It’s conference season in the HR world and as I’m traveling around the country and meeting HR pros face-to-face I can’t help but feel the pain we all feel when it comes to employee communications.

I love seeing real HR pros speak about the transformations they are making in their organizations, and one thing, for sure, is a common theme in almost every story I hear – communication is tough! HR leaders have gotten to the point that we all know this is super important, and still it’s hard for us to get it right.

In the spirit of making this stuff a little less tough, I’m going to give you 7 Benefits Communication Mistakes to Avoid Like the Plague, to help you through your own organization transformations. Here we go!

#1. Don’t assume your news is bad!

We know a few people will take pretty much any news we share negatively, so we build an entire communication to address those few. My advice: Stop doing that! A lot of people might love the news. What about them?

#2. Don’t build a one-size-fits-all communication.

Each of your employees is a unique and beautiful pink unicorn, and, damn it, they want to be treated as such! Okay, so you don’t have to make each communication unique to each employee, but think about your two or three biggest groups of employees (could be segmented by age, location, tenure…) and at least make an effort to make comms that speaks to their unique needs.

Check out #3-#7 over at JellyVision – MeetAlex where this post was originally posted by me!