For Your Approval

I’m back on my own

After two and a half years as an associate with Longview Communications, I am returning to private practice. I'll continue to work with Longview as a contractor on selected client projects, but my new independence gives me the opportunity to pursue opportunities as a consultant and barbecue evangelist.

I plan to focus my communications consulting practice on the areas where I have deep expertise:  employee communications, crisis communications and, of course, the fast-emerging new world of social media.

On the barbecue side of my life, I will now have more freedom to build on the success of my new book, Barbecue Secrets DELUXE! and Ronnie & Denzel’s Natural Champions BBQ sauces. I’m also planning to re-launch my barbecue podcast, and I will be stepping back into my role as Dean of Barbecue Academy, my corporate teambuilding workshop.

As of July 3, 2009 my e-mail address will be ron at ronshewchuk.com and my business phone number is 604-351-1999. I'm moving into my new office space in North Vancouver this weekend, and should be up and running on Monday.

On a personal note, although I look forward to working with Longview as a contractor, I'll miss the daily contact with my dear colleagues, who are great people and brilliant communicators. 

What communicators must do next

A recent article by Jennifer Robison in the latest Gallup Management Journal recognizes the consuming challenges facing corporate leaders these days, but reminds them of the need to stay focused on employee engagement. Gallup is in the employee engagement business, so the article is, of course, designed to prompt existing clients and prospects to pick up the phone and get some help. But I don't mind self-serving pieces like this when they ring true and have useful information and advice, and this one certainly does.

Here's a taste:

If businesses are to survive, leaders can't overlook opportunities to boost productivity and profitability -- and that means employee engagement is more critical than ever. "There's a tendency right now to freeze -- to avoid doing new things for fear of doing the wrong thing," says Denise McLain, Gallup principal. "Freezing is a mistake. You can always change tactics later if you need to and adapt when more information comes in. But the worst mistake is to overlook engaging your employees. When times are tough, leaders need all the engaged people they can get."

Gallup has a giant pile of data from years of surveying employees that shows a direct connection between high engagement and business success. Companies with engaged employees have more loyal customers, better productivity and higher profits than those who don't. And the flip side is also true. "bottom quartile" companies with highly disengaged employees "have 51% more inventory shrinkage, 31% to 51% more employee turnover, and 62% more accidents than business units in the top quartile."

So how do leaders get employees engaged, and keep them that way? Here's a summary of Gallop's advice:

• Remind everyone they're all in it together. This means communicating what's happening and why - and showing some empathy.

• Ask for employee input. People are more engaged when they know their employer cares about their opinion and responds to comments and suggestions.

• Create a focus. Having a common purpose brings a team together. This means getting out of "reaction mode" and communicating a long-term vision.

• Share the news -- good and bad -- with employees first. "No matter how bad the news is, people will always think of something worse unless they have accurate information from leadership." 

• Don't abandon front line managers, your primary conduit to employees. "They need support like never before because they may be feeling as uncertain about the future as the employees they manage."

• Demonstrate optimism by paying attention to people. "A good way to prove your optimism is to double down on people and products....show your people today that you believe in the future of the company--and that you're ready to meet it when it arrives."

This stuff all sounds like common sense, and you've heard most of this before. But in a time of crisis, common sense can be one of the first casualties. The Gallup article is directed at business leaders, but it might as well be a manifesto for corporate communicators. Here's how it ends:

Preserving or augmenting engagement isn't easy. It takes commitment from the top. But the return on engagement almost always outweighs the investment. "Worldwide, the best companies realize they can't afford to ignore employee engagement," says [Tom Rath, Gallup global practice leader and coauthor with Conchie of Strengths Based Leadership.] "But then, the best companies never did."

Communicators, take heed. If you're not currently giving your senior leaders advice like this, get on it.

Common sense does not always prevail on its own. What are YOU going to do next?

I’m worried

I have the honour of sitting on a panel of IABC Master Communicators today to discuss the future of our profession. The discussion will be led by one of Canada's leading communicators, Jacqui d’Eon, Deloitte Canada’s Chief Communications Officer and IABC's 2008 Master Communicator.

The theme is "Are Communicators Still Relevant -- Or Have We Become Disposable?"

The panelists were asked to contribute two or three minutes of commentary to help kick off the discussion. Here are my notes:

I believe there is a crisis of confidence in our profession, at least on the internal side.

We’ve been through a very dark time over the last decade, a time in which employee engagement has declined and digital communication tools have proved to be far less effective than expected.

This is a time of great change and opportunity for employee communicators, but I worry that we might not be not up to the challenge.

I worry that many of us are trapped in our roles as technical/tactical specialists -- constantly posting, posting, posting to intranets that don’t get read and don’t get measured. 

I worry that we’ve forgotten how to offer strategic advice, or how to effectively say no to stupid instructions from our leaders (and offer them thoughtful alternatives).

I worry that, at time that calls for leadership and action, we are so paralyzed by our habits, stifled by the bureaucracies in which we work, and fearful about the security of our own jobs, that we are doing nothing where we should be doing something.

I worry that we’ve forgotten about the basics of the old RACE formula (research, analysis, communication, evaluation) and we’ve become entrenched in our role as order-takers and crisis responders.

And I worry that the new social media tools, which reduce the need for intermediaries like us, could speed the erosion of our strategic importance.

I always say the more you worry about something, the less likely it is to happen. So in the end I’m optimistic about the future of employee communication, and here's why:

We’ve got powerful new tools that have uses we haven’t even begun to explore.

There’s growing interest and attention by corporate leaders in improving engagement, because there’s hard evidence linking engagement to bottom line business performance.
 
Put Web 2.0 technology together with the burning need to improve engagement, and you have a big opportunity to rebuild a new kind of loyalty -- a new kind of corporate culture based on the creation and support of strong internal communities.

There has never been a better time to make the business case for improving internal communication.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity is right in front of us and we must seize it now.

Towards a "stakeholder society"

Richard Edelman’s blog post yesterday is worth a read, and reflects the sentiment of a recent post on this blog. The salient Edelman quotes:

“We’re entering a new era of Mutual Social Responsibility, a virtuous circle in which people consume what they need (not what they want) while companies agree to achieve financial AND societal objectives.”

“...new voices ... must be incorporated into a global governance model based on a stakeholder society. Non-governmental organizations, communities as well as employees and consumers are entitled to a hearing. This is an evolution from the shareholder society which concentrates only on investors and is regulated by government. It calls for an outside in, listening approach by business and government because both of these traditional institutions have lost the mandate to lead unilaterally.”

“It is important that CEO’s use future public speaking opportunities to move from company stewards to private sector statesmen.”

Great thinking from one of PR's great thinkers.

Why most transformations fail...and what it takes for them to succeed

A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly, Corporate Transformation Under Pressure,  starts out reminding us that the success rate of major corporate transformation programs is less than 40 per cent.

That's not new. We know it's extremely hard to change a big organization. What's interesting is that "defensive transformations" -- those initiated to get a company out of trouble -- are less successful than "progressive" ones launched to generate growth or improve already good performance.

So much for the burning platform! It turns out that waiting until you have a crisis doesn't work as well as having a positive vision and seizing an opportunity to change things for the better.

The McKinsey article, based on a recent survey of executives around the world, also found that "companies under pressure do not make use of proven tactics for implementing change. Instead, they tend toward secrecy and may have small groups of troubleshooters plan the transformation rather than involve the whole organization and set clear, widely communicated aspirations and targets."

The good news is that companies that use proven tactics have a far higher success rate of 80 per cent.

The authors lay out those tactics, in all their elegant simplicity:

• Set clear aspirations and targets;
• Exercise strong leadership from the top;
• Create an unambiguous structure for the transformation; and
• Maintain energy and involvement throughout the organization.

Are you seeing what I'm seeing?

Every one of those tactics can be executed well, or screwed up badly, based on how well an organization communicates.

Communication makes a difference, especially when the stakes are high. And what's more, as the authors observe in their conclusion, "Taking shortcuts -- for instance, putting insufficient effort into communicating or focusing on small, short-term changes -- only deepens the problems."

There has never been a better time to make a business case for better internal communication.

Reserve that twitter id now!

I'm noticing that a lot of companies don't yet have a twitter account in their name. It's easy to check - just type twitter.com/yourname into your browser. It's so easy to start an account that you can do it in about 30 seconds. Have you reserved your microblogging future? Or has a twitter-squatter already claimed your brand name?

The Corporate Village

In a recent blog post, techno pundit Robert X. Cringely uses Susan Boyle's stunning performance on Britain's Got Talent (sitting at 37 million views as I'm writing this) to illustrate the power of the Internet to create shared experiences.

"Marshall McLuhan, who seems smarter every day, called it The Global Village. He said communication technology would link us together in ways we couldn’t imagine and those ways would lead to common experiences and shared values. McLuhan didn’t know about the Internet when he wrote that and he sure as Hell didn’t know about Twitter. But his prediction came true.....[And] every time our Global Village comes together in this way, it’s because of a shared delight that makes us feel more alike and less apart. We could all use more of that."

Are today's communicators helping create meaningful shared experiences in the workplace? Or are we too busy shoveling information onto intranets that no one wants to read?

Sadly, the only true shared experience in many big organizations is the frustration of dealing with bureaucracy.

It's time for a change. Time to build the Corporate Village.

Remembrance of stings past

The tough times we're in remind me of the old days.

Many years ago, a company I worked for was going through yet another in what seemed like an endless string of "downsizings." The acronym BOHICA was in active use by a jaded workforce.

Back then, our corporate comms team got very good at communicating job losses because we had lots of practice. When the latest round of cuts would come out of HR (which was nicknamed Human Remains) we would produce a printed communication detailing the organizational changes and documenting the staff reductions, and face-to-face meetings with affected groups would be organized. At those meetings company leaders would do a presentation about why the cuts were necessary, what was happening and where the business was going. Then they would take some time to answer employee questions.

At one such meeting, which I happened to attend, the CFO was asked a pointed question by an understandably grouchy employee.

"When will this company start putting people ahead of profits?" he said, with a kind of grim desperation in his quavering, angry voice.

You could have heard a bean drop as the CFO paused before his reply.

"Never," he said.

His needlessly blunt point, of course, was that if the company were to take its eye off the bottom line and give something like preserving jobs a higher priority, there would be no profits...which would mean there would be no money to pay salaries...which would mean that, before long, there would be no people left to put ahead of anything.

Although there's an appealing simplicity to it, we all know that this old-school, one-dimensional business imperative is flawed, and putting profit above all else is not the way to build a healthy, sustainable company. Recent events in the global financial industry remind us that too sharp a focus on profits -- especially short-term profits -- can be bad for business, and for society.

The circumstances related to the current downturn are new, but the massive job losses and severe corporate austerity programs that accompany each trough in the economic cycle are not new at all -- nor is the need to communicate with beleaguered employees. 

It's ironic that when times are toughest, our role as communicators is most valued and we experience some of the most meaningful and fulfilling times in our careers.

Fulfilling, sometimes even exciting, but often not very much fun. One of the hardest things I've found about communicating at times like this is the big disconnect between the negative impact of job cuts on employees and the positive effect they have on a company's share price. We spend so much time and effort preparing to give employees the bad news with all the sensitivity and respect they deserve. The same information, packaged in a media release, invariably ends up being excellent news to the market, which rewards the ugly short-term actions with a proportionately beautiful spike in the share price.

Some of us have been around long enough to know that the short term gain of downsizing is often followed by long-term suffering, especially when it is accompanied by poor leadership. The lack of trust, bad morale, high turnaround, low engagement and poor attitude to customers that characterize todays' workplace can be traced back to the short-sighted brutality of the downsizings and reorganizations that have ravaged much of the corporate world over the past 20 years.

This is not to say the impact of that brutality goes unnoticed when it occurs. As one of my favorite bloggers, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, pointed out in a recent post, the elimination of 40,000 jobs at AT&T in 1996 led to an huge and instant increase in the company's market capitalization, but it also sparked widespread public fury and even prompted the U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to leap onto the dogpile:

“Does a company have obligations and responsibilities beyond the bottom line?  Does a company owe anything to its workers, its workers’ families, the communities in which it does business?  Managers who balk at executing the judgments of the market may fear with some reason that they will quickly face their own day of reckoning.  And yet, I want to suggest to you that this restricted vision of stewardship may be ultimately disastrous for this country. And it may ultimately harm American business.”

Prophetic words, and we're all living with the outcome today. 

The big question is, will the current crisis be resolved in a way that will lead to permanent and positive changes in the way leaders lead and companies operate? Will our society find a way to return some balance and humanity to the business imperative?

I believe these changing times will change business for good. And business communicators have an opportunity to play a strategic role as we go through this once-in-a-lifetime paradigm shift.

#5 of 8 things you don't know about me

In 1980 I worked the summer as a construction laborer in Calgary, near the end of the big building boom. I drove a beat-up 1973 Ford LTD coupe - a gas-guzzling behemoth that rode like a canoe. At some point my friend Thierry Cariou, a young Parisian photographer who I'd met a few years earlier during my post-high-school European adventure, came to visit and I took him up to Banff one weekend. Today Thierry is one of France's most successful stock photographers and runs a graphics/multimedia agency.

Every year he mails out a Bonne Année card with one of his favorite photos on it. Usually they're abstract, computer-enhanced images. This year he went old-school and featured a gorgeous black and white photo of my old LTD on the side of the road with the big, electric Alberta sky above us and the Rockies ahead. Not only does the pic represent a moment from my youth (if you look closely you can see the fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror) -- it captures the spirit of the Canadian West.

Communicating in Hard Times

On April 20th I'll be delivering a luncheon talk at Vancouver's Steamworks Brewing Company on Communicating With Employees in Hard Times. It's part of the Vancouver Sun/IABC Speaker Series and the idea is to share some lessons I've learned from past downturns and "show how old-school tactics can be paired with new age tools to help organizations get through the recession and emerge with a workforce that's stronger and more committed than ever."

I've got my own war stories, at least one of which I'll be telling in an upcoming blog post, but I invite you to share yours in the comments below.

I'm also looking for examples of how companies are using social media tools to help employees participate in cost-cutting and efficiency improvement efforts -- or simply to help maintain morale as we go through the big downturn. What are internal communicators doing these days other than fighting for their own survival?