For Your Approval

A dystopian fantasy

The Global Times
A GoogleSoft publication

April 1, 2039

Engagement tampering scandal rocks equity markets

Fraudulent practices exposed at ailing automaker

DUBAI (Google news) – FordGMChrysler(FGMC) chief executive Sally Rodriguez and several other company officials have been charged with eight counts of corporate governance fraud, including employee survey tampering, falsifying employee blog posts and internal influence peddling.

The scandal erupted yesterday when a group of FGMC assembly plant workers lodged a grievance with the Dubai Securities and Exchange Commission citing questionable management and accounting practices. The Detroit facility, the last SUV assembly plant on Earth, has long been known for its low employee morale and poor productivity.

“We were tired of the lies, and tired of being bribed to pretend we’re in a good mood,” said assembly robot operator Rocco Bondi. “When we saw the company boasting to investors about our high engagement numbers, it was time to blow the whistle.”

The plant posted dramatic and unexpected improvements in standard engagement indicators in the automaker’s most recent annual report to shareholders. News of the improvement had driven the FGMC share price to a six-month high on the Dubai Stock Exchange and sparked talk of a long-awaited turnaround at the company, which has declined over the past 30 years to become the 13th largest car manufacturer in the world.

News of the engagement tampering scandal sent FGMC’s shares tumbling 28 per cent on the day as shareholders scrambled to dump their holdings, and the entire DSE slumped 5 per cent.

“What we see here is a systematic attempt by senior management of FGMC to falsify information about the attitudes of its employees,” said Federal prosecutor Perry Manson outside the Dubai courthouse. Manson presided over a standard perp-walk/press conference in which Rodriquez and other senior FGMC officials were paraded in front of cameras in shackles.

“This company did everything it could to boost its low engagement numbers, from hiring actors to stage morale-boosting posts on internal video blogs, to hosting lavish parties and handing out expensive gifts on the eve of engagement surveys. It’s high time the leaders of this scam are punished for their execrable behavior.” 

Manson compared the charges to the corporate malfeasance scandals at the turn of the century. “Just as the Enron and Tyco debacles taught corporations an accounting lesson back then, we hope today’s charges send a signal to public companies that falsifying employee attitudes is no longer tolerated in our society.”

The charges are the first test of the Engagement Measurement Act (EMA), the new securities law that standardizes reporting practices for employee engagement levels in publicly traded companies. The EMA is seen by industry observers as a logical progression that began with the Sarbanes/Oxley legislation of 2002, progressed with the Enanced Analytics Initiative of 2007 and the Environmental Measures Regulations of 2023, and culminated in the passing of the EMA in 2037.

“What we’re seeing is the acceptance of the fact that employee engagement one of the leading indicators of a company’s long-term success,” said Jennifer Buffet, great-granddaughter of the famed Oracle of Omaha and longtime employee engagement activist. “We proved in the 2020s that environmental responsibility was a key driver of corporate performance and we entrenched environmental measures into GAAP. Now, with the passing of the EMA and these charges against FGMC, we’re finally closing the loop and including all aspects of sustainable development in international business reporting practices.”

One of the key charges filed with the Commission is the claim that the ailing automaker bribed key groups of workers with gifts, vacation packages and gourmet dinners in the weeks leading up to the annual employee survey. The practice, officially called internal influence peddling, is also known in industry as “happy jacking,” a slang term that means fraudulently influencing employee attitudes. Many companies have been accused of the practice, but with the passing of the EMA into law, regulators finally had the power to go after the executives that sanction engagement tampering.

In related news, Toyota Motor Company announced its 60th consecutive year of earnings growth and plans to build new auto plants on Luna and Mars.

Delightful connections

One of the greatest things about writing a blog is that it makes so many unexpected and delightful connections with people from all over the world.

My most delightful connection yet happened a few weeks ago, when Ross Monaghan, a lecturer at the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deekin University in Geelong, Victoria, Australia, connected with me through this blog. Ross is co-editor of an innovative podcast/blog called TheMediaPod, which describes itself as an "experimental and collaborative page written by public relations and journalism students and teaching staff at Deakin University."

The connection with Ross turned into a correspondence, which has now turned into a dream come true for me. Ross just let me know he has included my handbook, Writing and editing the Internal Publication, on the prescribed book list for his second semester unit, PR Writing & Tactics. There will be about 300 students in the unit.

When I wrote the book, I had a vague hope that it would some day be used as a teaching tool for communication students. Thanks, Ross, for the huge honour.

On a lighter note, here's another unexpected and delightful connection. Kommunicat, a blog based in Poland, recently featured a post in which the author, Kamil Borowiak, summarized (in Polish) a recent blog post from For Your Approval.

I was, of course, interested in how my words had been interpreted, so I ran Kamil's blog post through a free online translation site, with interesting results. Here's an excerpt from the translation:

"Here word is key community. Correction of mood caused is important challenge for communication in today's times pitiless reduction of cost, bureaucracy, deep change of brand value and very often bad management. They trust from one part of firm employee (staff) not up to the end."

Got a nice ring to it, don't it? Thanks, Kamil, for making the connection.

 

Good questions

It's an old saw - the man-on-the-street interview. The employee publication I'm currently editing has a regular "streeter" that features four employees who are asked the same question. The answers are kept to one or two sentences. I don't know if many online publications use it, but it's a great way to involve more employees in your print newsletter.

But some of my colleagues think it's hokey and boring. Ask a softball question and print all the perky, positive, meaningless answers. Who needs that?

Everyone, as far as I'm concerned. From my point of view the questions and the answers are secondary to the fact that we're showcasing front-line people, showing their faces and listening to their voices, whatever they have to say.

But I took the point. It does matter, of course. The better the questions and the answers, the more interesting and readable they are, and the better a newsletter it will be. So we brainstormed and came up with some very good questions, some harder than others, but all interesting:

What keeps you working at this company?

How are you involved in your community?

What leadership quality do you most admire/value?

How do you handle change in the workplace?

What is the best safety advice you've ever heard?

Who has been a mentor to you at our company, and why?

What could our leaders do to be more connected with employees?

What is one thing that would make your job easier?

What is the biggest challenge facing our company today?

What keeps you awake at night?

How do you make sure you balance work and home life?

What is the best professional development session you've ever
participated in?

What have you personally done to make a new employee feel welcome?

If you had one piece of advice for someone graduating from high school
this spring, what would it be?

What is the most exciting thing you've ever done?

How will our lives be different ten years from now?

Good questions, all, and I look forward to publishing the answers.

Anyone else doing this? Is it worthwhile? Is not a blog like this just the grandchild of the original streeter, which was an attempt to have a proto-conversation with readers?

Managing editor wanted

My longtime client and former employer, Suncor Energy, is looking for a managing editor for its new company-wide employee publication.

This is a fabulous (and rare) opportunity for a senior editor who is looking for an exciting challenge. Suncor is a great company, going through lots of changes.

Please check out the job description and forward the link to anyone you know who might be interested.

The wisdom of Patti Smith

I have always admired the creative voice and powerful intellect of Patti Smith, one of the artists I avidly followed back in my university days. This week Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The singer, poet and pop philosopher recently shared her thoughts about the honour in a New York Times op-ed piece. It doesn't have a lot to do with internal communication, but there are some insights that I thought would be of interest to readers of this blog -- particularly when she writes of an emerging "new guard...

"...the guardians of our cultural voice. The Internet is their CBGB. Their territory is global. They will dictate how they want to create and disseminate their work. They will, in time, make breathless changes in our political process. They have the technology to unite and create a new party, to be vigilant in their choice of candidates, unfettered by corporate pressure. Their potential power to form and reform is unprecedented."

Tomorrow's employees will have similar powers. They'll just be a bit longer coming.

It's awards season

Call me an aging communication nerd. I passed up watching the Oscars last Sunday to judge the Intranet feature and internal blog categories for the Ragan Recognition Awards.

I also spent a couple of evenings last week helping judge the publications category of IABC’s Gold Quill Awards. (It's heartening to note that the publications category still draws the most entries -- our group in Vancouver had over 120 publications to judge.)

I always jump at the chance to be a judge in communication award competitions. It’s a rare chance to take a close look at the work of other communicators – to see the kinds of challenges they’re facing and the solutions they come up with. I always learn something from my experience, and this awards season is no exception.  So here, in no particular order, are some observations:

1. When it comes to internal blogging, we’re still very much in the early days. Ragan received only two entries in the new category. They were both impressive and engaging, but also rudimentary and experimental. The communicators who put them together knew they would be learning as they went, and the blogs they initiated, although rough around the edges, reflected a positive, pioneering spirit. One of the measures of a good blog is whether it generates lots of comments, and by that measure the ones I judged were great, if somewhat clunky, successes. Interestingly, both blogs were written by communication staff members and not rank and file employees or executives. Both were quite transparent attempts to simply start a conversation by putting issues on the table and then inviting readers to comment. And comment they did, with some posts attracting close to 100 comments. Some good lessons for anyone considering starting an internal blog:

• Initially at least, expect a flurry of comments that don’t necessarily stay on the subject being discussed.
• You may also get a certain amount of bitching and complaining as people take advantage of having a new internal forum to voice their irritations with their employer and their workplace.
• Allowing anonymous postings tends to encourage comments, but here’s a good rule – if you’re allowing a mix of attributed and anonymous comments, allow immediate, unedited posts for those willing to identify themselves, and moderated posts for anonymous contributors.
• The blogs I saw had effective self-regulation. Comments that are out of line (rude, unreasonable, confusing) get shouted down, with different degrees of politeness, by other readers.
• Set out clear, sensible guidelines when you start the blog so everyone knows what to expect, and what’s expected of them one of the blogs I judged did a great job of laying out the ground rules.

2. There’s a lot of great writing on Intranets, but how much of it is being read? I was amazed by how much some of the writers could get done in a short Intranet feature. At this point Intranets are relatively mature channel and the entries I saw were quite effective in telling interesting and relevant stories. My biggest concern is that so much good work gets done on these things, and no one is reading them. If you’re trying to keep your Intranet content “fresh,” that means you’re highlighting articles on your portal for only a day or two, or sometimes a week, before they’re buried by other content and then relegated to some kind of archive. Readers of this blog know I’m passionate about this: it’s a crying shame that so many companies have abandoned the extremely effective print medium, which is still one of the best ways of sharing information with employees and creating a sense of community at work.

3. You don’t have to look good to be good. I’m big on using great design and compelling photos to help get information across to employees. And I know there’s a disheartening amount of really crappy looking publications out there, with tiny photos, bad typography, amateurish writing and so on. But one of the publications that I judged looked about as bad as a desktop published newsletter can look – but it succeeded because it had clear communication goals and delivered on them. On a shoestring budget, an editor who had to do triple duty as writer, photographer and layout person managed to strike a chord with readers and influence bottom-line results.

4. Anecdotes and quotes are perhaps the two most powerful things in written communication. Stories that have them, sing. Those that don’t, sink. I was reminded of this with every item I judged. There’s really no better way to make an article come alive than to focus on an individual who is experiencing change first hand. Tell that personal story, using the subject’s own words, and you will be a better communicator.