Senior management gets mediocre marks from Human Resource professionals for communicating with employees, according to a survey by Novations Group, a global consulting and training firm based in Boston. Nearly half of the 2,000 HR executives surveyed give top management a grade of C or less.

How would you grade the effectiveness of your senior management's communications with employees?
A: 14%, B: 39%, C: 32%, D: 13%, F: 2%.

The findings are a warning to organizations that they are failing to connect with their most important asset, their employees, said Rebecca Hefter, Novations Senior Vice President for Training. "HR people have a unique vantage on employee opinions and attitudes, and are ideally placed to evaluate the communications effectiveness of top management. The survey results aren't just disturbing, they're also startling, given the time and money devoted to internal communications.

The HR executives were also asked to identify the causes of senior management's difficulty connecting with employees:

Senior management relies too much on e-mail                                             35%
(and little face-to-face time with employees).
Senior management assumes a single message is enough.                   30%
Senior management has no feedback loop in place.                                    28%
Senior management's messages often lack clarity.                                     24%
Senior management communicates too much, too often.                             3%

"Interestingly, few faulted management for trying too much to communicate, observed Hefter. "What stands out is the inherent weakness of e-mail for employee communications. The Internet is used more and more, but there seems to be a point of diminishing returns when e-mail is relied upon so much. Employees like to see and hear their management and may feel depersonalized by too much e-mail messaging, instead of direct contact.

The Novations Group Internet survey of 2,046 senior human resources and training & development executives was conducted by Equation Research.


Novations Group is a leading provider of consulting and training services on four continents. Novations is recognized for its expertise in diversity & inclusion, employee engagement, talent management, employee selection, leadership development, organization communications, sales training, customer service and project management. For more information, visit www.novations.com