Depending on the environment your employees are working in, you can probably expect it to take far more time and effort to communicate effectively with non-wired groups than with people who have easier access to their line manager, the rest of their team and a computer.

Based on the case studies from Melcrum's report on How to communicate with hard-to-reach employees, here's a set of 10 generic principles to guide communication with non-wired teams.

Ten guiding principles

1. Establish what absolutely has to happen and what is "nice to have". Invest time and effort in the essentials and make “nice to haves” available for those who are interested.
   
   
2. Be honest about what's important for the team and their jobs, rather than what corporate headquarters may want to tell them. Things that seem important at head office are often irrelevant and meaningless at the front line.
   
   
3. Keep things short and simple. Limit the number of messages, use simple language and get to the point quickly. Be ruthless about cutting volume, or the important issues will get lost. Use templates to keep leaders and corporate clients brief and make sure the important points are covered.
   
   
4. Use clear sign-posting to help managers prioritize and enable people to quickly distinguish the need to know from the nice to know. Make any actions clear.
   
   
5. Design channels and approaches to suit your stakeholder groups, their jobs and their working day. Don't expect or assume they will go out of their way to make inconvenient or unsuitable approaches work for them. Base your approach on solid research.
   
   
6. Be flexible and invest extra time and resource where it really matters. You may have to repeat meetings several times to capture different shifts or make sure production isn't disrupted. You or your leaders could end up sitting for hours in the staff restaurant, working area or at the signing on point, to speak to people individually.
   
   
7. Don't ask managers to do too much. Understand what you're asking of them. A color PDF newsletter sent out to be printed locally may take ages to print on outdated printers. Huge presentations can crash systems. Remember, not everyone has broadband. A simple request to "please cascade this email to your teams" may not be that simple (especially when 50 other people are asking the same thing).
   
   
8. Don't overuse and abuse channels. The noticeboard where people sign on/by the coffee machine/in the lift is a prime location… but not if there are so many posters on there that messages get lost. Staff pigeon holes can end up stuffed full of clutter that never gets read.
   
   
9. Be realistic. Even achieving the basics may be a challenge. Focus on what really matters, don't be too ambitious, and don't make promises you can't keep.
   
   
10. Be creative. You may need to think in new ways to achieve your communication object

And if you're planning to attend the IABC 2008 International Conference in New York next week, come along to the Melcrum stand in the main exhibition hall and pick up an exclusive extract from the full report.

See you next week!

P.S. Melcrum is also attending the VMA Group's summer drinks party on board HMS Belfast in London on 9th July. Come along and join us if you're in the London area.

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Do you love to "go forward", indulge in a bit of "blue-sky thinking" or, "collect low-hanging fruit"? Then you'd better not read this article over at the BBC – 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate.

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Even though employees will always want to hear from the top, no one's more influential than an employee's supervisor.

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The Source for Communicators is a free resource for corporate communicators from Melcrum Publishing.
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Copyright Melcrum Publishing Limited 2008.