Picture 1It is vital.

When it comes to breaking good, bad or scary news to employees, as a rule, most companies are piss-poor communicators. If and when they do think to inform the people who keep the shop running, it’s usually in the form of short, dismissive bullet points. Ick. Your people are your greatest asset! Learn to engage them in conversation! Oops; tangent – sorry.

I understand that spouting your message out to strangers and/or the media is one thing; chatting with your own employees is quite another. So, if you need an example of how to be transparent and validate their fears in times of uncertainty, check out this letter from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh to his peeps about being acquired by Amazon.com.

Things I heart:

  1. Hsieh’s tone, language and message flow serve to validate employees fears while still A) making his legal team happy, and B) talking to his employees like they are smart folks who mean something to him – because they expect and deserve that.
  2. He uses a smiley face emoticon AND references “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree???”
  3. He apologizes for the “suddenness of this announcement,” as it is not characteristic of the internal culture.
  4. He lets employees in his head by sharing the leadership’s strategy behind the agreement: “over the past several months, we had to weigh all the pros and cons along with all the potential benefits and risks. At the end of the day, we realized that, once it was determined that this was in the best interests of our shareholders, it basically all boiled down to…”
  5. He invites employees to ask questions and voice concerns to him directly: “please email me any questions that you may have so that we can cover as many as possible during the all hands meeting and/or a follow-up email.”
  6. He shares a video from Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos so that employees can see and hear him, get to know his humor and background, and – this is key – discover Amazon and Zappos’ shared “obsession over customers. “

So, what do you think of the Zappos internal (and now external) communication tactic? Do you agree that it’s a good example? Or am I just blinded by my Zappos love?

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