Question

You recently completely overhauled several aspects of employee benefits, including health insurance and compensation packages. You have also developed clear succession plans and career development plans to assist in the retention of your current employees. You are pretty excited about the changes and feel they are better for the employees, while costing your organization less money. These plans came from your development of a strategic plan and goals set last year. You think these plans will result in lower turnover.

However, in four recent exit interviews, the former employees mentioned the lack of communication from your department on the changes you made. They said they did not feel well informed and are disappointed they were not notified. In addition, they complained of micromanagement on the part of two particular managers. They said they spend half of their day responding to their managers with project updates, instead of working on the projects themselves. As you begin to think about these exit interviews, you realize that development of the strategic plan and implementing it simply isn’t enough; you must communicate the changes to employees as well. You also have a bit of concern about the management styles mentioned and think it might be a good time to offer training on effective management to your entire company.

Discuss some of the ways you can communicate the following topics to the employees: changes to benefits, training opportunities, compensation plans, and succession plans.

Human Resource Managment - Chapter - Successful Employee Communication

Answer 1

Communication is a very important part of any organisation and especially the scenario explained in the article mentioned above is more critical as it involves the well being of the employees of the organisation.

It has been often observed that most of the employees are not aware of the new policies or changes that incur within the organisation as most of the times the communication is sent through emails which most of the employees incur. Therefore, below are few modes through which it can be communicated:

a. Communicating through Town Hall notifications like getting all employees together at one place and make the announcements of the changes.

b. Communication through email but in a more intriguing manner where employee's attention is first gained through suspense emails and then revealing the changes. This would help them have better clarity on the communication.