Sending e-mails or writing your vision on paper and handing it to your employees to absorb doesn’t work, says Prashanth Rajendran.
The chief operating officer and co-founder of Pilgrim Software Inc. says that you can’t underestimate the importance of outlining a clear vision for employees because it’s linked to the overall health of the company.
“You have to be able to get a critical mass within your company to be aligned with you if you want to scale,” he says. “The way you’re going to scale is by having significantly more people within your company participate in whatever activities you think are critical to your company’s growth.”
Rajendran uses face-to-face communication to get the company’s vision across to his 100 employees at Pilgrim Software, a software solutions company that posted 2008 revenue of $20 million.
Smart Business spoke with Rajendran about how to communicate your vision to your employees and make sure they understand it.
Maintain an open dialogue with employees. One of the things that we have seen really work is the fact that you try to maintain relatively an open dialogue with the various levels of the company.
You need to have not only a clear message about where are you trying to go, [but] you want to be able to convey that message periodically so that the message does not get forgotten. Also to be able to show that the successes that we are having actually go down that message and also sometimes the relevant failures so you can learn from what didn’t work so that your path toward that message is continued to be fine-tuned.
E-mail is good to be able to provide more of a snapshot of what has been achieved. But when you want to communicate a vision and you want to communicate a larger message, you really want to do that face to face, so that if questions come up, you’re able to answer them. Sometimes I may not have a question, but let’s say in this case, Sandy, who is my peer here, may have a question. Through that question, I can learn something through that message that I didn’t quite think about it that way.
We have found that any time it is a strategic topic and it is a strategic communication, we are better off communicating that face to face. The downside is trying to get everybody into the same room at the same time. So you end up getting maybe about 85, 90 percent of the people in one shot.
Then you figure out who didn’t get to listen and how do you go about communicating to those people.
