“My company communicates with me too much”, said no employee ever!
Well that’s not strictly true!
I remember working for a large consultancy who sent out all their staff communications by email, between the HR, IT, Recruitment, Marketing and unit specific communications staff could receive several emails a day. So, staff got email fatigue and stopped reading them.
I’d have my monthly team meeting and start talking about a new initiative and no one would have heard of it, some of my team told me that they had set up a rule to automatically file the emails in a folder and they never got around to looking at it.
This meant that I had to go out of my way to ensure that my team were hearing the information I needed them to hear.
I found two things that worked much better than the email; a quick 5-minute scrum first thing in the morning or a lunchtime meeting where I’d bring in some tasty deserts and we could eat and chat.
You see, when you communicate there are two things that need to happen:
One – You transmit your message
Two – Your message is received as transmitted
You could have the most amazing message or opportunity to share but if no one is receiving what you are transmitting, you may as well save your breath or fingers.
You need to check that what you have communicated has been received, miscommunication is often the reason why targets get missed.
According to the VARK model, there are 4 primary types of learners; visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinaesthetic.
Visual learners learn best from visual representations such as, maps, spider diagrams, charts, graphs, flow charts, labelled diagrams, and all the symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies and other elements, that can be used to represent what could have been presented in words
Auditory learners learn best by accessing information that is “heard or spoken.” they learn best from lectures, group discussion, radio, using mobile phones, speaking, web-chat and talking things through.
Reading/writing learners learn best from text-based input and output, reading and writing in all its forms but especially books, manuals, reports, essays and assignments.
Kinaesthetic learners learn by getting hands-on and applying what they have learnt practically.
When you are speaking with your team it is important that you communicate in a way that engages the different learner types, for example having visual representations of the subjects that you wish to share, asking questions to make the session interactive and asking different members of the team to scribe or demonstrate a process.
If you need some help reviewing the way you communicate with your team as a group and individually, contact us to see how we can assist you.