We chatted about my career in engineering and how, along the way, I learned about good (and bad!) communication and how this shaped my business. I explain what the animal shift was and how things have changed, and how I managed the good and bad managers I had!

I give a few communication tips too – enjoy!

You can also find it on Spotify and Amazon Music:

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/evz5VA_w
Amazon Music: https://lnkd.in/eyB4qkb8

and I would recommend subscribing to his YouTube channel too!

Let me know what you think. And if you need some help with communication in your business contact me now.

Jacqui Hanbury is the Managing Director of The Pathway Communication Company Limited and is a specialist in helping you find the thing that is stopping your business from achieving as much as it could be.  Follow her on LinkedIn to find out more.

The Pathway Communication Company Ltd provides a personalised plan to help you and your business move forward. We might help you set goals, a strategy, a communication plan, facilitate a meeting, be a coach or mentor. Whatever it takes. Find out more at: www.pathwaycc.co.uk

The post The animal shift – a podcast appeared first on The Pathway Communication Company.

One of the ways many companies think about communications in their company is by using an employee survey package.  There are many and they vary from weekly to monthly questions. These are sent out to your team and then the answers are summarised back to you for action.  The summary should then score you against different aspects of the business and give you a basis to make changes.  In addition, your team can make comments that people can make at the end of the standard questions. But what do you need to think about before you buy in to one of these packages?

Let’s look at what Forbes says about why we should have an employee survey tool

1. It Identifies Where Improvements Are Needed
2. It’s User-Friendly And Anonymous
3. It Drives Employee Engagement
4. It Reports Data Across Population Segments
5. It Aligns With Company Values And Best Practices
6. It Enables Managers To Take Action   

I’d like to comment specifically on number 2: ‘user-friendly and anonymous’. These are key issues as many employees are not as tech-friendly as we would like and are busy, busy, busy!  Adding a survey to their workload is not what they need.  So ensuring it is quick and easy to complete is key.  If they have to faff around following links they won’t do it!  If they can click on the email, and immediately answer the question then they are far more likely to do this.  Some packages use gamification instead of responses having to be written which I have seen to be far more effective as it is often simply a slider to move or an image to click on (happy to sad faces maybe). Not a guarantee but more likely to ensure they fill it in.

And then there is the anonymous part – this is a hard one to crack – you can tell people till you’re blue in the face that you will not see who has written a comment or put a specific score but the only way to prove this to many people is by getting on with it.  I used to work with someone who would not fill in a survey because he believed everything written in it would be held against him, despite the senior leadership team telling him they wanted to hear his thoughts, be they negative or positive.  Eventually, after evidence from his peers that they had written about issues and had whole conversations online without the management team knowing who they were talking to, he started putting his honest thoughts down!  Only took a year!!

The biggest risk

The biggest risk to using this sort of software is having managers in the organisation who do not know how to react to comments. If you get a negative comment and answer by denying it happened or with any negative reaction then the person who wrote the comment will not do it again!  But this isn’t what you want, you are running the survey to hear the good and the bad.

How do you counter this?  In my experience, you do this by training your managers.  Don’t assume they will know what to write and how to handle negative and even targeted comments towards them or the business.  Start by setting out your expectations to your managers and ensure they understand the true value of the feedback they will see. Having unfiltered comments from your staff is invaluable – it is the equivalent of having a management consultant or similar interview each of your staff.  BUT only if you handle it properly. 

My three tips:

1. All the senior team has brought into the software – each manager needs to be handling the feedback from their department – and if you are the MD or owner – you need to see it all!
2. Be prepared that it is not an instant fix – it takes time to win over the team to really be honest and trust that it is anonymous and also that you will not jump down their throats if they give you negative feedback
3. You keep checking on the answers from your managers, and intervene if needs be!

As long as you consider these three tips then I have seen that the employee survey is well worth embarking on. And if you need any help, especially with training your managers, let us know

Jacqui Hanbury is the Managing Director of The Pathway Communication Company Limited and is a specialist in helping you find the thing that is stopping your business from achieving as much as it could be.  Follow her on LinkedIn to find out more.

The Pathway Communication Company Ltd provides a personalised plan to help you and your business move forward. We might help you set goals, a strategy, a communication plan, facilitate a meeting, be a coach or mentor. Whatever it takes. Find out more at: www.pathwaycc.co.uk

The post Three things to consider before you buy an employee survey tool appeared first on The Pathway Communication Company.

As a business owner, you have grown your business from nothing, and you are proud of how you have done that.  But now your business has plateaued and you are not sure how to move forward. You have a few ideas but they are things you have tried before. You could do with a few more ideas and some energy to implement them.

Have you considered asking your team?  They might surprise you!

When we manage a multi-generational, multi-cultural, diverse team and we don’t ask them for help we are restricting our business growth by only bringing our ideas to the table. Each of these people has their own life experience to call on, they may hear ideas from their friends and families on how other businesses do things and they will definitely have different perspectives to ours.  Each one of these elements means you cannot afford to NOT ask them! 

After all, you don’t occupy their lives, so you are not going to have their ideas! And if they have ideas they will be happy and excited to help the business implement them.

How do we ask them though?  Here are a couple of ideas:

• Run a workshop where you present your vision for the business and ask your team for new ideas to achieve the vision
• Communicate that ideas are welcome and set up a method for them to be sent to you (a Teams channel for instance)
• Make a point of asking in meetings what ideas people have

Once you have some great ideas you can work with your team to implement them, that could be by getting them involved or even taking on the action themselves. Always check that they are happy to do this though, especially if it was not their idea. Don’t underestimate the enthusiasm of someone who comes up with an idea being trusted to implement it.

Warning! 

Always, always, go back to the person who suggested the idea and say thank you. Even if it is not a good idea, go back to them and explain why that idea won’t work (e.g. it doesn’t fit your values or is too expensive).  They need to know you appreciate them taking the time to submit or share an idea.  Otherwise word will soon get round that you don’t mean it, that you don’t really want ideas!  And the ideas will tail off….  And then the next idea, the one that will change everything, may not ever be suggested

In conclusion

Ask your team, they may surprise you!

And if you need any more ideas on how to ask your team for ideas, ask me for some of my ideas

Jacqui Hanbury is the Managing Director of The Pathway Communication Company Limited and is a specialist in helping you find the thing that is stopping your business from achieving as much as it could be.  Follow her on LinkedIn to find out more.

The Pathway Communication Company Ltd provides a personalised plan to help you and your business move forward. We might help you set goals, a strategy, a communication plan, facilitate a meeting, be a coach or mentor. Whatever it takes. Find out more at: www.pathwaycc.co.uk

The post Ask your team – they may surprise you! appeared first on The Pathway Communication Company.

Since lockdown ended and we all started to try to get back to normal the conversation around home working versus hybrid or full-time return to the office has been constant. And recently more people have been asking me my opinion – especially about how to communicate the company’s needs versus the employee’s needs.

One of the main issues seems to be that employees are not seeing the need to return to the office at all. They argue that they can do their job from home, they did it in lockdown and therefore they can do it now too.

How do companies feel about this?

I am hearing that this is affecting the culture and the relationships in the company. Without the casual conversations at the coffee machine and in the corridor, there is not the same feel in the company. And it is also affecting the work being done, especially the standard of work. People are not learning from their peers through the overheard conversations or the casual questions in the office. This is not affecting scheduled training and development but the ad-hoc continuous learning is definitely being affected.

How do we reconcile the two views though?

Lots of companies are now insisting on hybrid working which at least brings people back into the office. Managers can then have face-to-face conversations with their staff. But the team themselves all chose different days to come in. And that causes meetings to be held on Teams, and employees therefore don’t see the point of coming into the office! It becomes a cycle!

I was recently speaking to the Commercial Director of a large charity who is struggling with these issues. She would like her staff to be back at work for at least three days a week, but is being met with resistance as they are unable to see the benefit, they like the convenience and cost benefit of working at home. We discussed how she is communicating her requirement to have them back in the office and she realised that she was not offering any clear and compelling reason for the employees to come into the office. We discussed what that could be and I suggested that she no longer has any team or larger company meetings online, that she always holds these on the days that everyone is in the office. Then they become as much a social occasion as a meeting. She has to ensure that they are not death by PowerPoint meetings(!) but interactive, in the way you cannot do with an online meeting. This, of course, necessitates all staff coming in on the same days, but now she has a real, valid reason for insisting on this.

This made me wonder if we need to change our expectations of the time in the office? And communicate that? Perhaps the time in the office is not going to be as visibly productive as the time at home, because we do chat to each other, we do go to meetings a few minutes early to get a coffee and catch up with our colleagues. And perhaps we start to talk about the value of that to our teams.

We can of course TELL our staff that we have to them in the office, either full time as some large companies are doing, or for a number of days a week which appears to be more common. But to ensure that we have happy staff, who want to work for us, and are not at risk of leaving, we need to communicate the WHY to them. Why will it be beneficial to the company and to them? Just saying because we said so is not enough!

So maybe, before you communicate with your teams, think about the WHY, why do you need them back in the office? It may be, like the charity, that they will build relationships and benefit from seeing their colleagues. It may be that it is about them building their future careers, learning from their peers and mentors, to continue the informal learning. It may be about their communication skills. Many people have suffered through lockdown with their communication skills, and some of our younger employees have never had the opportunity to learn good communication. How can you present that to them as a great reason to want to come into the office?

And maybe you need to lead the way, be in the office and be available yourself on the days you want them in! It’s no good bringing them in only for them to see you working at home.

And once you communicate the why, hopefully it will be easier to change the working patterns and directly impact your company culture.

Jacqui Hanbury is the Managing Director of The Pathway Communication Company Limited and is a specialist in helping you find the thing that is stopping your business from achieving as much as it could be. Follow her on LinkedIn to find out more.

The Pathway Communication Company Ltd provides a personalised plan to help you and your business move forward. We might help you set goals, a strategy, a communication plan, facilitate a meeting, be a coach or mentor. Whatever it takes. Find out more at: www.pathwaycc.co.uk

The post Home, office, mix? How are your team working? appeared first on The Pathway Communication Company.