How to Talk to Your Employees
Posted on Thursday, August 9, 2007 by Frank RocheAnna Farmery of The Engaging Brand wrote a brilliant essay about how to talk to your employees in 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing to Employees. Sin #1 gives you a flavor of how authenticity and creativity are essential in employee communication:
1. Don’t explain the company performance purely in figures. Many just don’t understand the terminology or what it means….use graphs, use pictures, use stories. You wouldn’t sell food by purely advertising the nutritional data!
This is a good corollary to a piece I wrote a few days ago that advocated using pictures to communicate. Read Anna’s entire list. There are some real “Ah-ha!” moments in there.
As an aside, Anna also does an excellent podcast that you can subscribe to here. I’m a subscriber!
Anna Farmery
Aug 9th, 2007
Thank you for the link to my post. I have always believed that to promote your external brand you have to concentrate on your internal brand. I often get frustrated that companies do not communicate in the same to their internal and external customers….such a missed opportunity.
Frank Roche
Aug 9th, 2007
Hi Anna, really great work that you do. I work on the internal communications piece, and it does always astonish me that companies talk one way to customers and another to employees. I’ve found that the best companies reconcile that, but it also takes a lot of guts and determination from the internal decision makers to stay with the plan. Sometimes the path of least resistance is to do plain vanilla. Sad, really.
I really like and admire your work. Your podcasts accompany me on my train ride into Philadelphia. And your sign off is just brilliant. I smile each time I hear it.