As E&C professionals, many of the problems we face at work result from poor communications.
- An employee violates a policy she didn’t know existed
- A manager doesn’t discuss the importance of onboarding training with his new employee, who decides to skip it
- The team conducting a routine unannounced audit poorly explains the routine nature of the exercise and the local organization goes into a tizzy
- A new compliance program, which took 2 years to create and significantly changes how things are done, is rolled out with little warning
- One business unit in France develops a new process in response to a new law and does not share it with sister business units in the same country
- Employees respond to a survey and never hear about the results
I could go on but you get the point. Poor communications create frustration at best and significant compliance issues at worse. Often, this happens because we think that we have too much to do to waste time telling others about what we are actually doing.
This reminds me of a quote I heard years ago when I didn’t take time to exercise: “If you don’t make time for health now, you better make time for sickness later.” Similarly, when we don’t take a minute to communicate about our E&C initiatives, we often spend hours fixing problems.
The Ethical Leader 