This blog is about 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.
Relationship
If the US Army is embracing social media, you can too!
Imagine this paragraph from the opening letter to the US Army’s social media policy - Army social media – Optimizing online engagement - written for your organization:
The US Army isn’t embracing social media as a nice to have. It’s a critical element of their operational strategy.
If the US Army is embracing social media, isn’t it time you did too! And not as a nice to have but as key to your operational strategy.
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The ultimate question & employees
I just listened to my favourite podcast, Mitch Joel’s “Six Pixels of Separation”. In this episode, Mitch spoke with Fred Reichheld. Not surprisingly, since Mitch is a brand marketing expert and Fred is a customer loyalty expert and author of the Loyalty Effect and the Ultimate Question, their conversation focused on the customer and the ultimate question: Have I treated you in a way that is worthy of your loyalty?
So, what does that have to do with employees and employee communication? Imagine asking the ultimate question to employees. I did. And, it made me think that perhaps we should be scrapping our annual employee surveys and instead start tracking the employees answer to this one question.
What could we learn by knowing whether our employees were “Promoters, Passives, or Detractors”? Would an employee net promoter score actually tell us more than we’re learning from our annual engagement and job satisfaction surveys? Would it be easier to administer and manage? Would the results be easier to communicate and act upon? Could that deeper understanding help us better achieve our business goals and build toward sustainable success fast?
Even if you don’t think this is the ultimate employee question, the idea of the one question employee survey is an idea who’s time has come.
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What do we do?
Good question.
“I’m an internal communications specialist.” Silence. ”Oh you mean you do employee newsletters?” Sigh.
“I work at the intersection of the brand, human resources, and business strategy. I help my clients involve their people and achieve the goals they are after.” Silence.
Then a conversation last week with a client who’s worked with me three times before – once as a colleague, and twice as a client. “You know what you do for me isn’t communication. It’s OD or change management or something. It’s not really communications… ”
This shouldn’t be so hard. I’m a communications professional after all.
Apparently I’m not alone. Just this week, the PRSA launched an initiative to update the definition of public relations. They set up a website where people can submit their definition and see it in a word cloud. Cool.
And then, Richard Edelman’s address to the IPR crossed my desk. “Re-imagining our profession. Public relations for a complex world” sheds some light and reinforces a view I’ve been trying to express – badly: ”…policy and communications cannot be separated… both are tied to operating reality. Communications must be a core element in the business planning process.”
I’d go further. Communications is core to doing business. Strategy and operations must be aligned and the only way to achieve that is through communications. Relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and vendors, governments and shareholders need to be built and sustained over time. And the only way to do that is by communicating.
Edelman goes on to say that “PR needs to create coherence out of complexity. As the stakeholder discipline, we are the profession that pays attention to the broad interests of the corporation… one foot planted on the policy side and the other on the communications side.”
The best of us [and as organizational leaders you should be demanding nothing but the best] think about the world from that place where the interests [and point of view] of key stakeholders, the operation and the strategy come together to create an institutional experience. That’s where I live and work [with a particular passion for employees].
Whatever it’s called it’s ….it’s what I do. And as my clients will tell you it helps them achieve their business and professional goals. Now I guess I need to find a better label than communications! Be seeing you!
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Power to our people!
A while ago, I came across a post by Brian Solis – “We are the 5th P – People“. His argument is that the product, price, place, and promotion model that everyone whose ever taken a Marketing course knows is missing a key element – People. And, the people he’s referring to are customers. His “… bottom line is that customers are not necessarily looking to build relationships with brands. They’re, we’re, looking for solutions, direction, insights, and value… ”
But, customers are only one P. Employees are another. And they are looking to build a relationship with the brands and organizations they work with. Every employee I’ve ever known has begun their job wanting to be involved. Wanting to be proud of the work they do, the team they belong to and the organization they work for. Unfortunately many of them end up, sooner or later, disappointed and cynical. Maybe the P we should be focused on is the one that actually wants a relationship!
Brian goes on to critic current approaches to social media marketing: ”We’re not driving experiences, we’re reacting to them. We’re not introducing meaningful value, we’re pushing content and creative. We’re not designing programs around intelligence, we’re focused on monitoring.”
What about employees? Are we doing any better there? Are we driving the employee experience from it’s first moments to it’s last [when for B2C products and services the E remains an enthusiastic C] or are we reacting to them? Are we introducing value to employee communications? Or are we pushing content and occasionally creative? Are we designing employee programs around a deep understanding of what employees need and want to better serve organizational goals or are we monitoring their engagement levels and job satisfaction?
I’d agree with Brian’s conclusion that it’s time to ‘click to action‘, I just think we should start with the P that matters most. Employees. Power to our people!
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What’s the value of a good relationship?
Being open. Being collaborative. Being innovative. We all say this is a good thing. But how does being open, collaborative, innovative add value to your organization?
The focus on social media – the tools and tactics – is taking us away from this more important question.
What’s the value of a good relationship to your organization? Here’s a conversation between Charlene Li and Gary Hamel.
What’s a good relationship look like? with your employees? your customers? your supply chain? your board? And what’s the value of that relationship to the business. Is anyone in your organization is really thinking about that?
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A small story about a big event
September 11, 2001 and the days that followed were terrible times. Today, as the world marks this 10th anniversary, there will be many remembrances and stories. As a professional communicator working in the aerospace industry during those dark days, I learned a lot. This is my story – a small story about a big event.
September 11, 2001. Bombardier Aerospace headquarters, Dorval, Quebec.
8:48. Our VP Corporate Communications hurries out of his office and gathers, his Communications Directors including me – Director, Employee Communications, together: ‘Did you hear?’, ‘An explosion at the World Trade Centre’, ‘Some report said it was a plane.’
8:50: We’re in our ‘war’ room transfixed by what we see on a tv screen that covers one whole end of the boardroom. The first network television reports and images of the World Trade Center in flames. “No way it was a plane.” Moments later we learn it is a plane and see images of the plane’s crash and the explosion – played and replayed in what seemed like an endless loop. Early reports say the aircraft was a Cessna or other small business aircraft.
“Was it one of ours?” “Looks like a Learjet.” “Might be a Challenger.” No one even suggests it might be a passenger aircraft. We get our senior engineer on the phone to see if he can confirm if it’s one of ours. Not sure.
Potential public relations nightmare.
9:03. By now the CEO and a few members of the executive join us from their offices down the hall. We, and several millions, watch live as a second plane crashes into the south face of the World Trade Center. Shock. Disbelief.
We knew this was no accident. Chilling. In the next minute, news confirms the ‘weapon’ was a large passenger aircraft.
It’s not one of our planes. Momentary relief.
The VP HR and his senior Director arrive. Where are our people? Was anyone in, or near, the towers? Phone calls and e-mails to Bombardier networks around the world.
Our CEO leaves us to go and call his family who live in lower Manhattan just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Phones are down. Calls to our own families wherever they were.
Our communications focus shifts to employees and their families.
9:39: A report of an explosion at the Pentagon.
By 9:45. The executive team is with the CEO in his office to hear that US Airspace has been completely closed down. Security lock down of our floor.
Glimmers of an industry-wide crisis that will re-frame our communications efforts for months, if not years.
By 10. Reports that our production lines in North America [Montreal, Wichita and Toronto] have stopped. Employees want to go home to their families. They want to know what’s happening and expect us to provide the ‘news’.
Employees become, and will remain, the communications priority over the coming weeks. How to be empathetic as we all go through this uncertainty together and get and keep production back on track. Everyone of us is afraid. And we have jobs to do.
Even though the field is asking for it, Corporate Communications cannot replace the feed of real time news available directly from the networks.We don’t have any tvs or radios on the plant floors. “Get some!” It is also clear this is time for real visible leadership. Our team does not let us down.
10:03. A United Airlines aircraft crashes into a field southeast of Pittsburgh in Somerset County, Pennsylvania
Flashback to June 2001. Bombardier Aerospace celebrates 100 years in aviation by launching a new brand – “Ideas that fly” at the largest airshow in the world. Le Bourget, 2001, is our most successful airshow ever. We confirm the most aircraft sales. The Corporate Communications team, with the help of our colleagues in the field, get the most positive media coverage ever. And, for the first time ever we’d engaged our employees in this essential moment in our business cycle using unique real-time reporting and employee stories from the site. The new brand was designed to highlight our technical expertise and to humanise the experience. The “We make it fly” internal tagline resonates. By September 11th, new pride in the company and the work is building.
Around 10:30. I take a breather from the terrible news in the next room. I walk into my office and glance down at a box of our next generation of branded material – a view of two towers shot from the ground looking up at to the sky and three dark beautiful and now menacing birds flying high between two towers.”We make it fly” and those once beautiful and compelling images are now something very sinister. All of our current internal communication plans are put on hold indefinitely and the visual image – now ready to go – scrapped forever. Context is everything.
Mid-afternoon. Sitting alone with my boss, in the now unfortunately named ‘war’ room, watching bombs fall in Iraq. We think we may be seeing a retaliatory attack. “Is this the beginning of a third World War?” We don’t know. No one does. And, we knew we would have to keep focused if we are going to help the Bombardier team get through this terrible time.
The next day. We find out that:
- miraculously [since some employees were in the towers at the time] all of our employees and thier families were safe [including the CEOs]
- many of our employees had been in the air, or away from their home bases, and were directly affected by delays caused by the US decision to stop all flights. Over the next few days they would find their way home
- many of our US employees were members of the US National Guard and would be off work for the foreseeable future. More challenges for our US operations. There’s an incredible outpouring of support from our Canadian and Irish operations for our American colleagues.
And, as the day unfolded, we knew that our business and the whole industry is facing the most critical and challenging time in its 100 year history. When, people don’t want to fly carriers and business aircraft owners don’t want to buy planes.
Bombardier survived these challenging times and is still one of the largest aeroplane manufacturers in the world.
Today, when I look back, I’m proud of how we as a team did our jobs during those dark days. And, as a professional communicator I realize now that we learned some important lessons:
- Strategy matters. We had a clarity of structure and roles built up over a year of working together. The communications leadership team – media relations, employee communications, marketing communications, and public affairs – had built and operationalized a robust integrated communications strategy. When in doubt or danger we could go back to our strategy. We were very clear about what we were trying to accomplish and who, what and how things needed to happen no matter what the crisis.
- Relationships matter. The strong networks we’d built across the system – in operations, engineering, business strategy and hr – and the relationships with communications teams in the plants and offices around the world and made it easy for us to get information and share what we knew and didn’t know and what we were doing about it. These same relationships gave us a critical real-time pulse on what was happening far from HQ and how and where we could best support the operations.
- Having the right channels and tools matter. The time we’d spent over the previous year developing the executive and management channel helped a lot. The leadership team knew they had communications responsibility and we knew how to reach and support them. It still wasn’t perfect, but it worked incredibly well given what we were facing. And, the new tools and tactics we’d been working on with the global communications team gave us a way to reach any internal stakeholder we needed to reach and get their reactions. Fast.
- Access to executive leadership matters. Direct access and proximity to the executive for decisions was essential for us to do what we needed to do.
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Close encounters of a third kind
It’s the end of summer and the skies are filled with falling stars and comets in this part of the world. Thoughts of end of summer movies and UFO’s are somehow on my mind. So, I hope you’ll indulge me.
As I’m sure you all know [; )], close encounters with UFOs come in three kinds: sighting, physical evidence, and contact. Now, imagine the CEO [read executive leadership] as the UFO [for fun you could actually make employees the UFO and see what that looks like from an executive leadership point of view]:
Close encounters of the first kind - sighting. Pretty rare in most organizations. Employees may see or hear the CEO in big announcement ‘townhalls’ [most often online], and very occasionally as they and their entourage rush quickly through the plant, store, office, or cafeteria for a ‘meet and greet’, or “Christmas” party.
Close encounters of the second kind – physical evidence. Employees can see the effects of the CEO pretty regularly – the welcome letter in the orientation package [if you're in an organization that takes your orientation seriously you might also get a video clip welcome], the quarterly newsletter, the financial results e-mail [and 'townhall', see above], the occasional e-mail and video for a launch of a new brand [identity], introduction of a new product, divestiture, acquisition and/or change of organizational structure or leadership, and even more indirectly in policy changes, the congratulations note for years of service. Physical evidence may still be the most common kind of CEO encounter.
Close encounters of a third kind – Contact. The most direct and the rarest. This is where CEOs and employees actually connect. Human scale, face-to-face contact. Conversations about what matters most. Feedback about what’s working and not working. Personal commitments for support and action. Direct follow-up.
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It’s a diverse world
Not always. When I’m in the blogosphere, volunteering, or attending church, or at my clients find myself in groups that are mostly white [certainly mostly North American], mostly of a certain age and economic level. I’m operating in a bubble.
This struck me over the head a while ago when I was attending the Living Art in southern Vermont. I looked up early in the training and realized it was the most diverse group of people I’d ever been in.
There we were 24 people. A few more women than men, but not by much. Ages ranged from 21 to 75. The youngest was an African American who’d served in the military and was now studying at Columbia Univerity. The 75 year old was a contemporary art expert and the daughter of holicaust survivors. There were two married couples. Two french Canadians, an Aussie, a Kiwi [affectionate term for someone from New Zealand] and a German. There were three East Indian Americans. There were about 4 students and one full-time mom. There was a chiropractor and a financier. It was an incredible workshop on creating. And working with this group of people was an amazing experience.
Back to reality. According to an article in the Globe and Mail a while ago, it will take women in Canada 151 years at the rate we’re going “before the share of men and women at the management level” will be equal.
That’s not just shocking because we know that women make up almost half of the work force in Canada, or that women make most of the buying decisions, but because we know lack of diversity hurts “employee retention, productivity and innovation.”
If as an individual I know I’m in a bubble, how can I expect the organizations I’m involved with to be? How can we, and the institutions we work for, break out of our bubbles?
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We have no bananas!
Yes, I’m sad to say we have no bananas today.
I’ve been in and around the blogosphere for 4 or 5 years. And, I’ve seen a lot. Some of it good [great]. Some of it bad. Some of it ugly. Today, I saw all three in one day.
And, I have an observation. Most of the communication, management and marketing blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook pages and groups I frequent start off very well; very well, indeed. They have a strong editorial point of view. They’re strategically oriented. Edgy, stimulating and provocative. The people they attract are from different backgrounds. All of them looking for insight and perspective. The conversations that follow are driven by the “founders”. Then there’s a moment when either the authors/founders lose interest, or where they take a decision to change the model.
On blogs, they invite guest bloggers. This isn’t so bad, since they are usually like-minded thinkers. On LinkedIn and Facebook pages and groups they open up to public postings. Despite what any of us may think about democratization of information and crowdsourcing [both of which I am in favour of by the way]. I haven’t seen a crowdsourced blog or page that really stands up.
Vision, an editorial point of view and “curation” are important. They lead to more vibrant and interesting discussion. They help attract the ‘tribe’ of “like-minded” followers.
Instead these sites end up losing everything they originally stood for. The thinking – strategic not tactical, systemic not siloed, innovative not iterative is replaced by discussions on questions like – what are the top 10 things great managers do? what are the best practices for process mapping? what’s the best social media tool for ceo’s? etc. It’s more a pooling of ignorance or a thinly disguised “marketing” approach than anything close to something that will further the profession.
What’s happening? Lost is the thoughtful and thought generating discussion. Found is watered-down free association.
Please, please can we have more bananas!
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“DIY” management
The other day, over breakfast with a good friend and senior HR professional, I learned something that surprised me. He works for a fortune 500 pharmaceutical company that is well-known and highly respected. Since he’s been there – well over 10 years – they’ve reorganized every year or two. I don’t mean minor reorganizational changes. I mean major tectonic plate shifting changes. And over that time, like many other companies, they’ve centralized the global HR function into their head office and shifted the commoditized work of the function to outsource partners.
But today, he told me that, they are also transferring technical HR work to managers.
Now, as those of you who follow this blog know, I think management should take more responsibility for their employees – knowing who they are, listening to them, helping them align priorities, getting them what they need to do their jobs better and more easily, building capacity of teams and individuals. But what my friend was talking about takes management in the opposite direction.
His company has decided that managers should take on what is fundamentally a very technical data input role. Thanks to new user friendly People Soft interface they will be able to promote, demote, transfer, reassign, document vacation, parental leave and remove their employees from the corporate database all on their own. Just add water and stir.
In a world that is already over-charged and over-loaded there are now new responsibilities that take management further from leadership and deeper into the semi-automated technical world that once belonged to HR specialists.
So while, managers are entering data, employees are calling an outsourced support function in Manila and figuring stuff out on their own rather than speaking with their boss or their local HR business partner. As one of my friend’s colleagues said it’s a world turning into “Do it yourself” management!
You do have to wonder what’s this transfer of work really about? And is it really for the better?
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Recent posts
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