Tracking the impact of your words

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2008 :: By Paul Cohen

view chart

What can you do to improve employee satisfaction and team performance? Pay attention to how well you communicate with your direct reports. Research at two high-performing companies shows that effective employee communication can influence business results.

Most employees prefer to get information from their immediate supervisor. And employees who rated their supervisor highly in personal communications were consistently more satisfied with other aspects of work, according to studies at General Electric and Hewlett-Packard. Conversely, the less satisfied employees were with their supervisor's communications skills, the less satisfied they were with the rest of their work life (see chart). The impact was by far the greatest on employees' overall rating of their supervisor.

The better a manager communicates with his or her employees, the better their job performance.

In a 2002 study conducted by Hewlett-Packard, more than 1,400 employees were randomly selected from among three performance groups—top, middle and poor performers—based on the company's standard human resources assessments. Across the board, job performance tracked with each group's satisfaction with management communication.

"There is quantitative proof that the immediate manager's role in the communications process is even more important than long believed," says Brad Whitworth, past chairman of the International Association of Business Communicators, and the executive who led the studies at HP. Whitworth is now senior communications manager at Cisco. "The data suggests, in short, the better a manager communicates with his or her employees, the better their job performance."

HP found that five questions in their 120-question employee survey were the best predictors of employees' overall job satisfaction—and all five relate to the quality of the supervisor's communications (see How Do You Rate?).

The reason for this correlation is clear, says Whitworth: "The manager's role has shifted from providing information content to providing context-not just answering 'What's going on?' but helping employees understand 'What does it mean to me?' Managerial communication is as much about listening as it is about talking. It means engaging in a dialogue with employees to make sure there's common understanding. Done well, it's why employees continue to rate their manager as a key and credible part of the complete information mix."