Face-to-Face

Weekly meetings have been a challenge to maintain. We have a very small, two point five person office, but even at this level if we don't make the effort to have regular structured communication we end up with the same failure-to-telepath problem you mentioned. Telepathy is over-rated. Direct, scheduled communication is old skool, but necessary.
Steve Y.
PastureLand Cooperative, Minneapolis, MN

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In January of 2008 First Alternative planned to roll out a new and vastly improved Merchandise Return Policy. Part of our vision for the new policy was that it was easy to explain and all staff understood it. In our microcosm we came up the idea of 10 tell 10. The instigator of the change made these small cheat sheets and gave ten of them to each supervisor. The supervisor then had a one on one discussion with 10 staff people. They explained to policy, gave the staff person the cheat sheet and then asked the staff member to explain the policy. When complete the staff person got a passport sticker. This strategy gave each staff person a tool to use, the clear expectation that they were to know the policy and the reward of another sticker to add to their passport.
Evelyn H.
First Alternative Co-op, Corvallis, OR

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As a quick answer to your question, like other organizations our company uses meetings of different formats and frequency. There are at least two annual occasions when we all get together (we are currently 50+ employees) - the annual "Kick Off", early in the year, when we present and discuss plans for that year, and a teambuilding event, usually 2-3 days in late spring or early summer, where we combine formal components (presentations, discussions) with fun during the days and a party or two in the evening. We introduced a new / improved intranet on our internal Web site last summer, which also has formal sections as well as entertaining ones ("Fun stuff"), as well as a management blog on various official and unofficial topics.
Ivo S.
Perpetuum Mobile, Zagreb, Croatia

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We hold regular bi-weekly meeting of all managers available, which has worked pretty well. We encourage all managers to have quick "stand up" meetings within their locations as a follow-up to the Mgr. meeting. This proves to be much more difficult with the variety of staff being full and part time. It also can backfire on management sometimes when information is shared that was not ready for the rest of the staff, or manager only information, or staff in one location understands something completely differently that staff in another location. Any suggestions on how you effectively get correct and decipherable information out to all staff? As you state a memo sometimes is not always the best way to communicate.
Jimmy E.
Old Mill Square, Pigeon Forge, TN

Face-to-Face

Logbooks

Leveraging Technology

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