Communicate
Every month, Bonham gets his 50 employees together for an all-hands meeting. It’s nothing extravagant, but it is consistent.
“It’s really just constantly trying to keep the lines of communication open at all levels of the company,” he says.
He says the most effective means of communication is in-person and face to face.
“It’s just a lot more effective if you do stuff face to face,” he says. “A lot of times you can’t do that, and websites and written communications and videos and all that other stuff are things we’ve certainly employed in the past, but you can never be as effective with those forms of communication that get filtered and not absorbed as effectively as you can with a face to face.”
When he communicates, he uses a standard format every time, always starting with the financial performance — how the company did the past month, how he expects the rest of the year to look and always looking at a series of charts about the financial position and the forecast for the company. He also reserves time to look at what they’re seeing in the business in terms of economic trends, regulatory trends and major developments with the customers.
“Anything that’s going on that could impact the lives of our employees gets put out there and discussed,” Bonham says. “I think they get used to the format, and over time, they get comfortable hearing things in the same format every time we get together.”
He recognizes that sometimes it’s not easy to communicate the things you see to the rest of the company, because you’re afraid the employees will run for the exits and put their resumes out.
“Every company, though, has challenges and no company has everything going their way at all points in time,” he says. “If you’re honest with people, they respect that, and they understand that every company has challenges they have to deal with, and what we’re trying to do is solicit them to be part of the solution, not just put the burden in management’s lap to solve every problem.”
The way to get people to help the cause is to make sure you follow up with your communication in a smaller setting. You may get some questions and ideas in the larger group, but you’ll likely get more in a small group.
“It’s important for every member of the management team to have similar discussions offline with their direct reports,” Bonham says. “In those smaller settings, people do feel less intimidated about proposing ideas and asking questions they may not be comfortable asking in a larger setting.
Just be sure your communication doesn’t stop with one large, companywide meeting.
“Every member of the senior management team has to challenge themselves to basically do similar types of meetings with their direct reports,” he says. “Those are the venues where you do get people more in their comfort zone.”
And lastly, if you want to make sure that your communication is taking hold with people, look to see how people act.
“You see nodding heads and that sort of thing, and you assume people are listening and absorbing, but it’s dangerous to make assumptions,” he says. “I guess you just make sure that the behavior that you witnessed after the meetings is consistent with the behavior you were trying to communicate in the meeting.”
