Every 90 days, the executive leadership team of every publicly traded company delivers an Earnings call to shareholders and analysts to review the previous quarters’ business results and to discuss and share future performance through forecasts and general guidance.

These Earnings Calls are very important and can significantly influence the analysts and more importantly, the employees of the company. The best leadership teams can uniquely combine humility, transparency, and data into a story that gives direction and convinces analysts to want to buy more stock in the company, hold their stock, or sell their stock. It can motivate or demotivate an entire workforce. It is said there is nothing better than a great earnings call to fire up the employees and nothing worse than a terrible earnings call to put them in the doldrums.

Over the past few years, I have heard more executive and senior leaders push their employee base to listen to the earnings calls as a way to learn more about the business and to help create better internal alignment around direction and decision-making. Unfortunately, most of these same executives believe less than 20% of their company listens to the earnings call and maybe at best 2% of the company can follow along. And that is startling.