Employee Communication: Leave Your Big Words At Home!

Greetings my fellow interns! and welcome to my second blog post! This week I wanted to talk about my second project where I have been working with a program called Formstack (https://www.formstack.com/).

Formstack allows you to develop your own surveys from simple detail forms to staff evaluations. We (my mentor & I) have been developing our knowledge of Formstack in order to create easier and more comprehensive ways of determining employee performance, job satisfaction and overall appreciation of higher-level management. The first form we created was an exit survey, which asked employees why they were leaving and whether or not EB Games could have prevented this by doing some things differently. This survey was difficult to a point because we were just starting to get to know the in’s and out’s of the program and what it could do for the ideas we had in store for it.

Image 1: Formstack Building Homepage

Following the success of our first survey, we realised the true potential of Formstack and how we could better our current ways of monitoring staff job satisfaction. So we went to work and created a job satisfaction survey and added in pictures and content that would keep employees interested and responsive. These were simple images of our company mascot “Buck” the bunny saying words of encouragement but it made the survey more inviting. Usually employees would be sent an Microsoft Excel document to fill out and email back, with this survey all they have to do is press a few buttons and the information is sent back to my mentors computer in seconds. We had truly found a more efficient way of communicating with our target audiences that was beneficial to everyone.

However it was not enough that we thought that it was a good replacement for current practices, higher level management (who would be using it) had to agree as well. So we sent out the surveys to them and asked what they thought and if there were any improvements they could suggest. Everyone had a look at the surveys, gave their feedback and we were then encouraged to make another one to replace the current mid year review form for all staff both lower and higher level.  This is where I saw the real benefit of evaluation in whatever you do in the workplace. As students we are always told that it is important to evaluate but not until you see it in action and what it leads to do you really see it’s benefit.

So we set off to work and created our next survey, which would revolutionise the way EB employees not only reflect on their performance but on the way we communicate with them while they do. What I learnt the most through this project was the importance of talking to different groups of employees in different ways. Meaning how surveys should and should not be worded depending on who is filling them out and who they are asking feedback about. For instance in one of the performance review forms different managers from different levels had to provide feedback. Therefore we had to create different pages of questions depending on the level of management. 

An example of one question was finding out how employees found the quality of communication with their leader. For lower level employees the question had to flesh out the information where as for higher-level management it could be simpler and to the point (refer to image 2 & 3). I’ve always known that certain groups of people have to be communicated to in a certain way, however it is a different story when you have to put it into practice. For instance a lot of my university terminology is not appropriate for this form of employee communication.

Image 2: Lower-Level Management

Image 3: Higher-Level Management

In a way this was one of the biggest challenges that I found at this stage of my internship, just really finding the ‘right way’ of communicating with people whether in a professional or personal manner depending on the level management and their relationship with each other. You don’t want to treat the lower level employees like they’re stupid but you also want them to understand what you are asking without a doubt. This project has really made me define what it means to be a communicator in PR. In order to be able to deliver our organisations messages to its key stakeholders we need to be able to speak their language whether it is using layman’s terms or educational terminology.

Thanks again for taking the time to read my blog! Feel free to leave some comments about how you yourself are dealing with issues of communication. Whether it is with your fellow teammates/interns or your organisations key stakeholders, I would love to hear about it!

Until Next Time…