FATHOM No. 8: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

The world is noisy and getting noisier by the day. The amount of information available — through email, texts, chats, video calls, meetings, online media, and more — can be overwhelming, disorienting, and is almost always distracting. Good information becomes difficult to separate from bad. And in a business context, all this noise makes it harder to be heard causing good ideas to be ignored, important decisions to be delayed, and decreasing employee morale.

Companies that want to compete and thrive need to find strategies to diminish the distraction. Leaders need to develop structures and practices, for themselves and their teams, that allow for focus, efficiency, and ultimately more powerful communication. And they need to cultivate the skills and practices that allow everyone in the organization to communication more effectively.

FATHOM No. 7: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

Communication forms the bedrock of any successful company — for the organization as a whole and for the employees who work within it. Strong external communication attracts clients, sells products, and boosts reputation; strong internal communication builds relationships, increases productivity, and increases job satisfaction. Importantly, strong communication isn’t just about being heard — it’s about persuading an audience to act in order to create even greater efficiencies, shorten time to market, and build a collaborative and cohesive team, among many other benefits.

Yet many early-generation employees lack communication skills, especially persuasive communication skills, and, in our experience, don’t always see communication as an essential skill. Additionally, the way many leaders approach communication skills building does not resonate with younger generations. That’s a problem for both the organization and its leadership.

FATHOM No. 6: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

At the Latimer Group, we’ve found it useful to focus on the concept of Belonging. A helpful perspective comes from Deloitte’s ‘Workforce Experience by Design’ practice, which defines belonging as “comfort, connection, and contribution”: knowledge that people will be treated fairly and respected in the workplace; that they have meaningful relationships and are connected to their organization’s goals; and that their strengths help achieve those goals.

Understanding belonging through these ideas underscores its importance for employee productivity and retention.

FATHOM No. 5: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

The world has changed in significant and dramatic ways since The Latimer Group was founded twenty years ago. In the corporate world, one of the most disruptive changes has been the increase in noise that surrounds us every day: the constant and ready access to emails, texts, news feeds, and any information we could possibly want, always just one click away. There’s an increasing and corresponding presumption that everyone is always available, whether for a meeting or to respond to an email, and an increasing expectation that every deadline is now. Under all these pressures, and with the possibilities for distraction nearly endless, we all struggle to manage and protect our time. More importantly, when everyone around us is struggling with the same issues, it is harder and harder to get people to focus on what we are saying, and simply be heard.

FATHOM No. 4: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

Virtual communication, already a significant part of our workplaces, grew to be our only avenue for interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The disruption caused by stay-at-home orders forced sometimes painful transitions, but it also created the opportunity for significant evolution and innovation across business. In our last issue, we looked at the overall picture of the advantages of virtual communication, its impact on creative processes, and its potential pitfalls. In this issue, we look at ways to implement more specific best practices to get the most out of virtual communication.

Communication is required to create a strong workplace culture—one that has the flexibility to allow in-person, remote, and hybrid employees to contribute their best work. This kind of culture relies on leadership that clearly and consistently articulates the values and mission of the organization and identifies the practices and policies that support those values.

FATHOM No. 3: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

As we move forward and see a near future when businesses return to in-person work, or a hybrid of in-person and remote work, strategically astute businesses will continue to apply the lessons forced upon us during the pandemic. When used well, virtual communication can add significant value to business operations, even when it is not strictly necessary.

But best practices on-line do not always correspond to best practices off-line; the skills needed to extract the most benefit from virtual encounters are not necessarily instinctual. And not all virtual communication works as readily in an in-person or hybrid environment. Leadership must identify strategies for virtual communication and create actionable plans to cascade those strategies throughout the organization. Investing in infrastructure and training will be crucial, as will be ongoing feedback and modeling. Embedding virtual communication into business practices and continuing to accrue value from it will require thoughtful, deliberate implementation from the very top.

FATHOM No. 2: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

Across industries, executives strive to create a culture of repeatable performance—a standard of work that promotes consistent, efficient, and predictable outputs. Yet when it comes to communication—one of the most integral components of any successful company— corporate leadership has rarely sought to set frameworks and standards to create a similar threshold of repeatable performance.

The reasons vary, but essentially this oversight comes down to the misperception that communication is a “soft skill.” This term has a toxic effect: it diminishes the importance of communication. It implies that a strong performer can get by without it and, even more, that if you aren’t naturally gifted at it, you probably don’t need to (and maybe can’t) get better.

Yet, as the noise of our business life has amplified, the value of a communicator who can simplify information into a concise, memorable, and digestible form has skyrocketed. For executives in particular, communication is a power skill.

FATHOM No. 1: LINK TO DOWNLOAD

Your company has a problem—a massively expensive and pervasive problem that starts at the top. Yes, this is a problem that begins with you.

But the good news is that there is a solution. And the solution, just like the problem, also starts with you.

That problem? The relentless proliferation of bad meetings: meetings without clear purpose, that have no defined limit, and that result in more confusion. And unequivocally, the reason bad meetings are so common is because leadership so often allows bad meetings to happen. A culture of bad meetings develops when leadership fails to set clear guidelines and expectations, allows meetings to be scheduled without oversight or consequence, and runs their own meetings poorly.

In other words, if executives and managers convene or lead meetings that are badly structured, are overly long, lack a concise agenda, and require unnecessary attendance, that’s how meetings will be run throughout the organization. Even if leadership sets out goals or provides training to rein in the meeting madness, the suggested changes will only be effective if what leadership does reinforces what it says.