AZBiz.com talks about the importance of consistent communication with your employees. 

"In the past few months, we have all seen drastic shifts in both our economy and the way we do business on a daily basis.

When change occurs, it’s natural for employees to feel unease and doubt. It is imperative that employers communicate with employees to address a multitude of questions and concerns. Among other benefits, ongoing communication helps establish and maintain a sense of connection and community among employees – a ‘we’re in it together’ mentality."

Lauri Huff, a communications specialist with Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Arizona, presents a list of four ways to improve and standardize communications with employees.

1. The sooner the better

"Communicate in a timely manner. As soon as possible, the internal communications team should meet with business leaders to determine what messaging needs to go out, to whom and over what time period. The sooner the messaging begins the better. Each day that goes by the door is opened for increased unease among employees. It’s important to remember that messages in these situations don’t always have to be negative. There may be positive news to convey as well."

2. Just the facts

"State the facts without promising a solution. Messages from leadership should outline what is taking place, how outside actions may affect the business and the employees, and what the business is doing overall to counteract the events. This isn’t the time to get creative with messaging — just put forward the facts."

3. Tackle front-line issues

"In times of economic stress, employees will contact the Human Resources department to discuss concerns. Human Resources should be on the front line for hearing the employee "hot topics" and learning which topics need to be addressed in messaging. In an economic crisis, employee fears can center on losing a house, job, or healthcare and other benefits. To ensure that all employee concerns are addressed, human resources representatives should be involved with message planning from the start."

4. Resources-a-plenty

"Tap into existing resources. Many businesses provide employees with a variety of resources to assist in stressful times. If on-site services aren’t available, you should promote outside assistance. Assistance can include stress management, creating work–life balance, how to plan for retirement, and treating co-workers with respect in times of stress. Placing employees in control of their physical and mental health will empower them to make choices that can alleviate their concerns.

Be consistent and diverse with your communication methods. Whether you use a mass e-mail or traditional mail, digital signage, or a flyer or a poster, messages should be updated as necessary."

Consistent communication is the cure for skeptical employees and an ever-shifting business environment. When businesses are communicating effectively, their chances at surviving and thriving in the current economic recession improve drastically.

As radio advertising takes a nosedive, businesses are still looking askance at the Web. Can it really become an advertising channel replacement? Do consumers really look to the Web to find products and services?

To those questions, I say yes, and here’s how:

1. Your web site is the new brochure or catalog. Rather than ordering a catalog via an 800 number, or requesting an information kit from operators standing by, consumers are going to the Web to browse Internet product listings and reading information kits online. Is your web site just a placeholder? Do you provide all the information to your Web audience as you do your radio or television audience? If folks didn’t make it to the trade show, can they download the same print materials from your web site? Why not?

2. Your web site tells your customer why you’re the solution for their problem. Can you give away a report or white paper that showcases your strengths in the exact problem area your clients are experiencing? That goes much farther than a radio ad asking folks to call your toll-free number.

3. You offer new information from your web site each month that helps your clients make important decisions. This can be in the form of a newsletter, a blog, even Twitter. When consumers realize that you’re more interested in providing them with quality information rather than making a quick sale, they’ll sign up to your mailing list. (These are your clients! They will buy stuff from you!)

4. You develop products and services that you’ve developed from listening closely to your client. A web site isn’t a place to just talk about what you think is interesting. For a business interested in developing quality life-long clients, your site should be interactive. Can your clients request information from you? Can they contact you with problems? Do you listen and then respond in kind?

5. A web site works all the time. Unlike a radio ad that you must pay to run 24-7, a web site is up and for a monthly hosting fee, is available to clients whenever they need it. It’s not as expensive as television advertising, and if you’re working hard to stay relevant by producing information your clients can use, a web site can actually bring in more clients than traditional print, television, and radio ads combined.

As the Web continues to grow, and as social media continues to expand at such a fast-paced rate, the opportunities for communicating your business message online will only increase.

We’ve all been there. A memo gone awry and people’s feelings are hurt. A three-hour meeting in which nothing is accomplished and the time is wasted. A seminar that doesn’t make sense to your employees or managers and confuses them more than anything. It happens.  What are you going to do about it?

First, don’t panic.

Remember that communication is a time-honored tradition among our species. We all have our issues with it. If it was you that caused the communication breakdown, try to find out what didn’t work. Was it the delivery? The presentation? The timing? The food? If it was the audience that didn’t respond well, was the information presented in a way that was confusing? Did it apply to them? Did they already know what you were talking about?

Second, interact, rather than shut down.

Talking to the party affected is the best approach. Be respectful and polite. Ask questions that require them to give you specifics. “How could I have improved that speech?” “What part of my memo was offensive?” “Is there any way I can improve how I communicate with your team?” Once you find out the answers, do something with them. Don’t just file them away and forget about it.

Third, figure out action steps on the feedback and implement it immediately.

If you need to make amends, that comes first. If you have problems looking people in the eye in one-on-one meetings, work on it. If you mumble when you give instructions, don’t do it anymore. If you’re writing is riddled with malapropisms and rhetoric, rewrite it. The best way to rectify a bad communication scenario is to take steps so that it is never repeated and to let the other party know you are doing so.

Fourth, try and try again.

Communication doesn’t happen on one try. You have to try and try again and again. It’s an ongoing process and doesn’t just go away because you want it to. Continually working on your communication processes will help you to become a better communicator, believe it or not. Not doing anything will help you become a better bad communicator. It’s true.

Most business owners find that communication success is not static in their offices. It’s a continual process that moves and turns with a rapid pace. Accepting that is a good solid first step. Then, you can move on to making sure that every time you write or speak, people understand you. It’s an honorable goal.

As the new year dawns, it is becoming more and more apparent that things are not going to run the same way they did last year. Whether you are forced to make cuts to track with the recession, or you feel that a recession is simply a chance to pick up more market share, one of the greatest challenges for a company is communicating those changes within your company before you attempt to communicate it with your customers.

There are ways that smart companies communicate change (the best practice theories are actually studied quite seriously) and I’ve included a few key points below.

1. Don’t rely on senior management to say what needs to be said. Employees may not get the right message if your senior management is the sole channel used to share the organization’s changes. Too much can be diluted, misinterpreted, and just plain shared wrongly. If you are using senior management to communicate upcoming changes, you must consider other ways as well.

2. Don’t rely on company publications or company-wide meetings to get your viewpoint across. Adding to senior management as a channel to communicate, you might consider company publications and company-wide meetings as a great way to accentuate the senior management message. Doing both of these is not enough. Employees can easily disregard senior management, refuse to read the publications, and skip or ignore the meeting.

3. Attempt to reach the employee within the realm of his or her work area. Instead of coming at the employee from a macro focus (company-wide, company publication), attempt to communicate within the employee’s realm. First, use a publication or employee work area-specific meeting, and then move on to in-person communication to further cement the change your communicating.

4. Rely on face-to-face communication within an employee’s work department. Employees need to talk about the upcoming changes and their immediate supervisors need to be ready to discuss the new focus in person and on multiple occasions. The discussion among a department must not be curtailed, but encouraged.

5. Support supervisors who will be responsible to keep the conversation going among their employees. Supervisors carry the full burden of responsibility to support the ongoing conversation about upcoming organizational and departmental changes, thus a company must provide as much information, explanation, and upper management support as possible.

Companies who understand how best to communicate will be the most supportive of the front-line employees who are the ones attempting to make the changes.

There may be multiple groups you speak to on a regular basis during your workday. You’ve probably always just produced a memo or email to communicate with a set group of people. That, or you’ve just scheduled a meeting and ran through a list of items. Now that a lot of group members (employees, members, alumni) may be located in different locales, different types of meetings (and the location of those meetings) may dictate other options than just the typical memo or departmental meeting.

1. Conversing with a group in writing. There are advantages to this most traditional way to communicate to a group. The first is that you can use precise wording and grammar, because you can edit a written communication. You can also include large amounts of detail, because your audience will be able to assimilate it, and you can enjoy the guarantee of having a permanent and accessible record of your communication to the group. Plus, writing is (relatively) easy, it’s been around for a long time, so people are used to it, and does not require as much of a time commitment as speaking (going to a location, preparing a speech, speaking from prepared notes, taking questions afterward, etc.).

2. Meeting with a group face to face in the same location. There are some advantages to face-to-face group meetings. You can control if and when the communication is received and each member of your audience hears the information at the same time. You can include nonverbal communication and choose the communication strategy you believe will best serve your message. You can build group identity and group relationships, however, face-to-face group meetings are less private and confidential, do not provide a permanent record, and cannot include as much detail as writing.

3. Meeting with a group in diverse locations. There are a couple of options: videoconferencing and teleconferencing. Each option has many advantages: savings on travel time and expense, affordable and easy to set up, and now, with the advances in technology, offer top-notch interactive perks. A videoconference or teleconference can be recorded for a permanent record, or can be transcribed for a text version. Either conferencing option includes interactive features such as web conferencing (even audio participants can view a PowerPoint presentation), Q&A mode, and more.

If you’re gearing up for a group meeting in 2009, why not figure out the best option for you (and don’t be surprised if it’s not the traditional writing one) and make it a goal this year to utilize this effectively. 

Why do people continue to harp on the difference between features and benefits? Enough already. Wait. Except for the fact that it’s annoying to hear the reasons to use benefits rather than features all the time, these discussions actually tend to hammer home the point that most businesses miss. No one cares how long you’ve been at your current location or how many employees you have as individual facts standing on their own. They want to know WHY that matters to them: in other words, turn your features (how long you’ve been in the community, how many employees you have) into benefits (we’re locally owned and always available to serve you or our employees stick with us for the long-term in order to offer you a better customer service experience). See what I mean? Let’s look at this more seriously.

1. Tangible benefits. These are benefits that are universal (profits, savings, better value for their money, or more time to relax) or significant as symbols (the best tires for their money, the coveted printer that prints color and black and white and is faster than any they’ve seen before) as well as unique and exclusive (a green way to heat and cool your home, save 45 percent on energy bills with our windows).

2. Career or task benefits. These are benefits that can help your client’s jobs (or even homes) easier or more streamlined. This is primarily a business-to-business benefit, but think about this angle when finding out the benefits your company can offer. Does your custom paper invitation company offer corporate items? Can you come to a client’s place of work to wash their car in the corporate parking lot?

3. Ego benefits.  These enhance a person’s self-worth, accomplishment, and achievement. If you sell hair care products, focus on how healthy and beautiful people would like their hair to look. If you sell mobile phone packages, think about whether or not your customers want to carry phones with customized colors. Why not offer any color a customer wants? What about custom shading in order to mix two colors together?

4. Personality benefits. These are benefits that are inspired by a certain type of person, so consider your audience and their mindset. Thinkers need lots of data, skeptics need lots of credibility, unemotional people need rationality, and emotional people need enthusiasm and energy.

5. Group benefits. Group-oriented audiences need to find out "what’s in it for them" as a whole. Sometimes an appeal to what connects multiple clients may be what they’re looking for. If you sell math software to students struggling with math, appeal to their need as a group to not be classified as just readers, or for a group of folks who ski, point out that every skier in your state enjoys a weekend at your ski lodge.

Benefits take a bit more energy to pull out of your typical features list, but it’s worth it. Just ask the ever-present question: "What’s in it for me?" from the point of view of your audience.

With a lot of writing, most of us want to persuade with our words. As a manager or CEO, your goal is to get your employees or clients to either buy something or to consider you as a person of influence – an expert they can trust with their most pressing problems. Right?

Well, many people have written a lot about persuasion, so what follows is just a quick guide to writing persuasively.

1. Your opening and closing should emphasize benefits to your customer/employee. This is the tough thing for many people to understand. They are so interested in proving their worth, they forget that no one cares how many years the company’s been in business or if they’ve won awards for selling the most cars in a given year. Sure, that matters, but first you’ve got to give it a reason to matter.

2. The problem/solution approach might be a good approach. Start out, if you’re a car salesman, by emphasizing that now may be one of the best times in history to buy a car. Prices are at the bottom, the inventory is high, and car dealerships are in the mood to dicker. Then introduce a problem your client/customer may have, say, looking for a car with better gas mileage, or a car that fits your growing family, and then offer a solution. You could write about your no-pressure sales process, that every car on your lot is available for test drive and special deals, and that if there are any questions the customer has, please just ask. Don’t push for the sale on your time frame, don’t force them to work with you; offer them a tempting solution that is a true solution.

3. Two-side structure is also something that works for people who may be making difficult decisions about money or major purchases. If you only present your side, a wary customer may see through that and find arguments to ignore your communication. Thus, present the negatives first. Show that you are paying attention to their needs by putting them at ease. Tell them "yes, I understand that you may not feel that hiring movers is for you because it seems like an unnecessary extra step as you are forced to vacate your home, but perhaps we can make it easier on you during this difficult time." Get the idea?

4. The ask for less approach.  This allows you to get your foot in the door. If you’re preparing an autoresponder email to potential clients who express an interest in your graphic design services, why not just ask for their email address and permission to add them to your monthly email newsletter list? This allows them to get to know you and helps later when you’re attempting to get them to hire you for a website redesign at the cost of several thousand dollars. The odds of you actually persuading these clients to hire you increases the better they know you and the more comfortable they feel around you.

5. The ask for more approach. Some persuasive writers champion this approach, but I admit I’ve never been really a fan. It’s when you ask for a huge commitment upfront, get rejected, and then are able to get a more moderate commitment on the next request. I am not comfortable with this outdated approach to sales. I’d much rather build my credibility with an "ask for less" approach. However, there might be some instances when the ask for more structure would work well. It’s up to you and your conscience.