Buy cheap Cialis Online />I read this new post by our friend Becky McCray on Small Biz Survival today – on how you can turn customer prospects into purchasers by repeating your message in different ways – and couldn’t help but think there’s a connection here to employee engagement for a more productive workplace.

Becky says seven is a magic number when it comes to branding; people often need to hear your message that many times before they remember it so that you’re top of mind when they need something that you offer and are prepared to make a purchase.  An implication of this tendency on small businesses, she says, is that in general marketers need to have more patience and keep their message, such as a product promotion, going longer, spread out across more channels on which your audience spends time.

Importantly, she ends her list of small biz implications by suggesting that leaders turn inward and

Extend the same courtesy to your employees.  Repeat instructions in more than one way.  Provide the same info multiple ways.

We have seen this as a hallmark of small firms that rise to the top of our annual Top Small Company Workplaces competition.  From hiring interviews and mentoring of new hires, to frequent all-staff meetings, lunch and learns, the company Intranet, and employee recognition activities, financially successful small organizations achieve their results in part by communicating the same thing to everyone across multiple internal channels, multiple times.

In terms of building a sustainable, high-performance workplace culture, continually mentioning and linking tasks and metrics back to your mission and core values can help you keep a pulse on whether you always have the right people on the bus, working on the right things, to keep moving your business forward.

Related: Our next IDEAS newsletter will share proven employee development strategies.  Sign up here to receive it, and apply the "seven times" messaging philosophy discussed above once you’ve read the article!

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I got an email from Mather yesterday promoting a series of five webinars they’ll be hosting once per month from June through October (you can view the email as a web page here).  The topics that will be covered in each one-hour session include creating a workplace culture of wellness, and creating "multi-dimensional" employee experiences for greater ROI.  (As I have written about before, ROI for wellness programs typically means lower absenteeism and turnover and also decreased medical insurance premiums – all of which are highly desirable by companies in today’s economy.)

You can attend the sessions individually, and Mather is also offering a group discount if you register to attend them all.  One nice benefit is that it looks like health educators, HR professionals, nurses, and nursing home admins Buy cheap Accutane Online who attend the webinars will receive continuing education credits.

We’re not making any money by telling you about these upcoming webinars – we just care about workplace wellness because the companies in our network do: 58% of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award applicants offer a health and wellness program for their employees, and an even greater share of our finalists (77%) do.

Related: This recent post shares 16 common staff engagement activities around wellness as used by our 2010 award finalists.

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I’ve been telecommuting for Winning Workplaces, which is based in the Chicago area, from a home office in Los Angeles since last August.  Until a few months ago, we connected for staff meetings every two weeks or so via phone.  Since then, we’ve used Skype and it’s been great in terms of communications team building.

We actually held a staff meeting today – here’s a screen capture I took of it:

Because everyone’s time is more valuable in a down economy, and because growing organizations must increasingly manage well over distances, it’s extremely important that virtual meetings deliver ROI.  But what goes into making them successful?

Based on my own experience, I have five general/employee engagement practices to share:

1. Double check your Skype or other software connection before the meeting starts.  This includes testing your webcam, as well as settings in Skype (or other programs) such as microphone and computer speaker connection/volume, webcam view of your office or workstation (you may need to zoom in or out with your webcam), and Internet connectivity level.
2. Dress appropriately.  This might go without saying in an office setting, but it’s a more important consideration for folks like me who, in working from home, dress more casually during other times.
3. The meeting leader should make a point to check in with the one or more people who are connected virtually if they have not been given a chance to speak up.  This can happen if the group in the room together gets going on a tangent and the discussion quickly veers in a different direction.  Sometimes audio quality issues coupled with this can hurt productivity if they lose the chance to contribute at an appropriate point.
4. The leader should also be clear at the end of the meeting about next steps for virtually connected employees.  The tendency can sometimes be to do this for people on site, and then simply say goodbye to those connected via Skype, et al.
5. As with other tools and processes, don’t assume that the virtual meeting solution you have in place now is necessarily the best one moving forward.  The meeting leader or another senior person in the company should check in with the appropriate team members twice a year, at Provigil pharmacy a minimum, to assess whether the solution you currently use is delivering maximum effectiveness for all parties.  You may find this leads you to evaluate new communications tools that will save your business money.

Related: One of our most popular posts is this one, which shares three benefits of virtual team building.

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