Getting the message to the people that matter

Jan 13 2009 by Karen Dent, The Journal

GETTING crucial information out to your staff can cause a headache, especially as your company grows. We asked some of the region’s top entrepreneurs how they dealt with the issue.

Serial entrepreneur Sir Peter Vardy of Wearside’s The Vardy Group:

“Communication is a vital ingredient of leadership and ideally it should be two-way. With a small team when you are all together you can communicate face to face, but at Reg Vardy when we had 6,000 staff this wasn’t possible, so email was used at least once every week on the same day at the same time. We also used a monthly team brief and a quarterly newsletter. These methods gave us the opportunity to tell everyone how the group was performing and gave regular news updates.

“Communication upwards is also vitally important. It is essential that we hear from people in the front line of the business so that we take their views on board. One of my sayings was ‘with every pair of hands comes a free brain’ and we need to use the intellect and intelligence of the entire workforce.”

Nigel Mills of Whitley Bay-based convenience shop chain the Mills Group:

“We have a weekly bulletin that goes out to all stores and features sales information as well as human interest info on people who have been awarded for completing particular training courses. Every three weeks we meet up with the operations team and we talk about what we got right in the previous weeks, what we got wrong and where we are going to go.

“Every three months we have a day with the managers, one in the North, one in the South. We spend the day talking about strategy, what challenges face the company and how we’re going to deal with them. We also have a trade show every year where we get together with suppliers and have a good day learning about their products. Finally, we have an annual celebratory dinner in November where we all let our hair down. Within this, we incorporate an awards ceremony with prizes for stores trading performance and so on.”

David Gillam, co-founder of Spinnaka, which monitors and co-ordinates a nationwide network surveyors from Newcastle:

“When we sadly had to make some redundancies, I actually communicated by calling the whole team together and personally explaining the situation. Generally, we don’t have newsletters, we always communicate information personally.”

Paul Callaghan, chairman of The Leighton Group of IT businesses in Sunderland:

“We have a formal staff meeting where, on a regular basis, we get everybody together and do formal presentations. We also have a fortnightly group management meeting and we decide if there is a message that needs to go out, the section heads will then talk to those people in smallish groups. This is what the Americans call an ‘all hands’ meeting, so we get everybody in the company to turn up.

“In the past, the managing director and I have talked with individuals and small groups to reassure them on new developments and decisions made but increasingly we’re getting the junior staff to actually do the presentation because we think it builds their confidence.”

For more How I ... tips go to www.ifwecanyoucan.co.uk , which is inspired by the North East networking and advice group the Entrepreneurs' Forum.