Employee Responsibility: Communication is a Two-Way Street

In chapter 10 of “Measure What Matters,” Katie Paine says employees are no longer in isolated glass bubbles. No longer can an employer spoon feed news of the organization to employees. Since the social media breakthrough, employees have access to any information about the organization any other stakeholder can get through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis and news apps. Paine says because of this rapid stream of information, around 63,000 advertisements, throughout an employee’s day it gets increasingly difficult to reach employees with pertinent information about the organization. In fact she even goes to say that “the chances of the message getting through to the employee are only slightly better than the chances of getting hit by a meteor.”

I agree that employees can gather their own information, and there is a lot of information out there in modern times. No person is in that glass bubble anymore. However, to say that a meteor hitting an employee is more likely to occur than a message from an employer getting to them seems a little exaggerated. It is an employee’s job, they are paid a salary, to be familiar with the organization’s information and actively work in the environment. Values statements, ethics, codes and goals should be known by an employee. An employee is in the environment. It is their responsibility to, within reason, seek information, read the memos, get caught up in the latest talk about upcoming goals and campaigns. Communication is a two-way street; if an employer talks it shouldn't fall on deaf ears.

Now I do not mean to say that all employees should be tossed hints and become sleuths about their organization’s needs because supervisors won’t openly communicate. Of course communication should be optimized, and then measured to see if the action taken to communicate was effective and promoted buy-in and feedback from employees. However, employees shouldn’t be treated like a helpless, wandering potential stakeholder who has never heard of the organization before. There should be a reasonable amount of responsibility on the behalf of the employee to be in-the-loop in their place of employment, even amongst the river of content flowing through their social channels.