Our latest research on Building a Change-Ready Organization shows that agility is a huge driver of performance. Improving the agility of your workers will give you four times the performance returns than simply getting them to work harder. What drives employees to be more agile? Understanding the company’s overall business context is a vital component that helps employees to embrace new ways of thinking and come up with ideas on how to improve existing processes.

Our quantitative analysis shows that employees’ ability to make connections to company context, beyond their immediate role, increases their agility regardless of what position they hold within their company. However, some industries might find it harder than others to foster understanding of the company for every segment of their workforce. Manufacturing industries, in particular, find it difficult to reach front line, often non-wired, workers who lack access to common communications channels like email and intranet. Frequently, even if the messages actually manage to reach these workers, employees tune them out because they don’t seem relevant or are not communicated in “their” language.

Communicating to non-wired employees thus presents significant challenges to communicators  — some of the most common issues we have been hearing are:

• Explaining why non-wired employees need to know any corporate information => i.e., ensuring that the messages are relevant and helping employees understand how THEY can impact the corporation.
• Improving information cascades =>  i.e., getting the right people to pass on the relevant messages.
• Overcoming limitations of traditional channels => i.e., coming up with innovative ways to pass on corporate and business unit messaging to someone who doesn’t have access to the internet or mobile.

Do you struggle with any of these challenges? How do you overcome them? Or any ideas of how to communicate with those non-wired employees who DO have wireless access?  Would love to hear your thoughts!

CEC Related Research:

• Building a Change-Ready Organization
• Communicating with Shop-floor Employees