Make your message meaningful
Poker chips and bingo cards are common at Oversee.net’s company meetings. That’s because, to Kupietzky, alignment between employees and the company starts with transparency, and he gets creative when it comes to giving employees information and making sure they understand it.
Regardless of how you set company goals — whether they’re set in the boardroom or collaboratively built with employee input — transparency is key. Usually, it’s an iterative process to align individual goals with those overarching ones, but some employees require more guidance than others.
In general, Kupietzky communicates overall objectives clearly and frequently, and then offers individual help if employees have trouble tying their goals to that.
To help employees see the connection, he uses the helicopter process. It’s a visual reminder of a chopper hovering over a forest, with both the forest and the trees in view so it’s never just one or the other.
“If you get too specific on the goals, people forget how that fits into the overall vision,” he says. “And if you stay too much in the vision, people don’t really [know], ‘What does that mean for what I do today?’ or, ‘How do I make a priority decision about two different things I could work on?’ That’s where that ongoing, consistent communication is important because it isn’t so clear to everybody.”
Maintaining that balance requires a lot of repetition as you reinforce both the big picture and details. Kupietzky holds biweekly meetings with his management team, giving them full transparency on progress toward targets. He sends monthly staff e-mails with the same information, then holds quarterly all-hands meetings to discuss trends in that data.
“This is where that redundancy comes in, where it sounds repetitive — because it is,” he says. “But it makes sure that everyone knows, ‘This is what we’re trying to achieve. This is how far we’ve come. This is how far we still have to go.’
“Everybody can make that direct connection to what they’re working on or what’s important. The reason why you do all this is [because] I can’t figure out what everybody does and accurately predict that they’re doing the right thing. You want people to understand what the company needs to accomplish and then they figure out, ‘OK, how do I help accomplish that goal?’”
To keep the message from becoming stale, spice it up with examples.
“You always try and find something new,” Kupietzky says. “I love to get wins, specific examples of where we’ve been successful in something. It could be a project, it could be a customer interaction, it could be something that we’re better than our competitors at. I try and highlight those, and I do it for two reasons. There’s individuals that can get recognition, but at the same time, it helps people see why this is real and it’s current; it’s not just the same thing I said three months ago.”
Another way to make your message resonate is tailoring it to your audience. Think about their vocabularies and try to meet them on their level.
“Words like gross margin and net margin, EBITDA, OEBITDA and operating expenses and everything, that’s kind of second nature,” he says. “Most people in the company don’t have a clue what those metrics mean and, even more importantly, why they’re important.”
When Kupietzky rolled out the budget, he showed employees white poker chips representing revenue, red ones symbolizing losses and green chips showing profit. As he moved the chips from jar to jar, he explained what was happening and how it affected the company.
“Visually showing people how white ones become red or green helps people visualize how the company earns its money and how it spends it and how it makes more in the future,” he says. “It became a very effective way for people to understand an income statement. I’ve gone back to that analogy even without using the picture to help people understand, when we talk about our results, why that’s important and how we’re doing.”
Employees have picked up on Kupietzky’s repetition. Now, when he takes the stage to deliver a message, they get Jeff Bingo cards featuring his most often-used keywords. They can win prizes for Bingo, so they’re incentivized to pay attention.
