This to me is really a no-brainer – a wall calendar displaying either this month and next month OR the whole year (which is what we had at one station I worked at) let’s everyone – EVERYONE – see what is happening.
From Staff Leave bookings to school holidays, business birthdays, releases of movies, annual celebrations, planned outages, updates to equipment due, sales reports, even staff birthdays and one calendar at a station I visited had listeners birthdays on it too (now that’s commitment).
Lay it out so everyone can see it at a glance – because it makes it easier to make staff rosters for events, plan what you will need for those events and make sure that no-one misses special events.
Don’t forget to include when major town, city, state, and national events occur too.
You can put coded notes on it specific to each department, so visitors at the station don’t know when surveys are due , when annual competitions are planned for – when sales props must be sold by, etc.
More importantly – everything you can find should be put up there.
Colour code your notes and keep it up to date – we had stats included on ours with number of entries/calls per day for comps, number of calls made by the sales team, etc so the CEO, sales and the promo team could see at a glance how things were going.
We also had a rule that only one person was ever allowed to make changes to it to avoid the usual vandalism that would occur in an office, and it made for a neat, proprietary document that everyone would refer to.
Some stations have tried to do this online, but having seen about 20 of these now – they are just not as effective a tool when online – a real world version is essential.
I have also seen versions which were erasable whiteboards, a wall painted with blackboard paint, a sheet of Perspex that had been painted on one side with lines and months which was then attached to the wall – and one which was just post it notes sorted into months on a wall, another had large sheets of paper taped to the wall – so don’t feel you have to buy a long wall mounted ‘professionally produced calendar’. Be creative and find what suits your workplace.
Go on – get a real world – BIG WALL CALENDAR – it does make a huge difference and more importantly – it must be centrally located so everyone walks past it every day, and knows what is going on.
