Key Takeaways

• Purely top-down communication alienates modern employees who expect a voice
• Reserve 25-30% of screen time for local management and team contributions
• Enable upstream feedback through QR codes or similar mechanisms for two-way dialogue

Topics

• Communications
• Content Strategy
• Company Culture

Transcript

Red alert, red alert, corporate propaganda coming your way. That's how most workers think about communication when it comes from head office and just broadcasts out on the screen, via email, on the company app. It's just top-down flow of information. Most comms is centralized, and for a very good reason. The leadership of the company wants people to stay on the same page and be getting those updates. There's nothing wrong with that. But if that traffic is flowing one way, especially in this modern world where people want to have more of a say, more of a voice, it doesn't really reflect on the environment or the voices locally of the people in front of those screens. So we need to consider a balance in the way that we're scheduling content. Of course, we need the centralized content. Maybe that's two thirds, three quarters of it. But we need to partition an amount of the calendar and the schedule to allow for local management and even local members of the team to also contribute content to those screens so it feels more reflective of the world as they see it. And even a way to pass content and information back upstream, maybe through a QR code to a feedback form or something like that. If it's all one-way traffic, people are going to be potentially even put off or angry about it, and it won't reflect the reality of their world.