5 ways to foster a culture of open communication with your staff, in your ogranization .

HR / OD / Culture 

Here are 5 ways to foster a culture of open communication with your staff, in your ogranization . 

(1) Be “unbrutally” honest. 
Open communication requires honesty—but NOTHIG  requires brutality. 
Ensure that all corporate communications uphold the highest levels of respect and that employees know this is expected of them as well.
 Should employees communicate otherwise, remind them that their feedback is important, but it must be respectfully submitted.

(2) Check in weekly.

 A weekly, ONE-QUESTION  survey designed to provide ANONYMOUS feedback can help managers stay in touch with what their teams are thinking. 
There are inexpensive systems that can be used to e-mail the entire staff with a new question each week—and provide management with the compiled feedback for review.

(3) Ask for anonymous suggestions. 
Remember the old suggestion box? 
 That reminds people that they are empowered to provide ideas for improvement, or at least to bring subjects to management’s attention that they might NOT otherwise feel comfortable addressing.

(4) Act on feedback ! 
Put a system in place to acknowledge, DIGEST , and ACT on all of the feedback you are going to be receiving. 
People will only take the time to participate if they see it translate into meaningful results. 
That doesn’t mean every idea will result in change, but every idea should be heard.

(5)Discover their dreams.
 When people join an organization, they hear all about the company vision. 
But that’s a very one-sided communication if we don’t hear about their dreams as well ! 
Ask each employee to create a personal vision board that will then hang in their workspace so they can be reminded of their own dreams and others can learn more about them. 
After all, the more we know about each other, the better we can communicate.
 Employees may even be able to help one another achieve some of those dreams.
Once you have opened up the communication floodgates, you may be surprised at how many insightful comments and new ideas you receive. You will also hear some things that you don’t like, so brace yourself.

Courtesy : HR Training Advisor