open Communication policy has helped us a lot. Although, there is a new tendency that I have started to see in the past two or three years, that companies from different industries have started showing their internal communication openly to the world, not only to their employees. It’s a mix between marketing and open communication, but it’s effective. The main difference is that it feels unedited, honest and has a clear message: This is how things are, like it or not.
Valve is a game developer company that launched its Handbook for New Employees in March 2012. You can download it from their website (I recommend reading it). It shows the world how Valve introduces their company culture to new employees: how their teams are formed, their no-manager/no-project policy, how they evaluate each other, etc. It’s a refreshing way of seeing how a company works. It’s exactly what the employee will see on their first day of work. It’s transparent and it’s honest. See, for example, the What if I screw up? section in the handbook:
Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake. It wouldn’t make sense for us to operate that way. Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company— we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors. Even expensive mistakes, or ones which result in a very public failure, are genuinely looked at as opportunities to learn. We can always repair the mistake or make up for it.
I call this rough-cut communication because it’s not entirely edited, the message is not hidden, and it is what it is. It’s informal too. It uses a language that you would use when talking with a partner and it’s respectful.
In my company, every week the managers get together for a meeting to discuss goals, company status, etc. One of the managers is responsible for taking notes. These notes are then shared with all employees. Yes, everyone. You’ll read things like “Recruiting is failing. We need to focus more effort here”, or “X company won’t continue with Y project next quarter. We’ll relocate the team to a new account”. And each manager has a meeting with their employees to share and explain these notes and collect feedback from them too.
You’ll think: “Wow, that’s too much to share with my employees“. There is nothing confidential though here, everything is related to our everyday work, our projects, our teams, our managers, our career inside the company, etc. And they share it with us, “as it is”. Of course, I know that “Let’s fire this guy because he is useless” won’t show up in the communication because that’s more of a personal topic to be discussed between that specific employee and his manager.
The rough-cut communication has helped us to see a more transparent company, how they work, and their mistakes, how the manager struggles with decisions and shows us opportunities to help them and help ourselves in the process. It takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s worth it. In the end, everyone gains their share of trust and feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves.
Extreme Rough-Cut Communication
Ok, rough-cut is great. Now, let’s look at this BIG example. Chris Roberts is the creator of PC games like Wing Command and Freelancer. He launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to build the “Best Space Simulation PC Game ever“. His goal was to raise $500k but he raised more than 2 million in the first weeks and it became the most successful crowd-funding project ever. After a couple of years, the project raised U$S 49 million.
Ok, but what did Chris Roberts do with that money? He wanted to share every single aspect of his project with his backers. So he built this extreme communication policy to share EVERYTHING and had every employee participate in showing their work to the world. On his website, you can see videos of the development team showing their progress, their mistakes… absolutely everything. They show their pre-alpha modules, how they interact, they even show their meetings! And every week, Chris Roberts answers people’s questions. Oh, I forgot to mention that they had their own reality show to interact with users to become part of the project. Amazing.
This extreme communication policy is costly (that’s why I call it extreme). Their way of communicating with their audience and how honest and transparent they are when sharing their decisions (and mistakes!) feels refreshing.
That’s close to what the company I work for does for their employees internally. Their notes and decisions are available for every employee, via email, in PDF and verbally in our weekly meetings.
The result for Chris Roberts is that they have more than 500.000 people that backed the project with their money. The result for us is that leaders have gained the trust of their employees and, as part of that they are starting to feel that they are part of a bigger goal than just “doing their daily work”.
Verlic Redclaw 