If you read any blog about business management, you’ll likely see effective communication listed as a must-have technique. Communication is so important to company culture, one study measured the cost of poor communication at $62.4 million per company per year for businesses with 100,000 or more employees.
That’s an expensive misstep.
At the PFD Group, effective communication is one of our core values and we also recommend it as a key success driver for our high-growth clients.
But what is effective communication?
We find many CEOs theoretically understand the importance of great communication both internally and externally, but they sometimes flounder when it comes to execution.
To borrow the words of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw,
“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
The Importance of Repetition
When it comes to team communications, CEOs can especially undervalue the importance of repetition.
How often have we heard the phrase “don’t make me repeat myself?” Inherent in the statement is the assumption that repetition is a nuisance or a waste of the CEO's time.
The advertising industry has no such concerns with repetition.
If you can finish this statement, “I wish I were an Oscar Meyer…”, your brain already understands the importance of repetition.
The popular hot dog jingle was first released 60 years ago and it ran so repeatedly for nearly 50 years, that most people can still recount the joys of being an Oscar Meyer wiener a decade after the commercial last aired.
Understanding that commercial enterprises spend billions of dollars to build brand awareness and to keep their messages top of mind, also means it shouldn’t be impossible for team leaders to take a page from the advertising playbook.
Great Leaders Encourage Repetition
Jeff Weiner, CEO of Linkedin, who has been rated one of the best CEOs to work with has stressed the importance of repetition. In a recent Business Insider interview on effective leadership techniques, he says
“A friend of mine once paraphrased David Gergen, saying on the subject of repetition, ‘If you want to get your point across, especially to a broader audience, you need to repeat yourself so often, you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalize what you're saying.‘“
The Science Behind Retention
Science has proven that people hear and retain things differently.
In one example, researchers at Canada’s University of Waterloo have illustrated the “forgetting curve,” to show the importance of repetition when it comes to studying for midterms.
“When you are exposed to the same information repeatedly, it takes less and less time to ‘activate’ the information in your long-term memory and it becomes easier for you to retrieve the information when you need it.”
According to the chart, If your brain does nothing with the information it receives, by day two it will have forgotten 50% to 80% of the information it has received. The key takeaway here is the importance of communicating regularly with your team.
Regular Communications Through Regular Meetings
At PFD Group, our main communications occur through two regularly scheduled meetings: our daily huddle, and our longer weekly meeting.
For a daily huddle, we recommend a check-in that lasts no more than 15 minutes and sticks only to relevant topics. Our agenda generally includes highlighting good news, providing a metrics update, and sharing lessons learned. We close out the huddle by discussing the most important item for the day, with a specific plan for what success looks like at the end of the day.
Our weekly meeting is usually scheduled for 60-90 minutes and follows a similar agenda as the daily huddle, but with the addition of top action items and a list of three priorities for the coming week. The agenda also incorporates a review of company priorities. Here the team has the opportunity to process and re-process information every week, keeping our company priorities well ahead of the “forgetting curve.”
Our weekly meetings also help build accountability, because they encourage the entire team to participate in the communication process, especially when it comes to solution building.
The Weekly CEO Letter
To further emphasize company priorities, we also reiterate them in a written format through a weekly CEO email. The information in the email is compiled by our entire senior leadership team but is edited by our CEO and sent to the entire company from his email on a set schedule every week. In it, we celebrate our wins, reinforce our core values, and share our KPIs.
By regularly sharing our core values and KPIs through in-person emails and written communications, we ensure plenty of repetition for all employees, allowing for flexibility in each individual learning process.
If you’re looking to develop better communications, we’d love to support you and your senior team. Please contact us and we’d be happy to schedule a call to discuss your strategic vision.