Brief about CEO: Chief Executive Officer, the highly respected management posts in any industry. Based on my experience, most of the CEO’s are reserved and very few who are down to earth. CEO’s may be either highly qualified or minimal qualified, and this does not matter to any industry until the company is running smoothly.
CEO Speech: Most of the CEOs have interaction (speech) with the company employees, maybe once in a quarter, 6 months or once in a year. By doing this, the CEO thinks that they have made the biggest speech of their life, but it has to be understood as this is an ongoing process.
The reason why I am telling this, Most of the CEO’s only talks about revenue and bottom life profit of their company, which is hardly understood by 20% of the overall employees. The 20% of employees include only the middle management, rest all are there to hear only about hike and bonus and are least bothered about the numbers associated with the company.
Now you may be wondering, why I said 20% include only the middle management, and the reason is middle management appraisal and work is related to the numbers, which matches the frequency of the speech (Revenue and bottom line profit). The rest 80% of the employees do not understand the terms, revenue and bottom line profit in the context of the organization and I think it is waste, a CEO talking to such employees only about revenue and bottom line profit and not the other important points.
Now let me explain in my opinion about how a speech should be done by the CEO to the employees of the organization. There are two options according to me.
The first option is if the CEO’s wants a speech to be done for all the employees of the organization, CEO’s must,
- Understand the people or the audience of the organization
- Must talk about the Passion
- Talk about the new policies in the company
- Merger and Acquisitions
- Revenue, bottom line profit, hike, and bonus
- Recognition of top performing units, projects and employees
Let us now understand all the six points slightly in detail,
- Understanding the people and audience is all about, making employees understand, about company overview, especially for newcomers, where does the company stand now with respect to their competitors? What is Revenue? What is bottom line profit?…etc in the context of the organization, like, how these terms are associated with each employee by relating the numbers with their daily working in the organization and make them feel they are equally contributing to the company’s growth and profit. This way employees feel proud about their work and may create great future leaders in the organization.
- CEO must talk about, how an employee must be passionate about their work, asking employees by focusing or be passionate in their area of expertise. Encouraging them to attend training organized within and outside the company. Passion is nothing but, what you like or should like, the enjoyment of the work etc.
- Once a year most of the companies, create new policies, maybe management policy, work policy or HR policy. These new policies information is communicated to the employees either by mail or presentation. Out of these policies, the CEO must focus on or pick the important policies and explain them in detail to keep employees motivated. CEO may ask the concerned department to take over the speech in order to be more specific.
- Talk about Mergers and Acquisitions of the company if any, like which company we have been merged or going to merge in the future and which company we have acquired or going to acquire its pros and cons. Normally these topics include in the speech, once in 2 years or 5 years, as mergers and acquisitions dont happen overnight.
- Communicate the good news like hike, bonus, profit etc in order to leave a positive note to the employees.
- Recognition of employees is a very important motivating factor for any company. This section is actually initiated by HR and departmental heads and usually organized at the end of the speech. CEOs must announce the top-performing units, projects and employees and hand over the signed certificate and medals/trophies to the deserving employees. Employees feel motivated in receiving the award from higher management. This way CEO’s gets a glimpse of the top-performing employees and can keep an eye on them and helps to consider deserving people for future technical and management positions.
The second option, if the CEO has a time constraint for speech, then he/she may communicate revenue, growth and bottom line profit etc only to the middle management and ask middle management to communicate to the rest of the employees in a simplified manner. Out of these two options I explained, I recommend the first option, as it creates a very close attachment and trust between higher management and employees of the organization.
