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Get IT Done - Let Me Tell You Something You Already Know
get IT done
Let Me Tell You Something You Already Know — by André Godfrey
Let me tell you something you already know. The great American remote working experiment has proven successful and there is every likelihood that it will continue and even grow.
Those hard-working staff that worked diligently at their jobs when that meant physically coming into work and being at a desk, continued to work hard when working at home. Those laggards who had poor work habits in their previous work environment continued to display poor work habits when working virtually. Not a surprise.
The quality of work performed however is a management issue (i.e. it is your fault), and we won’t address that here, but we will talk about how communication with remote workers possesses unique challenges; what those challenges are and how some businesses are addressing those challenges. After all, working remotely is here to stay albeit it may morph into a more hybrid model.
Is communication directly linked to productivity? That concept gets a lot of heads nodding ‘yes’ but I believe that while many managers understand that conceptually, they do not understand the reason why communication is the singularly most important function of management. The reason is that the largest budget item of any company is almost invariably payroll. If payroll is a business’s largest expense then by extrapolation, anything that improves the quality of what ‘payroll’ produces empirically falls to the bottom line in either revenue, gross profit or reduced expense.
I’ll give you some examples of communication segmentation with brief explanations and then begin a considered list, that as you read it, I would like you to think in terms of how significantly each item affects the bottom line.
Let’s start.
Understanding of New Initiatives – how quickly your people become aware of new initiatives, give input to new directions, and begin to make contributions is paramount to the success of those initiatives. Compliance, Understanding and Observance – whether compliance was dictated from within or without your organization, the downside of non-compliance could sink your business quickly. The worst thing to hear from staff is ‘I never heard about it’. Customer satisfaction deliverables – customers deliver revenues, and their continued satisfaction is tied directly to continued revenues and referrals. If there are shortcomings or better ways to deliver value, those methods must be communicated. Now here is my laundry list without expansion but hopefully somewhat self-explanatory:
Understanding of Company Policy Training/Training Reinforcement Improved Internal Coordination Employee Morale and Retention Behavioral Modification Health and Safety Issues Building the Internal Brand Business Continuity Preparedness Litigation Avoidance Onboarding or organizational changes
Each and all of the above are so important as to be vital to a business’s success. There’s a tool we invented years ago to measure the ROI of communication. It can be found at www.escreenz.com/Pricing/ROI-Calculator.
While the calculator was designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our eScreenz™ product it can be a great tool to simply demonstrate the outrageous ROI that better communication brings to any business. You estimate the number of employees multiplied by the payroll + benefits mean and see what the most minimal improvement in communication could bring to your bottom line. Many of the individual components listed above are contained within the calculator itself and even a 1% productivity gain is substantial.
We didn’t specifically tackle remote communication in this article but we will in the next issue of Rochester Engineer©. I thought the ‘what’ businesses communicate and the ‘why’, would be a good first step before we tackle the ‘how’.
