Dave Cain: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award-winning financial services and business advisory podcast that challenges your old school business practices and their traditional business suit culture. Our guests are industry professionals experts who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie, will offer you meaningful modern solutions to help enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host, Dave Cain.
Did you know that 70% of your employees are disengaged at work at one point or another? It’s true and you better believe that hurts the bottom line.
Communication from top down and bottom up is one of the biggest factors affecting communication and engagement of your employees. If you want your employees to be engaged, you must be intentional, consistent and transparent with your communication. Here to talk to us today about the importance of internal communication is Brent Ardit, a principal at Rea’s Dublin office and a recent graduate of the firm’s next gen program where he and his team spent countless hours researching this topic and developing a plan to improve internal communications within Rea & Associates and within Brent’s client base.
Welcome to unsuitable, Brent.
Brent Ardit: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Dave: Good to have you.
Brent: I think what episode are we on right now? Maybe number 70?
Dave: Could be.
Brent: I took me 70 episodes to get here. I’m pretty excited to talk.
Dave: Was it McGwire or Bonds who get the first one to hit 70? Was it Bonds?
Brent: Yeah, I think so.
Dave: Should he be in the hall?
Brent: That’s a tough question. That’s tough. I would go with yes. I think his baseball career is proved, proved himself.
Dave: Let’s stay with a little bit of baseball theme since baseball season is upon, pitchers and catchers reporting spring training. Opening day is right around the corner and I know you like baseball.
Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave: Let’s just pretend opening day. You’re the leadoff batter coming to the plate. Everybody has got a walk up song as they come up the home plate. What’s your walk up song?
Brent: I’m a big Reds fan and I like Joey Votto. I know Joey Votto at least in the past has used Paint it Black by the Stones. That might be my walk up song. I’m a Led Zeppelin fan and I could do a Led Zeppelin, When The Levee Breaks, Kashmir.
Dave: You’re a little young to be listening to that stuff.
Brent: My dad, he is a doo-wop guy.
Dave: Good songs always stay around forever don’t they?
Brent: Yeah.
Dave: Let’s talk about communication. I think maybe it’s this a little overrated. We’ve got email. We’ve got cell phone. I can text. I can get a hold of anybody just about anytime I want. I don’t read handwritten notes anymore, so that’s how to look at it. Why do we need a communication plan? What’s this all about?
Brent: I equate communication with engagement as we mentioned earlier. We talk to a lot of folks and you mentioned next gen earlier. This can apply to any business, any industry, but the experience that we had here at Rea is, when we talk to people and you mention email, you can send out emails, I think we get inundated with emails on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes where I think companies fail is they focus too much on email communication or they focus too much in another area of communication. With the diverse workforce nowadays, you need to expand the way you communicate with your employees, uses of technology whether that’s mobile or through apps or things of that nature that you can use to improve internal communication throughout your organization.
Dave: In our notes leading off the podcast, we talked about communication from the top down and also the bottom up. Where does this start? Start at the top down or the bottom up?
Brent: It’s both. It’s definitely both. From the top down, sometimes that’s the easy part. It’s easy whoever it is. The CEO/president is able to speak to a strategic plan or a vision or direction they want the company to go and how they communicate that. The difficult part is getting the bottom up and creating a mechanism or a framework in place to enable administrative staff or lower level staff to get their input as well. I had a session one time and I can’t remember the speaker’s name off the top of my head, but he was speaking to strategic plans. We have a strategic plan here at Rea, but he was saying that 70 to 80% of strategic plans will fail and usually that’s because they don’t get buy-in from their employees. They do not provide the mechanism to get feedback and buy-in from the groups. I think that bottom up is as important if not more important to an organization or a company.
Dave: You mentioned the framework in your group and the Rea next gen group put together the framework. Before we go there, by the way, I’ve got to congratulate you on your promotion to principal at Rea & Associates.
Brent: Thank you very much.
Dave: You’re one of the younger principals.
Brent: Yes, I am.
Dave: Congratulations. Certainly, leader in the firm, that’s very obvious. I can see why you were selected to be on the next gen program and attack the communication. I think it’s pretty critical. Let’s talk about the framework. Where does that start out? Is it a training program?
Brent: It has to do with training. We spoke about top down. I definitely think in order for proper internal communication’s framework to be successful, you have to have buy-in at the top, at the CEO level, at a vice-president level, manager level, whatever that is. You need to have buy-in at the top with a framework like that. Again, getting everybody involved and allowing everyone to have a voice is definitely important.
Dave: As your group put the plan together, it was specifically for a CPA firm. However, in discussions with you, it could be a manufacturing entity.
Brent: Absolutely.
Dave: It could be a medical office. It could be a nonprofit organization. The type of industry doesn’t matter.
Brent: No, it does not, not at all.
Dave: The key is communication. What are companies doing wrong in their communications? Obviously, you guys study that. That’s probably where you started, but what are companies doing wrong?
Brent: We mentioned earlier about emails. I think people are inundated with emails on a day-to-day basis. Focusing too much on communication through email is probably one. Not having a consistent message, especially when you have … For instance, with Rea, multiple offices but whatever industry if you have multiple locations, consistency, making sure that message is consistent. Focusing on the right people, the right areas. You get stuck in the day-to-day. You just get your head down, get your work done. I think that’s where it tends to fail.
Dave: The consistent message, that comes from the top, but it has to be shared with the entire vision throughout the organization. If not, there’s been a break in the communication. You’d mentioned and we are all victims I guess of email and sometimes we rely too much on email to get our information. You are saying that email may not be the foundation of a communication plan. It has to be far reaching.
Brent: That is correct. I’m not suggesting that we should get rid of emails. There is an appropriate place for emails. I think a lot of times we rely too much. We focus less and less on face-to-face communications, just sitting down with someone and having a conversation. When we were doing a lot of our research, what we noticed is when there’s a lack of communication or an employee does not hear from their manager or supervisor on a regular basis or they don’t get that feedback that they’re looking for, they take that as “Management is keeping secrets for me” or “Maybe I don’t trust management. They are trying to keep something from me.” As long as you have that two-way communication and you really focus on that and everybody in the organization realizes their role and it’s everybody’s role, it’s not just a marketing person or the president of the company. It’s everybody’s role to make sure that the lines of communication are open.
Dave: Why does engagement matter? We talk in the opening about a very large percentage. In fact, that percentage just took me by surprise, very large percentage that’s not engaged in the business. Talk to me about why does engagement matter.
Brent: It cost the business money and there is research upon research. You can Google it and you can find it out there, but it’s proven that disengaged employees, actively disengaged, or not engaged at all can cost the business money. There is this data out there. I think it’s 20 to 25% of revenues can be lost a year due to disengaged employees. 40% of the work week can be lost due to a communication breakdown among the team. It’s costing companies and organizations money by having disengaged employees.
Dave: You are not bullshitting me aren’t you?
Brent: No.
Dave: These are facts?
Brent: These are facts. We can Google it right now.
Dave: This may sound like a strange question, but what’s an engaged employee look like compared to a disengaged employee?
Brent: An engaged employee, those are the ones that they are cheerleaders for the company. They are collaborative. They work well as a team. They are always going that extra mile. The disengaged employee, I know we’ve all seen them from time to time. They are checking their cell phone half of the day. They are checking Facebook. They are watching that clock. As soon as it strikes five o’clock, they are ready to get out of there. They complain about the company. They don’t have buy-in on strategic plans or visions of the company. They communicate that with their fellow employees. That’s probably the most devastating is because one person hears negative thoughts about a company and that can start to snowball to other employees. Before you know it, you have an issue on your hands.
Dave: Sure. You mentioned obviously it’s everyone’s responsibility if you will to be a cheerleader, be a communicator, but there has to be I think and I refer this question to you. Does there have to be a cheerleader, a leader of the entire communication plan that organizes, direct traffic, you name it?
Brent: Yes. Throughout our process in the next gen program and, again, I would recommend this to anybody looking at an internal communication framework within their company is this concept of single source responsibility. Making sure you have one person that is responsible for making sure the plan and the framework is working as it should. Now, you can have people underneath you and champions if its different locations, but you need to ultimately have someone that has that single source responsibility and making sure that the framework is being used properly.
Dave: What kind of background would that single source person have? You take a CPA or a content marketing manager or a website designer and all of a sudden make them a communication expert.
Brent: I supposed you could. I’m not certain I would recommend. I think it needs to be somebody obviously that’s a good communicator, is able to understands the company, is able to work with different personalities. I would think it has to be someone of a strong personality and be able to act quickly on their feet. They’re going to come in contact or hear certain things and they need to know how to react and where to go. Someone who is quick on their feet and aggressive and a good listener. I think those are the traits that you really want to look for in somebody.
Dave: Sure. I think in a company or organization or industry, you’d mentioned multi-office, multi-location and we certainly have a lot of clients that are like that. There are certainly clients and businesses that have just one location, but their employees work outside of that location on a regular basis, maybe don’t come into the office every day. You don’t see that group. How do you communicate with them?
Brent: I think that’s where it comes in as far as technology is concerned. There’s always opportunities for video conferencing. I know that’s something we are starting to explore here at Rea. There’s other ways to accomplish that or at least making sure that once a quarter or once a month or whatever that is for your company that you are gathering people together and you do have that face-to-face and you are communicating, what’s going on in the company, where are we going, whether it would be financial performance, goals, those sorts of things. I think it’s definitely important to have something like that established.
Dave: Sure. It almost sounds like there’s a lot of pitch and catch going on. Obviously, the communication, that side, there’s the pitching, but the employees have to catch, have to want to be involved. I guess that’s where the engagement versus disengaged comes in.
Brent: That is correct. If you can get those disengaged employees more engaged, hopefully, it is a two-way street. You can have the best internal communication framework and have all this in place, but if the person on the other end isn’t as responsive, there’s going to be some breakdown there. Hopefully, you can move that needle little bits and bits from an engagement standpoint.
Dave: You talk about technology, using technology and that you are no different than I am as we come into the office after a long weekend or vacation or even overnight. We open up our email and we are slammed with emails. The first thing out in the gate, we are a little confused, a little frustrated because we got to clear those emails. To me, somehow, we’ve got to manage that in the communication plan.
Brent: Absolutely. That’s what I was saying you are inundated with emails. Making sure there’s other medium to get the message across whether internet, apps. The big thing now is mobile. Everyone carries a smartphone or mobile phone around. Being able to manage that email is key in your day-to-day and making sure setting certain times that you’re going to look at email during the day.
Dave: Are you going to start twitting us on a daily basis? You and the president?
Brent: I’m not a big Twitter guy. I’m more of that Facebook guy although. I don’t post along in Facebook either. Maybe the email works for me. I read a stat the other day I think by 2020 we are going to have five different generations in the workplace. As you get this millennial generation enter the workplace, they are looking for the use of technology when it comes to communication in the workplace.
Dave: Obviously, you got a great amount of passion for this topic. What excites you the most about this internal communication? Service offering or plan however you want to phrase it, what gets you excited?
Brent: It is a passion of mine. I like the thought of making the people that come to work every day making it better and better for them. Obviously, when you come to work, you want to be engaged. You want to feel part of the team. You want to feel like you are contributing. If you don’t have that opportunity to do so, it’s discouraging from an employee perspective. What excites me is being able to bring that person. Maybe they are not engaged or actively disengaged and the thought that I can turn that around and get them more engaged and have a future in the company is exciting to me.
Dave: Let’s talk about a few things that should be, it’s a must communications that must be in every organization or probably is in your plan is performance in the communication plan.
Brent: Absolutely. I think that’s one of the big things is feedback and it’s more instant feedback. It’s not just having the annual performance evaluation. You have that every end of the year and then it’s not until next year do you hear from your manager or supervisor on how you did. I think it’s ongoing. It’s that instant feedback. We live in a day and age where we expect everything right now. We just talked about Twitter and Facebook and everything is at our fingertips and I think that’s what employees are looking for nowadays is that instant.
Dave: Instant feedback?
Brent: Instant feedback.
Dave: What about company happenings? What’s happening in this office or this division or this segment. Is that a must?
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. People want to hear what’s going on in other offices or other locations. With best practices or what’s working well in a certain office, maybe they can share ideas in best practices to be used in another location.
Dave: Let’s say we have an employee, Abigail, that just had triplets. Is that information that would be helpful?
Brent: Yes, it is. We love to know if Abigail had triplets.
Dave: What about company performance? KPIs. Should that be shared in the communication plan?
Brent: Yeah, I think to some degree. Again, when we were going through this process, we talked to a lot of people. We were never suggesting that the company should reveal everything. There are certain things that only certain levels or certain individuals need to know, but employees want to work for a company that is transparent. One of those transparent items would be financial performance. They want to know how the company is doing. If they are not doing so well, they want to know how they contribute to make it better.
Dave: Like you said earlier and I’ll paraphrase your comments. The communication must be intentional, must be consistent, and must be transparent.
Brent: Correct.
Dave: There isn’t a communication plan one size fits all, is there?
Brent: Absolutely not. It will vary by the company, the culture in the company, company size, number of locations. It’s definitely not one size fits all here. I think there are some general concepts that we’ve talked about today that companies can implement to make this successful.
Dave: As you said would sit down with the client or prospect to talk about communication plan, your job would be similar to a reporter. You would continue to ask questions to understand the culture or the situation within and then build the plan accordingly based on the stats that you received.
Brent: Yes. We found that focused groups were very successful, employee surveys are very successful. Again, sitting down and talking to people and getting their thoughts, what would you like to hear from the top down? What would you like to see communicated? Those type of questions and interview process that you can sit down with different folks at different levels and see what they are looking for.
Dave: It sounds like the Rea next gen group follow the Rea way and it’s coming up with a proactive solution to communication based on feedback from the team.
Brent: Absolutely, yes.
Dave: Our guest today is Brent Ardit, principal with Rea & Associates in the Dublin office of Rea & Associates. Brent, his day job is he is an auditor and a damn good auditor at that. Again, I want to commend you for your group’s actions and forthcoming and your passion for a communication plan. Before we wind up, we started with a baseball theme. We’ve got to end with a baseball theme. Baseball, it has not started. Season hasn’t started, but who do you see in the World Series?
Brent: That’s a good one. Usually, you got the Cardinals out there. I’d like to say the Reds, but they’re definitely in a rebuilding year. Who know? Maybe we get the Indians back there.
Dave: Save the chief.
Brent: Save the chief. We’ll go with the Indians.
Dave: What about national league? Cardinals? You’re going with the Cardinals or the Reds?
Brent: No, I can’t go with the Cardinals. That’s a division rival there.
Dave: All-Ohio? We’ll go All-Ohio?
Brent: We’ll go All-Ohio.
Dave: There you go. We’ll listen back in October to see if this happens. You might be Mr. October now. Thanks again for joining us on unsuitable, Brent.
Brent: Thank you.
Dave: Listeners, there are a lot of great resources on the website at reacpa.com. Take a look and there’s information to help improve your communication strategies. If you want additional information, drop the podcast and email. We’ll put you in touch with Brent Ardit. Don’t forget to subscribe to unsuitable on Rea Radio on iTunes or SoundCloud. Until next time, I’m Dave Cain encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.