How do you really engage your people?

This investment has created a distinctive people-centric culture that has become a major differentiator for our firm.

Starting point

Needless to say, the starting point for us, like any organisation that is serious about keeping its people "in the loop", is knowing which key messages we need to communicate. These are formulated with the firm's Executive Committee on a regular basis.

To communicate these strategic messages, we have invested in the typical, formal channels that organisations such as ours use to communicate to staff. So we do have the requisite quarterly (printed) newsletter, the posters, and the notice boards, as well as the "sexier", more modern, and arguably more appealing, channels such as an intranet, electronic newsletters, messaging plasma screens, etcetera. But that only goes so far - these channels, although very important, primarily deliver one-way, high-level information.

The question remains: How do we really engage our people to ensure that they not only understand these messages, but also understand their role in helping the firm to achieve its objectives, i.e. listening to and involving them? And that's the real challenge which most organisations should be acknowledging today, be they small or large; and it's something Ernst & Young is working at improving, although we know we have some way to go yet.

Two-way communication

On one level, we've introduced regular staff/CEO lunches, where people from across the firm can engage our CEO, Philip Hourquebie, and other members of our Executive Committee and leadership who participate in the programme, on issues of concern to them and any other matter they wish to discuss. There is also a CEO Hotline, providing anonymous access to Philip and our leadership, where people can post their concerns, questions and ideas, which is regularly updated. Of course, robust HR policies and processes, including Performance Management, and meetings in many formats held throughout the organisation, assist in supporting this more two-way communication process.

And we're going further yet. To deal with the increasingly complex issue of ensuring that we deliver clear, consistent, timely and relevant messages to our people (effective downward communication), as well as facilitating effective upward communication, we are in the process of designing a new communications mechanism that we are hoping to roll out soon.

Funnily enough, this is not a new-fangled technology - rather it relies on a great method that has been tried and tested over time: good "old-fashioned" face-to-face engagement, which we are confident is the only way we can engender truly effective two-way communication.

Quality engagement

The difference is that now we're making a concerted effort to dedicate time and resources to the process; and to mould these conversations in such a way that quality engagement takes place with guided, constructive, strategic conversations, led by staff members who are trained to facilitate such interventions effectively and who know what the key messages they need to communicate actually are.

Smaller, entrepreneurial organisations can certainly learn from and adapt many of these concepts, scaling them down to match their size and culture - and the one benefit they already have is their size. Communication is a lot easier when there are fewer people to communicate with!

In summary, here are a few words of advice if you and your company are serious about getting it right:

• Know what you need to communicate - define key messages on a regular basis.
• Implement as many communications channels as possible, and communicate your key messages through these, but recognise that two-way communication (preferably face-to-face) is the most important.
• Allow staff a platform for feedback, and use this feedback to inform future messages / actions.
• Make sure your organisation's other processes support communications and incorporate the key messages.

Finally, if you are a leader, make communication your responsibility - don't always leave it up to your company's Communications function to do the communicating!