Going with the flow of information

Posted 2 mins ago by Sarah Glover 7 Minute(s) to read

 

Efficient and effective flow of information in your organisation is good news for all of your systems, compliance efforts, and outcomes.

Communication is a crucial foundation for success in health and safety, human resources, quality assurance, and much more. Good communication becomes positive engagement, as informed workers are more likely to be happier and feel more connected in their workplace. While there are many different pieces to the puzzle that is communication, there are a few primary concepts that underpin them all: content, frequency, channels, and responsibility, to name a few of the most important ones.

What’s being communicated? When should it be done, by who and to whom? Who’s in charge of making it happen, and what methods should be used? Who’s ultimately responsible? All of these questions should be answered as you review and create or update a solid communication strategy.

The risks of poor communication in your organisation

All types of risk increase when communication deteriorates. Conflict, misalignment, missed actions, and accidents are all very real consequences of poor communication and a subpar comms strategy.

• Safety risks: when people don’t have the information they need, they are much more likely to have or cause accidents.
• Quality and reputational risks: Poor communication leads to poor results, it’s as simple as that. It can reduce the quality of your product and/or service, as well as creating a reputation as a subpar employer.
• Legal risk: a lot of your compliance rests on effectively recording your actions and communicating rules, guidelines, and requirements to various people. To fail to do so could leave you open to legal ramifications.
• Employment risk: many studies, like this one, have demonstrated that effective communication contributes to employee retention. Good comms can help you to avoid costly turnover and hold on to valuable people and organisational IP.

The benefits of systemising your communication and engagement

To improve the communication within your workplace requires strong systems and planning. What else is new?! Taking stock of how information flows within and across your teams then making a plan to streamline it is no small task, but it’s well worth it. Here’s why:

• Financially, good communication can result in better productivity, consistency, and bottom line.
• Communication is key to designing and implementing systems for safety and quality, both of which are foundational in any trades or manufacturing business especially.
• Communication improves teamwork, job satisfaction, presenteeism, and development. Knowing where people are at and what they need helps with creating a great culture and continuous improvement for a “learning organisation’.
• Organisational citizenship gives employees a sense of belonging rather than just showing up. Engagement with organisational citizenship behaviours consistently shows a direct correlation with better employee satisfaction and retention plus overall productivity and profitability.
• Communication improves safety, service, and quality of production, which results in better customer satisfaction and boosts your reputation as an organisation.

Improving systems of communication: a simple guide

As we mentioned before, overhauling your information systems could seem like a mammoth task. However, there are some simple steps you can take.

 

Review

Reviewing your comms starts with asking some questions. What is being communicated or documented regularly? Is it working? Identify the breaks and roadblocks.

This requires a wide lens! Zoom out and take a look at how information moves. How does it move down the levels of your organisation? How does it move up them? How does it move laterally?

 

Refine

At this point, you want to dig further down into the details. Think about the mechanisms that move information around your organisation.

You don’t need any fancy jargon for this; simply look at how you record and transfer information—whether it’s a whiteboard or a bespoke app. Even a courier pigeon is valid. We’re not making judgements at this stage, just gaining oversight.

For example, one refining activity you could take part in is to take the org chart and write next to each name which meetings they attend. Who’s missing out? Maybe the frontline team have a meeting every morning. Where does the information go? Is this contributing to the common complaint of meeting for meeting’s sake? Meetings are great and helpful, but if info isn’t going anywhere, it can feel futile. How can you take the points covered and get them to those who would benefit from them?

 

Revise

This is where you’ll make adjustments as necessary. You should have some idea by now of what works and what doesn’t. Where can you make changes to remedy the issues?

This might look like:

• Assigning or reassigning people to be in charge of information transfer.
• Changing the way meeting notes are recorded and/or reported.
• Deciding who needs to be in meetings to report back to their teams.
• Creating opportunities for employees to feed back and engage.
• Creating central sources of truth, whether digital or physical, so that people know where to go for information. Making someone responsible for updating these.

One of our clients has planning meetings with various teams in which they talk about jobs coming up and other important things. They compared the attendance of these meetings to their org chart to see which people were not in any of the meetings who should be—and importantly, identified why. They discovered that a lot of the office staff were unintentionally out of the loop, probably because of the times that the meetings were being held. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but a lot of the information discussed was relevant to their work. They had to put in some work to figure out how the office team could be informed of anything that concerned them and also how they could be given the opportunity to feed back and engage.

 

Re-release

Once you’ve identified the changes and reshuffles that will improve your communications systems, it’s time to put them into effect. This should be fairly straightforward, but there’s one thing you should keep top of mind when making changes to improve your communications: good communication! It’s crucial to let your people know about the changes before they happen and as they happen.

You should be providing opportunities for feedback and be willing to make adjustments accordingly. This is a big part of engagement—involving your workers in decisions and changes that directly affect them. Not only do they deserve to be kept informed, but they are your best source of information about how things are playing out in reality. Their comments and feedback are invaluable.

When implementing new communications systems, don’t forget about the principles of good change management. Understand what is changing; understand who and what will be affected; communicate to those affected and ensure you’re meeting all legal obligations; implement in stages to avoid change fatigue; allow time for adjustment, feedback, and course correction.

 

TL;DR: systematise your comms

The way that information moves around your organisation is often something that goes unscrutinised, but it’s a crucial business system and one that can have significant impact on every aspect of your operations when it’s improved.

Good communication can do many things:

• Improve productivity and profit
• Boost your safety and QA outcomes
• Engage workers and help you to create a good culture, reducing turnover, absenteeism, and job dissatisfaction.

On the flipside, poor communication within your organisation can come with an array of risks: safety, reputational, legal, and employment, to name a few.

Where do you start with reviewing and improving communications within your organisation? We recommend these four steps or stages.

1. Review. Without judgement, first simply review and write down what you have in place; be thorough.
2. Refine. Dig down into the details to recognise and understand the mechanisms and channels which move information around.
3. Revise. Make adjustments as necessary (see the section above for some examples!).
4. Rerelease. Put into effect the changes you’ve decided on, being sure to communicate clearly and employ good change management processes.

 

Seek help

When you’re so into the details of what’s going on in your organisation, it can be hard to pull back and look at the big picture. Especially regarding something as everyday and ingrained as communication! If that’s the case for you, there is help available.

Our approach to business systems is to set you up for self-governance. Capability uplift—educating and equipping your own people rather than outsourcing key aspects of your business—is what will bring success and self-reliance in the long run. We can help you to zoom out, identify what communication systems you have in place, and work alongside you to improve them. If you’re seeking to create a business that’s internally sustainable, get in touch with the Emendas team!