Glovebox Moments: Communication. The Key to Transparency & Engagement

Check out the latest "Glovebox Moments” episode presented by Miriam Dushane & Tom Schin of “HR in the Car.” Miriam & Tom share more on why communication is a crucial aspect to a transparent and engaged workforce.

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Glovebox Moments here with HR in the Car at Alaant. I'm Tom Schin, this is Miriam Dushane. We're behind the wheel here with you.

So one of the things, Miriam, we talk a lot about is transparency and, specifically, I'm curious what you're seeing because you and I have conversations with people all over the place, but specifically around communication, we know that big companies do different things than smaller companies.

So I think a lot of times small companies might actually get in a bad habit of not communicating enough, because they think they're communicating all the time. So think about it. You're a small organization, let's say, of less than 20 employees. Most of those employees are probably working very closely together. You would assume that everybody knows what everybody else is working on and what's happening. Large organizations assume the opposite. You know, there's different departments, there's different things. They make more of an attempt, from what we've seen this isn't a blanket statement, but they often will make more of an attempt to try and do town halls and quarterly updates. Yeah, they have more equipment, more tools to do these things.

Absolutely. But I think what we need to do with small businesses is to make sure that we don't get caught up in the "everybody knows what everybody else is doing". I mean depending upon, I know for our organization we work remotely four days out of the week, so we take for granted sometimes that "Tom knows what Nick's doing and Nick knows what Lauren's doing", and sometimes we come together and we're like, "oh crap, we never told Nick this or we never told Denise that", and it's not that we didn't intentionally need to do that, it's just because we are actually passing ships in the night a little bit.

So I would say it's super important to make sure that you do make an effort to have an all hands meeting, whether it's weekly, monthly, whatever it is. Make sure the leadership are the ones guiding those, giving updates to the entire organization on a regular basis. The good and the bad in terms of making sure just everybody feels like they are engaged and part of how the organization is going, whatever direction they're going in. So it's super important to do that and I just would say for small business owners, me being one of them just be very careful, because I do it too. I think everybody knows what's going on and then half the people don't know what's going on.

Right, but you're a great case example of look. If you miss something, say hey, my bad- mea culpa. Here's the information they meant to share wasn't for any intent. Usually they say the simplest explanation is the right one. So don't make assumptions, ask the questions Absolutely and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

So thanks for joining us on this Glove box Moment. If you have questions, please throw it in the comments here. We're happy to answer those as well. But come back to Alaant.com, subscribe to "HR in the Car" Podcast, and we look forward to talking to you soon.