Top 5 ways to communicate with non-wired teams

by Katrina Andrews, Head of Marketing, Melcrum

Next week is my third year attending the IABC International event in New York – and even though I haven’t accrued as many attendance ribbons as many “IABC International lifers” I definitely feel like a little bit of an experienced veteran.

I’ve earmarked to go to Joe Williams’ presentation on Transferring your energy: Communicating for greater connection, influence and persuasion as I'm wondering if his suggestions will tally with our recently completed research on how to communicate with hard-to-reach employees - here are the report's top five guiding principles for communicating with non-wired teams:

1. Establish what absolutely has to happen and what is “nice to have”. Invest time and effort in the essentials and make “nice to haves” available for those who are interested.

2. Be honest about what’s important for the team and their jobs, rather than what corporate headquarters my want to tell them. Things that seem important at head office are often irrelevant and meaningless at the front line.

3. Keep things short and simple. Limit the number of messages, use simple language and get to the point quickly. Be ruthless about cutting volume, or the important issues will get lost. Use templates to keep leaders and corporate clients brief and make sure the important points are covered.

4. Use clear sign-posting to help managers prioritize and enable people to quickly distinguish the need to know from the nice to know. Make any actions clear.

5. Design channels and approaches to suit your stakeholder groups, their jobs and their working day. Don’t expect or assume they will go out of their way to make inconvenient or unsuitable approaches work for them.

If you’re also off to the Big Apple, pop in and see us at the Melcrum stand (in the exhibitor hall) to pick up a more in-depth extract from this report.

Katrina