A Lesson Learned

Our accounting company suggested that we get a sign-off of the plan design of our 401-K from all of our employees. This seemed like an easy enough task... for someone who doesn't have an illogical employee base. I sent a letter and the form to all of our employees asking them to read the form, sign it and return it as DeltaHouse needed to have these form in order to do our audit. Needless to say, I had about 85% of the employee sign this without a problem... and the other 15% treated it like a government conspiracy to read every DeltaHouse employees' thoughts.

It took me about three weeks of begging, pleading and grovelling to get the last few stragglers.

A few weeks later, I was at a party and met a college professor of organizational communications. I told her about the my issue of the lack of 401-K sign-offs. She told me that the employees didn't accept it or understand because I (i.e. the internal source of the communication) was not credible because I tell the employee base things all the time. And that I might have had better success if I had someone from our accounting company or the 401-K company say the exact same thing that I did.

Taking this knowledge in, it made a lot of sense. I'm using this in the future. And I wanted to pass this on to my loyal readers.