Launching goals with a major rollout isn’t enough. Goals must be visible and repeated to keep the commitment alive. Why not have some fun with your ongoing communication. You can find plenty of creative ways to keep your employees up-to-speed on the status of the plan.
Taking it one step further, you can reinforce goals without coming across as a nag by adding humor, inspiring quotes, and customized encouragement to the messages. You can’t say thank you enough; keep that in mind when goals are attained.
Here are just a few ways to ensure ongoing communication:
In monthly e-mail messages
At surprise coffee breaks
On computers as screen savers
In envelopes with paychecks
In company newsletters or e-letters
On the bulletin board in a common area
Through your company blog
Through your intranet
One company dedicates an entire room to ongoing communication, dubbed the war room. The room includes anything and everything about the company’s strategy. On one wall is a timeline with sticky notes that display all the different goals and their deadlines. Another wall contains charts and graphs of the company’s key performance indicators from the scorecard. And yet another wall contains space for brainstorming and contributing to key strategic issues at hand.
The wall also contains an area for capturing items that are hard to measure, such as innovative ideas, customer complaints and compliments, and employee training schedules. The room is updated monthly, and anyone in the organization can walk in and see what’s happening with the business.
