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.
Trust
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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“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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Sucky values suck!
It was impossible to disagree with Robert Fritz when he said, at a training I participated in last week, that:
“Organizations are amoral in and of themselves.
It’s human beings in organizations that have values.
It’s leaders that must impose values.”
So, when I read the most recent Maritz poll results (2010, USA), I had to conclude that leaders may be imposing values, but they aren’t the ones that are being communicated by Corporate communications and HR professionals.
The survey found that “despite a slight improvement in business conditions, the American workforce remains less engaged with their employers than they did one year ago. Poor communications, lack of perceived caring, inconsistent behavior, and perceptions of favoritism were cited by respondents as the largest contributors to their lack of trust in senior leaders.” Specifically:
- Only 7% believe senior management’s actions are completely consistent with their words.
- 14 % of employees believe their company’s leaders are ethical and honest.
- Only 12 % believe their employer genuinely listens to and cares about employees.
- Only 10 % of employees trust management to make the right decision in times of uncertainty.
- About 25 % of employees distrust management more than they did the year before.
What is especially disheartening is that these same leaders are reading this report and year over year seeing the same results disappointing results. What are they making of it? Do they see employee involvement in their businesses as a must have or as a nice to have? What’s keeping them up at night if it’s not this?
Sucky values suck!
Thanks to Hacking Work and Communication at work for bringing this poll to my attention.
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Making “magic in the marketplace”
Today, thanks to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, I came across this key note address by Bill Taylor, the founding editor of Fast Company Magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself.
Here’s what really caught my attention: ”You can’t build something special, compelling, distinctive in the marketplace unless you also build something special, compelling distinctive in the workplace… Strategy is your culture. Culture is your strategy. Success today is about so much more than just price, performance, features, technology, pure economic value. It’s about passion, emotion, identity, sharing your values… Real magic in the marketplace is when you make your organization more memorable to encounter.”
And that my friends can’t happen when the relationship with employees is the last thing on the C-Suite’s agenda! It can’t happen when leaders do not trust employees [though they expect employees to trust them], where leaders are not loyal to employees [though they expect loyalty from them] and where they are not proud of employees and the work they do [though they expect employees to be proud of the leadership and the organizations they work for]. Broken cultures on the inside will always show on the outside sooner or later!
Recommend you take the 20+ minutes [Bill comes in at about minute 4] to watch it. Some great stuff on bench marking too!
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A case of “internal communication deficit disorder”.
This week a Canadian University was diagnosed with internal communication deficit disorder. Though not rare, the disorder is almost always fatal if left untreated.
Concordia University is an institution I know well. It’s 45,000 students studying in over “300 undergraduate and 200 graduate programs” are at the centre of the downtown community I work and live in. I studied and graduated with my MBA from there; began studies for a PhD there; taught there; consulted there; worked with a student intern and volunteers from there on an urban farming project. And it’s an institution that has seemed sick at the core for some time; perhaps even further back than the Fabrikant murders in 1992.
Last year, for the second time in 3 years the President left before the end of their contract. After considerable bad press and internal finger pointing, the interim President, Dr Frederick Lowy, asked an external committee to review the governance of the university. This week, Concordia University received the report “Strengthening governance at Concordia: A collective challenge“. The review pulls no punches in reporting the situation and recommending changes to all aspects of governance.
Among other things, the review panel reported that the university was “…blatantly deficient internal communications“… had created “…a lot of distrust, often bordering on mutual contempt, between the various communities of the University.” And that “…the chorus of negative response [to the most recent President’s departure], the depth and even the fury of that response could only have arisen in a context where long simmering governance and internal communication problems between the Board and the University community, to say nothing of other outstanding matters, had neither been addressed nor resolved.” The report reflects my experience and understanding of the good [and there is a lot of good there], bad and the ugly of Concordia.
Today, the University has a decision to make: To take the recommended course of treatment for internal communication deficit disorder or not; to act on the letter and spirit of the report and its 38 recommendations or not.
If they do, it won’t be either a quick or easy recovery but recover they will. Concordia has an opportunity to change how they do things. To become a place where the board, faculty, administration, and students work together to create a unique and compelling experience for those who want to study and learn, to teach and do research, to invent and explore new ideas. In the end, this report and its recommendations are less about fixing something that is broken and more about supporting Concordia in becoming the great institution it has always had the potential to be.
As a neighbour, alumnus and friend that’s my hope.
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Scale & proportion in communications
"The Fisherman," Saul Steinberg, from The Labyrinth
I think internal communications design at its best is compositional. So, that takes me to the arts to see if there are things I can learn there.
Scale and proportion are two important considerations for the artist or architect. Should they be considerations for those of us who design communications plans? Scale refers to the size of the work. Proportion refers to how we see elements within the work in relationship to each other.
It’s easy in the heat of the moment or the “big” announcement to lose sight of what really matters to our colleagues in different functions and at different levels across our organizations. Not all decisions and announcements are created equal from the point of view of those we’re trying to reach and engage. Not everything is as big to “them” as it is to us.
Designing a communication approach that is the right proportion and scale for the news we’re sharing is as important as any other aspect of communication plan we’re building. Overdoing something that isn’t all that relevant to employees or failing to communicate something that is will lead to equally bad outcomes: Confusion and erosion of trust.
Thinking about the scale and proportion of the communication from the receiver’s point of view helps.
- Scale – the number and variety of communication channels, the frequency and duration of the communication, the effort level to engage people in a conversation
- Proportion – how evident we want to make the communication in context of everything else that is going on organizationally at any point in time and over time, and within the communication itself what is most relevant/important for different employees to ‘get’.
Next time you’re about to communicate a ‘big’ new corporate decision, business strategy, human resources policy, technology change, acquisition, or quarterly financial results, think about what this news really means for the people you’re communicating it to. What impact – direct or indirect – will it have on them? What do you want them to know, feel or do as a result of your communicating with them?
And once you have the answers to these questions, think a little bit more like an artist, design a communication that is right in terms of scale and proportion.
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Employee orientation. The essentials.
New employee orientation begins way before you think it does. It starts when an employee makes first contact with your organization. That could have been years ago if they use your product or service or if you’re a major brand with lots of advertising dollars. Or it could have been the job ad on Workopolis or Monster. Or it could have been at a booth at a job fair. It most certainly isn’t at that “onboarding” event you asked them to attend 2 months after they started working for you.
Orienting employees has more to do with introducing employees to your culture: “The way we do things around here” and the brand experience than it does all the rules and regs that are the usual focus of employee orientations.
Nordstrom’s employee handbook may do this better than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the shortest. Here it is in its entirety.
Welcome to Nordstrom
We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.
Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.
Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.
What do you think? Does this say more about their culture than a full-day briefing and a 300-page orientation binder?
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It’s them!
In organizational life there are a lot of “thems”. And, they are all up to no good. You know them:
- The executive who must have been smoking something when they came up with that idea
- Those senior managers who clearly don’t know what they’re doing
- Those executive assistants who have nothing to do but gossip
- Middle managers and front line supervisors who are simply incompetent and never do the cascades [read anything] the way they were supposed to
- All employees who come to work to do a bad job, waste time on the internet, stand around talking, break the rules
- Those guys in corporate who are always asking us for reports and making our lives miserable
- Those guys in the region who never do what we ask and make our lives miserable
- Our colleagues upstream/downstream/in operations who just can’t get their processes right, deliver on time, do anything right
- Those guys in region X or product Y who don’t do ‘it’ like they’re supposed to
- The consultants who cost too much and deliver so little
- Our customers who question our service, aren’t happy with our products.
What’s this all about? What about us?
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“Be honest”
When people say ‘be honest’ in an organizational setting I think they really mean ‘tell the truth’. As an individual telling the ‘truth’ is easy.
You know what you know. You know what you don’t know.
You know how you feel. You know how you don’t feel.
You know what you’re going to do. You know what you’re not going to do.
Institutionally, it’s a lot harder. As an institution you may or may not know. I’m not saying impossible to know. I’m saying it’s harder.
Understanding and being mindful of the difference is key to great institutional communications.
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