Help! I created this beautiful message and nobody’s listening!

It’s sad: HR spends hours crafting a message for employees – about benefits, or a policy change, or training opportunities – and they don’t seem to pay any attention.

You hold an informational meeting and few people show up. You leave memos in people’s boxes and you find them in the trash. You e-mail everybody and they delete the e-mails.

Deploy incentives
How can you ensure people listen to your message? Make it worth their while, is what leadership coach John Baldoni recommends.

Here are some suggested incentives that will help get your important messages across:

• Hold your meetings at breakfast- or lunchtime and provide food.
• Award a small ($5) gift certificate to, say, a local coffee shop to the first X number of people who read your informational e-mail. (They’ll have to send you read-receipts.)
• Offer people an afternoon off to read and ponder the message if they’re willing to give you their thoughts about it in writing the following day.

Source: “The Leader’s Pocket Guide,” by John Baldoni.