Even though we have amazing new leadership (witness Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya as his first interview) we know by now that we are in for a rough ride, as we work through the issues of the depression and the deflationary spiral we are being sucked into.
It is a time where communication is even more important, both at a national leadership level and within each organization. Writing on the HBR site, John Baldoni gives key reasons not to cancel that corporate meeting. He cites issues such as building trust, the importance of telling stories, of updating with customers.
Yet we know that many budgets are being cut, and travel and big meetings are certainly good targets for shrinkage. Consider your ability to stay connected, both with virtual meetings, but more importantly, with those issues Baldoni discusses -- sharing stories, catching up with the issues that are important to diverse stakeholders. You should be doing this with an online site anyway! He says:
"Meetings are far more than a collection of speeches or talking points. They are an opportunity for people of similar interests to come together and share their stories about how they are coping as well as what they are doing to increase business. Customers need to mingle with executives and employees and vice versa. People need to hear each other out."
Set up an area on your interactive pages where everyone in the organization can hear these different voices -- how they are coping, what they need from management, what management is doing to address the additional stresses that are affecting the enterprise.
In Aperian Global's latest newletter, they cite some suggestions for involving team members in specific communications processes, in order to maintain true collaborative and creative integration of work, rather than dispersed and separated individual work:
- Creating an environment of trust within the team – particularly to foster team members' trust in each others' skills; and
- Strategically developing work design approaches that promote a creative process.
Challenge conventional thinking, encourage dissent, recognize progress.... these are more themes from another post of Baldoni's on January 23. Think how you could put these ideas into an online forum, and encourage some focus from your people's grouped intelligence. From my perspective, you will need to think carefully about the focal question, to stimulate the most effective input; but you don't need to wait for a meeting to do this. Aperian talks about documenting processes and bringing closure to team project steps. Do some gardening in your online workspace! Be structured enough to be effective, and be interactive enough to leverage the shared knowledge and creativity of the team.
