1. Communication & Feedback
Introduction
Numerous articles & reports discuss how employees leave their manager, not their jobs. Therefore, communication and feedback from a manager is critical for ensuring employees are engaged and retained within the organization.
Objective
To exercise effective communication and feedback avenues for employees custom to their medium for receiving it.

2. Communication & Feedback
Managing Employee Communication1
Stemming from this article is Lloyd Field’s Communication Model, which is outlined into eight primary steps below:
The Communication Model
Step 1) Goal Setting: Communicate goals, objectives, and targets
Step 2) Job: Communicate job responsibilities and performance standards
Step 3) Feedback: Communicate individual performance review feedback
Step 4) Recognition: Builds relationships showing personal concern for the needs of employees
Step 5) Upward Communication: Makes a time and place for communication upward from employees to reinforce employee's sense of value
Step 6) Department: Discusses the scope and role of their department in relation to the entire organization
By using these six steps the payoff is that employees who feel valued are more productive, more likely to take initiative, and are frequently more willing to play a role in innovation
1Field, Lloyd M. "Managing Employee Communication." Lloyd Field: Human Values of Business. Lloydfield.com

3. Communication & Feedback
Mentoring Millennials1
Effectively communicating feedback to employees in Generation Y is critical. Performance management hinges on an organization being able to offer honest, timely, and useful coaching. Four different types of "mentoring" - or handling performance management - are expressed.
Reverse Mentoring: Reverse mentoring is shifting the responsibility of mentoring from the manager to the employee. This is where the employee is asked to share or teach the manager how to do something effectively. It could be something small, such as teaching the manager how to use something or something more serious like how they like to be managed.
Group Mentoring: A group mentoring approach is less resource intensive, but still effective. It is typically led by a more senior manager, but can be peer-to-peer, and is a technology platform that allows others to share feedback. As an example the author explains a program called Dare2Share where coaching happens through social collaboration. A topic is shared and others provide feedback through Dare2Share.
Anonymous Mentoring: This method is matches mentees with mentors outside the organization and exchanges are conducted online. Both the mentee and the mentor are anonymous and do not know each other, but a relationship is built to help guide the mentee.
Microfeedback Mentoring: Microfeedback is what could be compared to as a twitter-esque approach. It is succinct real-time feedback with 140 characters or less. Using this approach uses a medium which Millennials are familiar with. It's short, fast, and more readily available. The length limit forces people to think carefully with their response and because it is near real-time they can provide more relevant detail.
Using these different avenues for mentoring Millennials once can expect to have stronger performance management and engagement from their employees.
1Meister, Jeanne C., and Karie Willyerd. "Mentoring Millennials." Harvard Business Review (2010): 1-5.

4. Communication & Feedback
Exercise
Being able to build strategies around bridging communication gaps is an important skill that all employees should have. Collaboration and innovation are central to our task and generational gaps should be explored.
For your generation, using the table below, write in what you think of as critical for each row. Then write how you think this is potentially different for the other generation categories.
Once completed, have each member in the activity explain the characterizations of each generation for each category. How are they different? How could these be improved when communicating and providing feedback?
Boomers
Gen X
Millennial (Gen Y)
Communication Skills
Adherence to standard working hours
Promotions
Repetitive job assignments that need to be done each month