Kari Fluegel

Marking a significant anniversary for your business can be an exciting time; however, while you’re clinking champagne glasses and celebrating the past, don’t forget to drive your business goals for the future. An anniversary celebration provides an excellent opportunity to reinforce your current customer relationships, attract new prospects, differentiate your business from the competition and enhance your growth, so don’t waste the occasion on a simple party or two when you can leverage it for much more. Set…

Your business’ success is not a singular accomplishment. Many people contributed to the achievement, and an anniversary celebration is a logical time to recognize them for their support. Thanking current employees, customers, vendors and others with whom you do business is standard, but have you considered thanking those who might not be so obvious? Recognizing such individuals will make your anniversary tributes complete and could payoff in the future as well. WHO: Former employees WHY: Your employees are…

Any given year, every company founded more than a year ago celebrates an anniversary, and any event so common, by definition, is not news. Generating interest from media requires creating or finding stories that are compelling and out of the ordinary. This week, we continue our own 25th Anniversary observation with the second half of our list of 25 ideas to inspire your anniversary tactics. No matter what you choose to do, make sure the story can’t be…

A milestone anniversary provides an opportunity to recognize employees and thank customers, but if you hope to receive some external acclaim, the mere passage of time is rarely something that attracts attention from news media. However, with sound planning and creative thinking, you can use the occasion of your milestone anniversary to create news that spurs media interest. In honor of our 25th Anniversary, here is the first of our 2-part list of 25 ideas to help inspire…

A crisis can shake a company to its core and put revenue and reputation on the line. While many companies invest time and effort into preparing operational response and external crisis communication plans, few make a similar effort to get ready to communicate internally when things go wrong. Well-informed employees can be highly effective company ambassadors. Clear and frequent communication during and following a crisis will provide them with the information they need to support the response. Make…

Mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity is on the rise. According to Deloitte, 84 percent of corporate executives anticipate a sustained, if not accelerated, pace of M&A activity across several industries through mid-2015. Unfortunately, many of these mergers may fall short of their financial projections for one simple reason – failure to effectively integrate the two organizations. Mergers and acquisitions require extensive number-crunching and due diligence to get the deal done, but the day-to-day effort required to make it…

By 2015, the global mobile workforce will reach 1.3 billion or 37.2 percent of the total labor force, according to International Data Corp. In many ways, communicating with employees who rely on receiving information via a mobile device is no different than communicating with employees in an office. The same basic rules apply: communicate frequently, keep your messages clear and consistent, and be timely and relevant. But, employers aren’t communicating well with remote employees. According to Fortune Magazine,…

Change bombards us all day every day, or at least that’s how it feels, and in the workplace, the overall success of any given change initiative rides on the effectiveness of your communication with the employees touched by it. This makes when, how and what you communicate to your employees critically important in successfully implementing a change initiative. When Waiting too long and communicating too little are the most common change-related communication failures. This is especially true in…

Anyone who has been a manager knows it’s a tough job. Managers are constantly stuck between the demands of upper management and the often conflicting needs of employees. With everyone pulling in different directions, effective communication isn’t the manager’s most pressing issue. Consistently, studies on employee engagement over the last 20 years report that employees prefer to receive work-related information from their immediate managers, whom they often trust more than senior management. Given that this middle layer of…

In a successful organization, communication is everyone’s job. From the C-suite to the production line, everyone acknowledges and accepts their roles to receive and comprehend information, and to provide and accept feedback. To establish this kind of healthy, two-way communication throughout a company is a challenging yet easy task, and it starts with one person — the CEO. Research and real-world experience have taught us that employees want to hear from the CEO on the company’s vision, direction…