Vincent Chee, Director of People and Culture at Bevel - Effective Communication is Key

Vincent Chee, Director of People and Culture at BEVEL, has built his career around the unglamorous work that determines whether employees feel like they belong: how the company says what it means and listens for what employees mean back. The conversation focused on what HR teams can do to design communication as a system rather than a series of memos.

Communication failures rarely look like communication failures at first. They look like missed deadlines, surprised employees, and feedback that arrives too late to act on. Pull on the thread and you find that the channels were unclear, the cadence was inconsistent, or the manager layer translated the message into something the executive team did not intend.

HR leaders should treat communication as infrastructure. The question is not whether the company has a slack channel or an all hands. It is whether the right information moves to the right people in the right moment, and whether employees can move information back the other way without losing it in the gap.

Communication as a system, not a campaign

A campaign starts and ends. A system runs all the time. The companies that handle change well are the ones with a system in place before the change arrives. HBR research on turning employee feedback into action makes the case that organizations with continuous listening loops adapt faster than those that rely on episodic surveys.

Building a system means defining the channels, the owners, the cadence, and the response expectation for each kind of message. Strategic updates flow one way. Operational decisions flow another. Concerns flow a third. When channels get mixed, employees stop trusting any of them. AllVoices supports the listening half of the system through an engagement solution and a pulse survey product that gives HR a fast read on how messages are landing.

The system also has to account for managers. Most communication that employees experience is filtered through their direct manager, which means the manager layer is either a multiplier or a bottleneck. Investing in manager communication skills is one of the highest use moves an HR team can make.

Designing the channels and cadence

How do you decide what goes where?

The simplest test is reversibility. Decisions that are hard to reverse, like layoffs or strategy pivots, deserve direct, leader led communication with space for employee response. Reversible operational updates can flow through written channels without a meeting. Mixing the two confuses both.

The second test is audience. A message that affects everyone needs a wide channel. A message that affects one team needs that team's channel. Sending narrow updates through wide channels creates noise. Sending wide updates through narrow channels creates resentment.

What cadence keeps trust without exhausting people?

Weekly written updates, monthly all hands, and quarterly listening sessions are a strong default. Adjust based on company size and pace of change. Watch for fatigue signals through your employee feedback instruments.

Cadence is also about predictability. Employees should know when to expect each kind of update. Surprises in cadence are read as instability, even when the content is fine.

What actually works

Match the medium to the moment

Difficult news belongs in synchronous channels with a real human delivering it. Routine updates belong in written form so employees can read on their own schedule. Informal communication still matters and should not be suppressed; the goal is to make sure formal channels carry the messages that need to land precisely.

The mismatch most companies make is delivering hard news in writing because it feels safer for the sender. It is not safer. It is corrosive to trust. Synchronous delivery costs more and pays back many times over.

Train managers to translate, not just transmit

An executive announcement is rarely complete on its own. Managers have to translate it into what it means for their team's work, timeline, and goals. That translation is a skill that can be taught. Provide a short manager talking points doc with each major message, then check whether the translation is happening through quick pulse questions.

According to Gallup research on employee voice, employees who feel their manager communicates clearly are significantly more engaged than those who do not. The manager layer is where strategy becomes felt experience.

Close the loop on what employees say

Listening without response teaches employees that voice is theater. The discipline is simple. Acknowledge within a day. Decide within a week. Act or explain within a month. Publish what you heard, what you did, and what you decided not to do. Transformational leadership shows up in how the loop closes.

The closed loop also generates better future input. Employees who see receipts share more useful signals next time. The system gets smarter the more it is used.

Where Employee Relations Fits

Some communication is sensitive enough that it needs a confidential channel. AllVoices supports that need through an employee relations function that handles intake with discretion and an anonymous reporting tool that lowers the cost for employees to share what they would not say in a town hall.

Why confidential channels strengthen the broader system

Public channels capture what employees are willing to say in front of their manager. Confidential channels capture what they are not. Both kinds of input are needed to see the whole picture. The blog on building a transparent workplace culture covers how the two channels fit together.

Frequently Asked Questions About Workplace Communication

How often should leaders be visible?

Predictably, not constantly. A monthly all hands plus a quarterly written update from the CEO is enough for most companies. More than that and the bar for content gets harder to clear.

What if our managers are inconsistent communicators?

Treat communication as a manager performance area, not a personality trait. Provide templates, review them in 1:1s, and give feedback when translations miss the mark.

How do we communicate during a crisis?

Faster, simpler, and more often than usual. Acknowledge what is known, name what is unknown, and commit to a next update time. Employees forgive incomplete information. They do not forgive silence.

How do we know our communication is working?

Pulse surveys with a single item on whether employees feel informed will catch most drift. Add an open response question monthly to surface what they wish they knew that they do not.

What is the biggest mistake?

Confusing volume for clarity. More messages do not equal more understanding. The goal is the smallest amount of communication that produces the desired understanding and behavior.

What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?

Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.

Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.

Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Vincent Chee makes a useful point that communication is the substrate everything else in HR runs on. Performance management, engagement, and inclusion all depend on whether the right things get said to the right people at the right time.

The mandate for HR leaders is to design the system, train the manager layer to use it, and close the loops the system creates. Done well, communication stops being a fire to put out and starts being the steady drumbeat that holds the company together.

Request a walkthrough of how AllVoices supports the listening half of a strong communication system.