Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon. Image via CrunchBase

When I first began working at a publicly traded company, the team who managed the media relations around our company’s quarterly earnings never shared information with the broader corporate communications team, even our employee communications team. It drove me crazy, especially as someone working on that employee communications team.

How were we supposed to keep employees informed about the company and its strategy if they were hearing news first from the news media? We always had to scramble to prepare employee communications regarding earnings because we got the earnings news release when the news media got it.

Though this was done out of an abundance of caution to ensure we didn’t violate Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules, the approach always struck me as odd, because it meant that our workforce was usually the last to know about the company’s news coming out of earnings. Over time, this changed as our internal communications team lead worked with our finance team to ensure that some sort of employee communication went out at the same time as the earnings news release.

That approach– sending an employee communications out at the same time as your earnings news release crosses the wire — respects your employees and most importantly,  is consistent with the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). (We just made sure that our internal communications lead operated under the same non-disclosure rules as our financial media relations team.)

Enter Groupon and their initial public offering (IPO) last year. [click to continue…]

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