Employees: Communication Connect the Dots

A company is only as strong as its employees.
Why? If the employees slack off at work and do not really care about the orgs success, than the organization is affected (for worse). Which is why I am a strong advocate for building a strong communication base for the employees.
I define a strong communication base as a place to listen to employee feedback. This way, employees can make another feel valuable or communicate that their work and contribution is respected. A slacker at work could turn into employee of the month. So, the question becomes: Do you think the solution is that easy? Or am I being too optimisitc?
Well, I think it is that easy and I know so from personal experience. I used to work in an organization where I felt invisible and so did every other employee. The boss was very authoritative and did not take to well to listening to other people's point of view. He had a vision for how the company should be run and he was going to stick with it. There were so many things that he did wrong that we all had simple solutions for. There were also so many things he could have done better when engaging customers and we all had ways that he could fix that too. Finally, he was a poor facilitator at improving employee relationships and making our work feel valued.
Eventually, he realized communication was key and put up a white board where we could leave suggestions and then held a weekly meeting to discuss everyone's suggestions.
By listening to what the employees had to say, my boss turned his company around. I guess it truely is important because even my Social Media and PR book devoted a whole chapter to the importance of listening to the employees.
Below is a listing of other ways to communicate with employees as discussed by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff:
1. Create an online community that employees can participate in (maybe a message forum). This is the virtual white message board. This is great because if a company is big-branches everywhere can find one place to come together
2. Encourage employee blog posts.
3. Build a company wiki (a place to edit and store information about a company). This is great because it is a project that everyone can work on and everyone participating has the same goal: build company sucess.
And, there you have it! But always remember it is extremely important for the management to always be listening and care about what their employees do and say.