If you’ve ever been part of a growing company, especially one that started out with 3-4 people sharing a handful of desks, you’ll understand that how you communicate as a company changes completely as you begin to scale.
In the beginning, everyone knows pretty much everything. You’re always chatting across your desks and sharing successes and failures on Slack. What everyone is working on and what they’re trying to achieve is clear.
Once employee numbers reach the double-digits, things begin to change drastically. Specialists in different business areas are hired, new employees with different working styles come on board, and as the volume of work increases, employees often find themselves working heads-down on their own projects and aren’t always paying attention to what everyone else is doing. Slowly but surely, your employees start to feel like they’re no longer kept in the loop.
Not keeping people in the loop isn’t the fault of any one person within the company, it’s just that successful communication takes time. Where previously a conversation about company strategy or new initiatives could be had over a coffee table or discussed during lunch, it now takes pace over a number of interactions with different groups of employees. This increases the possibility of misinterpretation or of information being relayed “through the grapevine”.
As companies grow, they need to start to hone and document their communications protocol. In our experience, there are two important actions every company should take:
1. A clearly-defined protocol around different types of communication
Different mediums are suited for different messages. Be clear and transparent in your communications expectations and document how both one-on-one and group conversations take place, whether over messenger or in person.
Additionally, clear protocols should be put in place on when to move a conversation from one medium to another. For example, on instant messenger, a simple conversation could unintentionally become adversarial since tone is so hard to convey in writing. It’s necessary to document and share with the team that when this starts to happen it’s time to jump into a meeting room or pick up a phone right away to sort out differences.
For smaller companies, this doesn’t need a lot of detailed documentation — it can be as simple as a one-page matrix listing all mediums of communication and best practices for their usage. You can continue to build on this as your company grows and new challenges emerge, but having these protocols in place early can help mitigate serious miscommunication further down the line.
2. A schedule for sharing company-wide information
The second and more important facet of a successful communication plan is building a schedule where company-wide information is shared and team members have a chance to have their say.
Team leaders need to meet with their teams regularly to understand their goals and challenges, management needs to have a chance to meet with the wider employee base to disseminate important information, and everyone should have the opportunity to listen to and learn from each other.
Each company and team will need to find their own rhythm and schedule, but these are a few examples we’ve seen in companies we’ve worked with:
- Daily Scrum — a time when everyone can share their projects, any challenges they might be experiencing including who or what is blocking them, and what they’re going to be working on next.
- Weekly Management Updates — a 1-2 hour meeting each week for management to review key metrics, challenges, personnel issues, and other important company updates.
- Weekly functional team meetings — some teams aren’t suited for daily scrums, so team leaders in these cases should meet with their team to share goals and challenges and allow leaders to pass on any pressing information from management meetings.
- Weekly all-hands — in many companies this may be overkill but when used effectively, these meetings can be a great time to share individual achievements, product or marketing launches, and key data across departments.
- Monthly town hall — once per month is usually the best rhythm to share larger-picture views of how the company is doing and how each department is contributing. In our view, this is a key meeting that should be set up quite early in a company lifecycle. In early-stage companies, it can be quite interactive. As companies grow beyond 20-25 people, when Q&A can be difficult or awkward, it often takes the form of a presentation prepared by management and team leaders. It also should correspond with financial month-ends so this data can be shared.
- Annual retreat — once a certain scale has been reached, it becomes more and more important to make sure employees participate in the company vision. Bringing employees together once per year, whether offsite or just in your own offices, and giving them a break from their day-to-day jobs, becomes essential to building a cohesive team and a solid understanding so individuals and teams can work together effectively.
These are just some of the communications protocols we’ve seen emerge and helped to build within companies. If your company is struggling with internal communications, a BeachHead Organization Audit can help you identify the changes required to solidify team cohesion and engagement
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At BeachHead, we are passionate about helping businesses scale up from a strong Operations foundation. The BeachHead Organization Audit (BOA) helps founders evaluate their business through an objective lens. Our BOA scorecard allows us to evaluate all aspects of a growing business so we can recommend changes based on what the organization wants to accomplish in the next phase of growth.
If you’re ready to take your company to the next level, reach out and let’s start a conversation.
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