Working Remote

As a leader, what are your top tips for effective communication, especially now during COVID and post COVID? In the new normal or next normal, however, you want to put it?

Yeah, the work-life and the way we work has changed universally. I've seen a lot of studies that suggest that only about 15% of employees want to go back to work in an office environment full-time every day and 85% either want to stay at home or want to have more flexibility. So I think this is going to change dramatically and it's going to challenge leaders in pretty substantial ways.

In the first step, I would say you've got to make it extra clear that the organizational focus is very clear. It really matters to reduce complexity and to improve the clarity on what matters and what the priorities are and where you want to go. That is absolutely critical. Second, I would say communication obviously needs to be a lot more dependent upon technology. So at Clorox, for instance, we've adopted a lot of new tools, whether that's Microsoft Teams and others that we use on a day-to-day basis today, that seven months ago we wouldn't have used at all. So in some ways, this was a unique opportunity for us to accelerate the adoption of new technology and get people to be really open-minded and willing to change.

So new technology matters, I generally find that more frequent less long communication is better. I feel like peoples' tolerance for long drawn-out speeches and long-drawn-out meetings is waning a little bit. So we at Clorox changed to daily communications but shorter. It's really important to be in touch constantly, use a variety of tools formal and informal to engage people, use technology and make it interactive as much as possible, not just one-way communication but a two-way conversation.