Listening, Interviewing, and Conducting Meetings

1. Comunication close-up at Kelly Services

First of all Kelly Service of Troy is the ultimate service business. Like many organizations, Kelly Services started out with the feeling that “something wasn’t quite right” with performance management and found that oral communication is essential when you`re dealing with 500.000 temporally and 3000 full-time employees. The company’s leaders – some from HR, but many more from the business – then had the guts to deeply analyze the entire performance management process with no pre-conceived notion of where they would end up. They examined the traditional solutions – better training on calibration, better communication around how to assess performance. Those were not the right solutions for Kelly Services (though they might be for your organization). Instead, the leaders at Kelly Services focused on creating a unique business process that created the most value for their business. And abolishing performance scores was where they ended up.

Kelly Services provides annual market adjustments as appropriate, given an employee’s position within the salary range. Further, the company has developed an evolved definition of “total rewards” that reflects the holistic approach the company takes in providing appropriate recompense to employees. This approach includes incentives, recognition and other rewards.

David Anderson learned that the documentation requirement in most countries only extends to proving that conversations were taking place -- not recording what was being said. Since performance conversations still most definitely take place at Kelly, this arrangement was not a problem.

Kelly created the concept of senior leader talent summits, which are forums for leaders to discuss their talent, the development activities that have occurred and next steps in development. Talent summits typically cover discussions of the top two to three levels of management below the executive level and a small number of other top talent employees who leaders wish to highlight. Problem-solving meetings have even more interaction.The purpose is to reach a decision or coordinate the efforts of other people.

Recently Dave organized a problem-solving meeting to work aut a program of helf-care benefits for temporary employees.Then he draw up an agenda that suplied as much background information possible.Dave sent out the agenda in advance and then contacted all the participants by phone.

The meeting itself then went rather smoothly, with Dave asking each participant to express an opinion.Oral communication techniques like those Dave are a key to achieving that sort understanding.

2. Communicating orally: The basic skills

Dave Anderson`s job may involve more oral communication than most, but his experience in by no means unusual. Speaking and listening are the communication skills we use most.

So to speak more important, oral communication provides the opportunity for feed-back.When people communicate orally, they are able to interact.They can ask questions and test their understand of the message; they can share ideas and work together to solve the problems

In additions, they can convey and absorb nonverbal information that reveals far more than words alone. By communicating with facials expression,eye, contact, tone of voice, gestures, and postures, they can send subtle messages that add another dimension to the spoken words.

In my opinion many people owe their success to their ability to give good presentations and to participate confidently in discussion, despite the fact that both are initially a major source of anxiety for most of us. As with any behaviour-based skill there are those who are 'gifted', but that doesn't mean that effective discussion techniques, charismatic public speaking and presentation skills can't be learnt. Through learning the techniques you'll also develop the ability to understand how the communication process works, so that you can adjust your approach to suit your purpose. Clarity of oral communication and well-developed interpersonal skills, when interacting in a group or one-to-one, are attributes that make us more successful students, professionals and all round communicators.