This blog is about improving the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
Cultural norms
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Oh dear, what can the matter be?
“E-mails and Intranet Are Top Communication Methods Used to Engage Employees”. Oh dear.
In my last post I spoke about Gary Hamel’s call to reinvent management. In the webcast I refer to there, Hamel talks about a global study of 90,000 employees around the world that was conducted by Towers Perrin and that showed that less than 20% of employees are engaged. I think this IABC News headline, above, may tell us why. Or at least part of the why.
We talk about communications as being more than crafting and sending messages. And yet, this new survey just released by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation and Buck Consultants makes it clear, We still rely heavily on push technology and message sending.
And, in case we needed more evidence, the IABC article goes on to say that “32 percent of survey respondents indicate that their organizations rarely or never conduct employee listening activities”. Oh dear.
In the world Hamel describes. A world where “obedience, diligence and intellect aren’t enough to create a competitive advantage, any more, organizations need employees to bring initiative, creativity and compassion to their work.” And, that “isn’t going to happen if we command it.” It isn’t going to happen because of e-mails and intranet. It isn’t going to happen if we aren’t listening. Oh dear, what can the matter be?
What do we need to do to create inspiring work places? Places where people want to bring more of themselves.
Is it possible? Is there a role for communications in creating inspiring places to work? If so, what is it? How do you see it?
Something to read and think about
Bill Jensen, Work 2.0: Rewriting the contract, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, 2002
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Creating extreme competitive advantage
Meeting people who really get communication is rare. So, I was pleasantly surprised to meet with Bob Weiler, founding partner of Brimstone Consulting Group last week.
It was a meeting that proved to be both interesting and provocative. Early in the conversation Bob suggested I change my business card to read Hinton : Communication strategies for extreme competitive advantage. Boy did he have my attention?
He pushed on. Reminding me of what, as an air force brat, I once knew, which is that the first thing you do when you go to war is take out or try to take out your enemy’s communications. Once you’ve got your enemy in the “dark” and unable to communicate with HQ or each other they start to think very dark thoughts. They will imagine the worst things possible about what’s going on. And this gives you a very critical strategic advantage. So the very first thing you go after is communications.
I felt like a light bulb went back on. Somewhere 100 conversations ago and in the constant fight for limited resources and budget my clients and I’d lost touch with reality. The reality that communications is not nice to have. It’s critical to have. And, great companies aren’t just OK at it. They are great at it. Individual, team and organizational mastery of communications is a top business priority. And, for the super great it is used as a weapon.
Bob suggested I go back to Kotter’s 8 steps of change model [it's a classic]. As a reminder they are: 1. Create urgency, 2. Form a Powerful Coalition, 3. Create a Vision for Change, 4. Communicate the Vision, 5. Remove Obstacles, 6. Create Short-term Wins, 7. Build on the Change, 8. Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture. Every one of these steps requires not just good communication, but great communication at the individual, the team and the organizational level.
And since Kotter’s change model isn’t the only way think about change I pulled out some notes I had on a newer favourorite of mine – Viral ChangeTM . As Dr Leandro Herrero describes it, this approach takes “a small set of behaviours spread by a small number of people through their networks of influence to create massive behavioural tipping points, translated into new routines and ‘cultures’ (new ideas established, new ways of working, new process adoption, new culture).” What will it take? Great communications.
So, I went back and pulled out some other classics:
Remember the 5 elements of management from business school? What managers need to do to get things done through their people: Planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. What will it take? Great communication.
Or the 5 P’s of marketing, those things that marketing managers use to control marketing mix: product, people, place, promotion, price. What will they take? Great communication.
Or Jim Collins description of how to move an organization from “From Good to Great”. Remember: Develop level 5 leadership, decide first who and then what, confront the basic facts, use the hedge hog concept [know what you’re deeply passionate about, what drives your economic engine, what you can be the best in the world at], build a culture of discipline, be a technology accelerator, use the flywheel effect. What will each of these need? Great communication.
Or what makes for really engaged employees [this still rankles with me, but since it’s so loved by so many] – job clarity, materials and equipment, matching strengths to the job, recognition and praise, caring about the people you work with, mentoring, valuing employee opinions, connecting to a noble cause, one for all and all for one, creating the conditions so that people can have a best friend at work, regular conversations about individual progress, creating opportunities to learn and grow [based on Gallup G12 questions]. What will that take? Yep. Great communication.
So, why is it that so few organizations make mastery of individual, team and organizational communications an essential business priority? Seems like a no brainer. What do you think?
And thanks Bob for reigniting the flame.
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“Where everybody knows your name”
There are very few of us who would associate the place we work with the Cheers theme song.
In fact that was the point of the song. Cheers is the place where we can escape our worries. A place where we’re understood and appreciated.
You’d think that a place where we spend 50% to 60% of our waking hours getting to and working in would be a place “where everybody knows your name”. But it’s generally not. Instead, it’s a place where:
- An EVPs executive assistant for over 5 years told me that her boss didn’t know she had children until she had to stay home one day with a sick child.
- A manager reported that he’d never met his Director face-to-face even though he’d been working for him for over a year.
- [fill in the blank]
What is it about organizations? After all we’re all there working toward the same organizational mission, vision and values.
What is it about these places that:
- Isolate rather than integrate?
- Create internal competition rather than collaboration?
- Dehumanize rather than humanize?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that colleagues at work need to be your best friend. Or that a weekly beer with people you don’t really even like is a solution? I’m not really a fan of the drive for employee engagement [what's really being measured?, implication that employees need to give more?, etc]. But, I do think that organizations can be places that encourage courtesy and respect. And it starts by knowing some basic things about the people you work with. Who are they? What matters to them?
Is your organization doing anything to humanize the work environment? Is there anything you can do in your corner of the workplace?
“Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
Wouldn’t you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.”
With thanks to Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo
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From the inside looking out
Earlier in my career I worked for one of the most admired brands in Canada. It’s the kind of thing that makes you proud. You walk into any situation and people are all over you about how great it must be. Except it wasn’t. The buzz and hype had created an external brand that didn’t match the internal reality.
What brings this to mind is that two more of the world’s most powerful and valued brands have taken big hits to their reputations in the past few weeks. And both of them for misleading customers.
DELL is accused of hiding significant and potentially dangerous technical issues from their business customers. Recently unsealed lawsuit documents reveal cover-up and purposeful deception that may have gone on for years.
Apple’s iphone customers have complained of dropped calls since the first iphone hit the market. They were told it was a network problem. A small problem of design which meant you just had to hold it a certain way. Then a software problem. Now, according to consumer reports the phone’s hardware is flawed. And it looks like Apple may have known about this problem for some time.
The thing is when we say DELL and Apple knew and have been misleading customers, we mean DELL and Apple employees knew and have been misleading customers. Certainly not all employees new. But, most certainly some of them did. And, no doubt many of them suspected the truth.
What’s it like to be on the inside of brands like these? To know that the customer’s brand experience is build in whole or in part on a myth. To know that if anyone really took a look behind the curtain they’d find behaviours that were questionable if not unethical or illegal. To know that your boss or your colleague is misleading you?
Rising employee cynicism and plummeting trust in leadership tell the tale. So the next time you’re asked how communications can help reverse these trends don’t start drafting new and better messages to push. Stop yourself from building a inspiring internal campaign or refreshing the intranet. Do start thinking about how you can help set the conditions for getting the right conversations going with the right people around where and how the employee experience is not aligned with the brand and discovering what needs to change.
Some additional reading
I went to see if I could find the values statements for DELL and Apple. Read in the context of what is in the news now, they are pretty interesting.
- Check out Dell’s official ‘Soul of Dell’
- Apples doesn’t publish its values statement on the web, but I did find a pdf post that looks pretty credible. If the actual values statement “customer empathy” is especially chilling.
And, I’ve been following the animated discussion on the smoke and mirrors of employer branding with Sean Trainor at CIPR Inside that adds another dimension to this post.
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Innovation culture & internal communications
There’s been a lot of talk about the need for organizations to innovate. But, since organizations don’t innovate, people do, there’s also been a lot of talk about building “innovation cultures”. My friends at CommScrum have taken the discussion further and begun a conversation about innovation and what the drive to an “innovation culture” means for Internal Communications. Here’s how I’m thinking about it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
“Innovation culture” seems to me a lot like the next generation “leadership culture”. Then everyone had to be a leader. [how that was possible I have no idea.] Now everyone has to be an innovator? [makes about as much sense as everyone’s a leader.]
So, the challenge for Internal Communicators is not to get caught up in the organizational hype and feel pressured into delivering on demand tools and tactics [sound familiar]. Instead, we need get the answers to these fundamental questions.
What needs to be innovated? Products? Services? Systems? Decision taking? Codes of Conduct? Accounting procedures? Pay policies? You get my point. Some things really benefit from continuous innovation. And some things just don’t. In fact getting too innovative would be detrimental and perhaps even illegal.
Why? To improve our employee experience? To improve our customer experience? To make it easier for the CEO to brag on the golf course? To get a headline? Understanding what’s motivating the drive for innovation will tell us how important it really is to the organization’s strategy.
Who will be most impacted? And what will the implications be for what they do and how they do it? No matter how wide or deep the drive for innovation goes, not all employees [I include execs in here too] will be affected equally [see What? above]. As communicators if we assume anything different we may find ourselves creators or amplifiers of mixed messages.
What? When? and How? It’s important to get an adequate take on what’s already being planned/done to create an “innovation culture”? And to understand how those changes will support employee innovation. New processes? New reward systems? Training? Supporting tools and tactics? For an interesting take on what needs to change, check out Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan’s book, “Leading outside the lines”, p.177. This should give us a clear idea of how seriously the leadership is taking the change and where their priorities are. It should also help us discover where, when and how we can be most helpful.
What do you think? Will the drive for ‘innovative cultures’ change the role of Internal Communications? And, if so, how?
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“Always look on the bright side …”
Well no, not always. Sometimes it’s just the wrong thing to do. A lesson I hope the staff at Planet BP — an online, in-house British Petroleum journal – learned this week.
You can imagine the challenge the BP internal communication team has. You can picture them gathered in a room with their other communication colleagues looking for something positive to report to their employees. Something that would uplift and motivate them.
And, so it is not too surprising to hear as The Wall Street Journal reported that “… a “BP reporter” dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint … [a rosey]…picture of the disaster… “Much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams.” Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that “BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us.””
The Planet BP story shows yet again that the BP communications team does not understand what is on the minds and in the hearts of people they are trying to reach and connect to. Can you imagine a Tylenol internal newsletter reporting on the positive impact of their disaster on Tylenol container makers? What is BP thinking?
Ragan Communication picked up the story. Their conclusion: “Now, more than ever, BP’s communication efforts—internal and external—require transparency.”
But, the problem here isn’t transparency. The BP article was accurate and transparent. And it is definitely propaganda. It is “disingenuous” and manipulative.
Why is that? As I have said elsewhere, you can’t fool Mother Nature and you can’t fool employees. And, I’m sure this article didn’t fool BP employees.
This isn’t the time. There’s nothing at this stage that is good about what it happening in the Gulf. And BP employees know it maybe better than anybody.
So what kind of employee communications do they want? My guess is that BP employees want to know what the company is doing to clean up the mess from an insider point of view. And they want to know what the company is doing to ensure that a disaster like this can never happen again.
And, they want communications that help them feel confident in their leadership again. And, that build pride in their work and the company they work for.
This story misses on all counts. Manipulative communication – internal or external – always destroys relationship.
Sometimes looking on the bright side is just wrong. This is one of those times.
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Getting grassroots
This week I’ve spent a lot of time with people who are part of grassroots movements of one sort or another. And, I started to think about whether there was anything we can learn from grassroots movements like these that are making important and fundamental societal and environmental change?
It started last Friday with a fabulous evening – the Equitas host family dinner – spent with 3 of the 130 Human Rights educators who are here in Montreal for the International Human Rights Training Program. A Cambodian working on a peace and reconciliation program in a world where some citizens fear reprisals in the wake of Khmer Rouge convictions. A Brazilian Human Rights lawyer who devotes time to an NGO working on local Human Rights issues. And a children’s rights activist from The Gambia. Each of them committed to changing their society from the bottom-up. They come here to learn. They will go home to share and act. And they will change their world one action, one person at a time.
Then, because I have a crazy idea of building a rooftop garden – my field of dreams – on our Church hall, I’ve started meeting local people in the community who are working on related projects. They are working on food security, urban farming, creating a sustainable university campus and greening the downtown. They are students at Concordia who are piloting a sustainable business growing herbal tea to supply a student run and operated tea shop at the Loyola campus. They are professionals working with local action groups to green some of the most debilitated parts of the downtown. There’s one young man who went to jail for an action he took to change a regulation in The Plateau. And guess what they did. And, they are profs and grad students working on urban farming projects. It’s amazing. They are changing our urban landscape one planter at a time. It is amazing what’s going on just outside our door.
What do these movements have in common?
- They are “natural and spontaneous” movements
- They are driven by passion for the ‘cause’.
- They operate outside of “traditional power structures”
- They use “traditional power structures” to raise awareness and funds.
- They rely on informal networks to share information and resources.
- Their projects start small and local but with the clear intention of leading to big and sustainable change.
- They pilot and learn and share and pilot again.
- They build pride in the work and the community.
What do you think? Is there anything we can learn from grassroots movements that we can apply to institutional change initiatives?
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What makes a good code of conduct?
Virtually every organization of any size has a written code of conduct. I’d really never thought about them much but, in the course of doing research for two posts for this blog I’ve ended up checking out Rio Tinto’s, British Petroleum’s and the Canadian Forces among others.
I was reminded that a good code of conduct is about more than the content of a written code. It’s about “the way we do things around here”. It’s about the behaviours employees see at work every day. It’s about the institutional stories that are told both formally and informally.
That said, all this often starts with a written code. So, here are some preliminary thoughts on what I think makes a good code of conduct:
- It’s written to help all employees behave in a way that is consistent with the authentic values of the organization and in line with national and international laws and regulations.
- It’s written from an employee’s point of view and not just the organization’s. The Code is about more than maintaining the organization’s reputation. It’s about employee pride in their organization, their team and their own work.
- It’s “virtually universal in … application”. There’s no guessing about who the code applies to [all executives, managers, non-managers, business partners]. No guessing about when the code applies or doesn’t. No gray zone. No exceptions.
- It clearly defines acceptable actionable behaviours and operating practices. It is written simply and is easy to understand. Plain English. No management speak or legalese.
- The number of behaviours are relatively few, easy to remember and act on. The consequences – both positive and negative – for the institution and the individual are clear.
- It includes relevant scenarios and mini-cases that bring the values and the behaviours to life for employees and can be used as the basis for discussion.
- It is supported by a process[earlier post]. that ensures employees are introduced to the code of conduct on day-one as part of their orientation to the organization and their work. There are regular opportunities to discuss the implications of the code in their day-to-day decisions and actions with their immediate supervisor and to ask questions, provide feedback. There are ways to report suspected violations without fear.
What do you think? Is this list complete?
Do you have any examples that you think are particularly good? Why are they good?
When was the last time your executive spent time thinking about the code of conduct and its implications in terms of their day-to-day work?
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Actions speak louder than words
This week, British Petroleum [BP], under Tony Hayward’s leadership, failed to make any progress in stopping or even slowing the flood of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Five weeks after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform the crisis is now described as perhaps the largest man-made disaster in history.
In the same week, the Canadian military leader of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard, was removed from his post after rumours of an affair with a soldier in his command.
The military responded quickly and unequivocally. Ménard is now back in Canada awaiting a hearing and potential court-martial. The allegations alone were serious enough to remove him from his post.
Back at BP, Tony Hayward, continues to run the company despite:
- The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 2010 that killed 11 people and began the uncontrolled oil spill in the Gulf
- Rumours that the explosion happened because the company had not invested in a relatively inexpensive remote control shut off device due to budget constraints
- The fact that the oil spill now threatens some of the most important and fragile ecosystems in North America along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida and the livelihood of millions of people. Today, on the first day of hurricane season, the potential threat to people and the environment has just increased. The current and potential costs are incalculable.
- The lack of an actionable crisis plan. Now over 5 weeks later it is very clear that the company did not anticipate an accident of this magnitude or have plans in place. Every attempt [and there have been many] to stop the flow of oil is a new and so far failed experiment.
- The fact that the direct costs to the company of responding to the spill is now reported to be at $1B
- Today’s news that BPs stock plunged 17% – Investors will pay – and that the company’s very survival is at stake. If this happens, over 80,000 employees and their families will be directly affected. The direct social and economic costs to the supply chain and everyone in and around the communities where BP operates will be huge.
In the case of the Canadian Military morale may be affected by this revelation about a man they respected and trusted to lead in a critical and dangerous theatre of operation, but they will have no doubt that the institution values the lives of the people on the mission and in the communities they are there to protect over the image of the institution or the reputation of the commander.
What about the 80,000 employees at BP?
These are extreme examples, but I’d love to hear from you. What actions are speaking louder than words in organizations you know? What impact does that have?