Indirect Employee Communication via Blog
An unanticipated benefit of my blogging has been that it gives my employees a window into my strategic and tactical thinking, as well as insight into what I'm focused on and what my interests are. This is, of course, a logical side effect, yet one I had not thought about when I started blogging a few years ago.
I find that I regularly hear from team members about ideas triggered after reading my blog and realizing that I was giving strategic thought to one area or another. In other cases, I have discovered that some of my more philosophical rants (like my recent commentary on the importance of saying no) helped some employees better understand how I approach decision-making.
Given my heavy travel load and the havoc that can bring to internal meeting schedules, I find this communication especially valuable.
The most interesting thing to me is that this all occurs on a public blog. Certainly I could create a private blog accessible only to company employees, but I try to maintain a 30,000 foot view as much as possible, so that's well-suited to public blog communication. Being part of a larger, transparent conversation hopefully reinforces the candor of the message.
Though I have read a few other observations along these lines (Jason Calacanis pops to mind, though my recollection is notoriously bad, so I could be off base there), I think this value of blogs deserves more attention and understanding. Whenever one can communicate with two audiences simultaneously, that's a good thing for today's time-strapped company leaders.
Obviously blogs cannot be a substitute for good communication with your team, but it can be an added resource for team understanding and hopefully even guide some good informal brainstorming.
Comments