Your company memos are frequently disregarded|Tips on how to prevent it

How many of the employees at your company will pay attention when you send out an important memo outlining a significant new change initiative, policy revision, strategic shift, or another significant topic? 

When people check your email message, which is far from a certainty, ask yourself the following question: How many people are aware of the information and support it? 

If you’re now questioning whether your memos are effective, consider asking yourself the following: Did any employees show signs of amazement when the last significant change you announced by company-wide memo began, as if they hadn’t gotten the memo outlining your plans?

Memos omit the reason. 

The fact that corporate memos don’t provide answers to people’s most pressing issues is one of the main reasons they aren’t read. 

Your memos aren’t intentionally ignored by staff members; rather, it just sort of happens when they can’t find the information they need. And here’s the real shocker: Depending on who is reading your memo, it may not always be clear what the most crucial question is. 

Let’s delve deeper into this final topic. 

The online test “What’s Your Communication Style?” has been taken by over a million people, and the results show that there are four unique basic communication styles: intuitive, analytical, functional, and personal.

* Intuitive communicators prefer to go right to the point without wasting time or providing background information. 

* Analytical people seek out hard data and figures. 

* Those with a utilitarian style like a step-by-step analysis of the procedure. 

*Personal communicators, on the other hand, favor emotive language in a casual, amiable, and warm manner. 

It’s important to keep in mind that meeting each communication style’s needs calls for more than merely rephrasing the same material slightly differently. 

In general, delivering distinctly diverse forms of information is necessary to give individuals what they desire. 

The best way to illustrate this is with an example, so let’s say your business announces a merger through an internal memo from the CEO. 

Here is an example of how you could handle each of the four different writing styles in that memo:

The intuitive approach: “By joining forces with this other business, we think we can take the lead globally in this area and pave the way for steady growth over the next ten years.” 

The analytic style: “After examining sales data from the previous 18 months, we found that 32% of lost sales were attributable to having insufficiently diverse product options. Our revenues would have climbed by $832 million YTD if we had a larger catalog. 

“The merger procedure will take 12 to 18 months,” says the functional style. To unify our marketing activities, we will first form a joint task force. Undoubtedly, integrating operations is a significant problem for us. Implementing a program to detect any customer service issues is the second stage. We’re prepared to slow down integration efforts if it means protecting our customers from any mistakes. Step three will be to gather a few months of data, and step 4 will be a phased integration rollout.”

The Personal style: “I understand that many people are concerned about losing our unique culture and our connections to our coworkers and consumers. I agree, and we’re going to make sure that what we do benefits both our interpersonal and professional ties. I see this as a chance to improve on what we already do effectively while also providing us a chance to address issues that you have told me have been aggravating you for a long time, such as communication breakdowns. And feel free to contact me or any other executive to continue the conversation. This place is unique because of the relationships we have with our clients and among ourselves. 

You’ll observe that every style requests a distinct piece of information.

However, analytical people could care less about the empathic feeling phrases requested by the personal people and instead want actual data, with statistics and decimal points, to support the merger. Functional people want a week-by-week description of the following phases, whereas your intuitive workers want you to get right to the point as soon as feasible. 

Your company’s memos probably only speak to one of those styles if they resemble the thousands my staff has read and revised. The population of your employees, however, encompasses all four kinds, so omitting even one may leave out 25% of your workforce. 

You should begin your memoranda by speaking to the intuitive, then shift to the analytics due to their differing attention spans, and finally functionals, and finally, close with the message for personals.

Memos are a quick and affordable way to speak with staff members. You should undoubtedly provide a thorough and precise communication plan to a note. Direct communication with employees should take place between leaders at all levels, whether in person or by video. However, the traditional business memo still serves a purpose, therefore it’s critical to treat memos seriously and pay attention to all of their different formats.