If you’re running a decent sized company, chances are, you’re getting a pretty biased view of what’s actually happening in your company. That’s because hierarchical org-charts often insulate business leaders from the front-line realities.
Do you live in a back-office bubble?
When it comes to company communication, multiple levels of management can introduce “errors” into the system (see “Grapevine” or “Telephone Game”). As a result, management isn’t always getting accurate information about what’s happening on the sales floor, and sales floor employees aren’t getting good instructions for the same reason. This disconnect between Management and Employees is widening into a serious problem for many companies. Communication silos like these severely affect a company’s execution and reduce its productivity.
Is a flat, non-hierarchical structure the answer?
The trendy solution to this problem is “re-orging” the company with a flat, non-hierarchical structure. This approach distributes decision-making responsibility and authority to everyone in your organization. And it depends on having employees who understand the company vision, business complexities, and ramifications of their actions as well as, or better than, you and your management team.
But what if you can’t, or don’t want to, re-org your entire company? Or what if, as more and more companies are finding, your employees don’t want a flat structure? What then?
An alternative to re-orging the entire company.
In order for both Management and Employees to do the best job, they both need the best information. Yet it’s not enough for Corporate to have a clear communication channel to front-line employees, front-line employees need a way to feedback directly to Corporate as well. An Enterprise Social Network solves your intracompany communications problems by directly connecting every employee regardless of job level, organizational structure, or corporate hierarchy.
A private social network like tibbr offers a quick and easy way for anyone in the organization to contact anyone else, either publicly to the company at large, or privately to a single colleague or team. tibbr ensures that employees see relevant posts from management and that management sees relevant posts from employees.
Information helps everyone do their job better.
Employees who interact with customers see business threats first. They see changes in attitudes and preferences before they show up on quarterly reports. They get direct, hands-on insight into what customers think. It’s invaluable feedback that often gets mired in layers of hierarchy. An ESN makes it easy to surface customer trends immediately, share them broadly, and react to them quickly and effectively.
To see the results in person, walk into any Men’s Wearhouse. The company works hard to maintain their brand image where it matters the most: at the store level. Every one of their 280 nationwide stores accurately reflects the brand. And that kind of consistency takes seamless, two-way communication and flawless execution. It’s why Men’s Wearhouse uses tibbr to keep all its employees — from the boardroom to the sales floor — all on the same page.
Erase the Management/Employee divide with tibbr.
Closing the communications divide between management and staff is critical to running any organization effectively. And nothing fosters communication and collaboration better than an Enterprise Social Network like tibbr. If you want to experience all the benefits of tibbr first-hand, sign up for a free trial now!
