>No, I’m not talking about their personal compensation. Rather, your company’s financial results. Was it a good year? Was it a bad year? Is it enough to just point them to the press release? Does it even matter if your employees understand your company’s financial results?
I’d argue that it is critically important that people have a well-formed understanding of their employer’s business model and results against that model. For one thing, it helps contextualize the decisions that senior leaders make — from provisioning IT, to the size of expense accounts, to travel expenditures, to increasing/reducing the size of the workforce etc. And since so many people own shares of their employer’s stock, it just makes good sense to understand your investment (don’t you wish that sentence could be teleported back in time to Enron and Worldcom employees?)
I’m going to attend — and speak at — the Council of Communication Management’s annual meeting. This year one of the focus topics will be communicating financial results. The size of IBM and the demographic and geographic diversity of our employee population has made communicating financial results challenging, but we’ve come up with some approaches that I hope the CCM members in attendance will find worth hearing about.
Ethan McCarty 