I read this new post by our friend Becky McCray on Small Biz Survival today – on how you can turn customer prospects into purchasers by repeating your message in different ways – and couldn't help but think there's a connection here to employee engagement for a more productive workplace.

Becky says seven is a magic number when it comes to branding; people often need to hear your message that many times before they remember it so that you're top of mind when they need something that you offer and are prepared to make a purchase.  An implication of this tendency on small businesses, she says, is that in general marketers need to have more patience and keep their message, such as a product promotion, going longer, spread out across more channels on which your audience spends time.

Importantly, she ends her list of small biz implications by suggesting that leaders turn inward and

Extend the same courtesy to your employees.  Repeat instructions in more than one way.  Provide the same info multiple ways.

We have seen this as a hallmark of small firms that rise to the top of our annual Top Small Company Workplaces competition.  From hiring interviews and mentoring of new hires, to frequent all-staff meetings, lunch and learns, the company Intranet, and employee recognition activities, financially successful small organizations achieve their results in part by communicating the same thing to everyone across multiple internal channels, multiple times.

In terms of building a sustainable, high-performance workplace culture, continually mentioning and linking tasks and metrics back to your mission and core values can help you keep a pulse on whether you always have the right people on the bus, working on the right things, to keep moving your business forward.

Related: Our next IDEAS newsletter will share proven employee development strategies.  Sign up here to receive it, and apply the "seven times" messaging philosophy discussed above once you've read the article!