The Very Good News Tucked Inside

The Washington Post recently combined with the University of Maryland to survey on Covid-19 issues and released their results regarding political approval ratings and predictions for when businesses should re-open.

At first this looked to me like more of the mind-numbing same old stuff until I came across this one, singular line tucked in at the end of a paragraph:

And workers also rated their employers positively.

That was it. No data, no explanation, just a minor league addition to what looked to me like scant new findings otherwise. I scoured the websites for both publishing organizations and found nothing there either.

This tells me that many of our companies are doing good jobs regarding managing employee issues during our pandemic…and their employees know it.  And this is happening when our CEOs are pushing against a steep climb, having to consider employee welfare, shareholder returns, and maintaining customer relationships during a time when it is hard to sell anything to customers.

And our c-suite teams are doing this during a crisis unlike any other. How many times have we heard “unprecedented”?

Our client companies are among those doing a very good job communicating, and here are some of their best ideas:

1. They make most communications as verbal ones between managers and their individual employees rather than large-group zoom meetings or emails; this is challenging for large companies who have employees with big teams but it works for them
2. They reserve group communications for whenever their messages are likely to activate the grapevine, choosing to tell such news to everyone at once
3. Those same managers make personal calls or text to their individual employees entirely to ask about their health, both physical and emotional, and ask the same about their families.

These are the stories that don’t make the news, the good ones about management teams working smartly together to build and maintain trust with their teams. Even if they do not have all the answers, studies tell us that frequent communication along with demonstrating sincere care will improve their engagement with your organization.

So, the next time you hear about workers who are striking or protesting, let’s recall the good jobs many of our top teams are doing, pushing against the greatest crisis of our generation.

Dick Finnegan is the CEO of C-Suite Analytics which helps client companies cut turnover by 30% and more. Contact us for help in building trust with your employees today at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com.