For Your Approval

Dear CEO

It’s time for corporate leaders to change the way they communicate with employees.

In an article in the current edition of the Journal of Employee Communication Management, I outline nine ways today’s CEOs can improve their vital connection with the people who make their businesses run. I’ve structured the piece as an open letter to CEOs.

When I first got this assignment, I invited readers of this blog to weigh in with their thoughts, which I incorporated into the article. Thanks, Mark, Steve, Robin and Kristen! Thanks also to my wise colleagues at Longview for their insights.

Here’s a link to the entire article, in .pdf format. Download ron_jecm_article_feb_08.pdf  

And here’s a blog-friendly summary of my advice to corporate leaders:

1. Think about communication as you’re making business decisions – not after the fact. Good business decisions can go bad in a hurry because communication implications aren’t considered as part of the decision-making process.

2. Involve your communications team much earlier than you do now. Your communicators can act as a proxy for employees who do not otherwise have a voice.

3. Recognize that today’s employees don’t necessarily share your values. Baby boomer CEOs have a different work ethic, a different set of priorities, a different idea of what a successful career looks like, and a different way of communicating. If you communicate as if all employees think just like you, you risk alienating and further disengaging your workforce.

4. Understand what your employees are thinking. Quickie employee polls, readership surveys and small focus groups can give you timely and useful information. Be sure to show that you’ve listened, and that you’re responding to employee concerns, and you’ll earn their trust.

5. Start a real conversation with your employees.  One of the easiest ways to increase engagement is to have a conversation with employees about the future of your company. Get ahead of the curve now and start experimenting with social media like blogs and podcasts. In the meantime, get out there and talk with people face to face.

6. For goodness’ sake, stop blocking the Internet! There are security and productivity issues, but they can be resolved. Severely limiting internet access is not the answer because it inhibits employee engagement. Open access to information invites involvement, breeds innovation and inspires commitment.

7. Improve day-to-day communication with your direct reports. The way to make the biggest impact is to model the right behavior with your own immediate team.

8. Don’t be reluctant to tell the whole truth. If you don’t talk frankly and openly about what everyone knows already, you lose credibility – and the next time you have really positive news to talk about, employees won’t buy that, either.

9. And, finally, and perhaps most importantly, speak plain English with employees. The language you may speak in the boardroom, or with your bankers and lawyers, may be truthful but it’s incomprehensible to most employees.

To communicators, all this stuff is as obvious as the nose on our faces. But many corporate execs don’t think in these terms, and their leadership suffers as a result. Part of our job should be to give them this kind of advice, and I don't think we do it often enough.

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

#3: I have a nine-inch metal plate in my upper left arm.

On a rainy January morning in 2004 I went on a mountain bike ride with our family dog, Molly, galloping by my side. It was my usual fitness ride along Lynn Creek near my home in North Vancouver.

As usual, for a little middle-aged thrill, I rode into a skateboard bowl located along the trail. Except, this time, someone had ditched a shopping cart in the bottom, which I swerved to avoid. But the side of the bowl was coated in frost. My front tire gave way and I flipped, my body crashing into the sloped edge of the bowl.

When I hit, my humerus (which, I learned, is one of the least funny parts of my body) snapped in two like a dry twig and I rolled to the bottom of the bowl.

So, there I was, lying flat on my back in the rain with my arm bent in a most unnatural position behind me, my dog staring down quizzically from the edge of the bowl, and Cheryl Crow blaring into my earbuds, singing "All I wanna do, is have some fun..."

First thing I did was flip the arm over to the front of my body. Boy, did that hurt. But it eased the pain to straighten out the limb and have it resting on my chest.

No one else was on the path that morning, but luckily I had my cell phone. Unluckily, in my trauma-induced confusion I gave the folks at 911 the wrong address for the skateboard park. An ambulance sped around the North Shore for about half an hour looking for me at other parks in the area. Finally, after some back and forth calls to the dispatcher, I was discovered and eventually my arm was screwed back together.

These days I mostly don't notice the metal plate (I think it's titanium, and it's fastened with about nine screws), and, interestingly, neither do the metal detectors at airports. Which makes me wonder what else they don't catch. I retain a long, loud scar, which makes me feel kind of macho, as if I had a past career in extreme sports.

I still go on that fitness ride, but no more skateboard bowls for me.

High concept and high touch

Finally, I am reading the brilliant The World is Flat by New York Times reporter Thomas L. Friedman. As predicted by those who recommended the book to me, it is blowing my mind. It features lots of stuff I kind of knew about globalization and technological change, but the information and analysis are presented with such clarity and color that my understanding of the world is now at a whole 'nuther level. And I'm only on page 343, with almost half a book more to go.

So far, the most striking passage in the book isn't Friedman's, but rather this excerpt from another writer, Daniel Pink, from his book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age:

"To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high-tech abilities with aptitudes that are 'high concept' and 'high touch.' High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

"Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy for everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or at least fear less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our caveperson ancestors weren't plugging numbers into spreadsheets or debugging code. But they were telling stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human. It's just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high concept, high touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape."

I can't think of a clearer or more inspiring mandate than this for employee communications.

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

#2: I was a teenage parodist.

In the late 1970s I was a student at Carleton University's School of Journalism. For fun, I became part of a group of young writers and editors at the school paper, The Charlatan. Every year we put together an annual special edition of the paper that parodied something. One time it was People magazine (see Pupil magazine, with yours truly on the cover), another it was the local daily paper, and so on. I guess it was our version of the Harvard Lampoon. And what fun it was! We skewered pop culture icons. We stomped on convention. We threw big rocks at big targets. Some of my very best memories come from those days. I'd like to see the odd bit of parody injected into employee publications. Can you imagine putting out a spoof of your own annual report? Actually, when I was at Petro-Canada editing the employee publication, In Brief, which did a lot of reporting on downsizings, some wag did a desktopped parody and called it In Grief. Ha!

HR is in decline, but let's not celebrate

The latest article in the McKinsey Quarterly is entitled "Making Talent Management a Strategic Priority." (You may need to subscribe for the link to work; so here's a .pdf version: Download mata08.pdf.) It's worth a read, with lots of insights for internal communicators. One passage in particular struck me:

Our research confirms the idea that HR’s influence is declining. The executives we interviewed criticized HR professionals for lacking business knowledge, observing that many of them worked in a narrow administrative way rather than addressing long-term issues such as talent strategy and workforce planning ... As one HR director explained, senior executives “don’t see us as having business knowledge to provide any valuable insights. We’re doing many things based on requests, and they don’t see HR as a profession.”

Employee communications people have big issues with HR. Many communicators downright hate the function and dislike many of the people working in it. But before we start dancing on HR's grave, let's remind ourselves that employee communications often reports to HR, and we are often perceived by executives in the same way. There's plenty of paint on McKinsey's brush left over for us.

Whether you like HR people or not, the report's findings are a chilling reminder of how the human side of big business continues to decline.

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

What fun. Thanks for the tag, Shel! Here goes...

#1: I have a brother who's also a foodie

My dear brother, Allan, is a Calgary lawyer. We don't look very much alike, but we have many things in common, including a flair for showmanship and a deep love of cooking. I guess we're kind of competitive... although neither of us would admit it. At the same time as I was pursuing a sub-career as a barbecue champion and cookbook author, Allan became a Calgary food celebrity specializing in Italian cooking and hosting obscure food TV shows. My wife Kate calls us Frasier and Niles. Can you guess which one is Frasier?

Links for Jan. 4, 2008

Some interesting stuff posted on other blogs recently that's worth sharing:

• Penelope Trunk (Brazen Careerist) blogs about the implications of Obama's ascendency on today's workplace. Just some more background on why Generation Y matters.

• And Jeff Jarvis (Buzz Machine) puts up an intriguing defense of Facebook and how its mistakes are challenging the status quo. I love Jarvis' commentary about the evolution of the media.
  

New media channels are indeed gaining traction

Erik Samdahl of the Seattle-based consulting firm, The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), saw my recent post listing my predictions for 2008 and responded with a thoughtfully targeted blog pitch.

My thanks to Erik for sending along a useful overview of recent research on the adoption of social media into the workplace, which comes in the form of a recent edition of i4cp's newsletter, Trendwatcher: Download trendwatcher_20071102_social_tools1.pdf

The evidence suggests that use of social media inside big organizations is trending upward, but isn't yet ubiquitous. We all kinda know that, but it's handy to have a roundup of statistical evidence to back up our instincts.

The i4cp was formerly known as Human Resource Institute (HRI). Eric tells me his firm "helps companies improve workforce productivity by providing a combination of research, peer communities, tools and technology to corporate executives and HR professionals." Good call on the name change. Human Resource Institute sounds like it might be run by Nurse Ratchet herself! Thanks again Erik!

Guru Ronnie on the year behind, and the year ahead

2007 was one of those seminal years in which technological changes, economic trends, generational shifts and business realities made employee communications people more nervous than usual about our place in the world.

We watched as the foofarah over social media came to a bubbly head, prompting those who were "in" to feel trendy and superior, and those who were "not in yet" to soften their skepticism and wonder if it's time to jump onto the bandwagon -- before it sinks, wheels spinning, into the mud of reality.

We worried that the continued globalization of the world economy would outsource all our jobs to Bangalore. (They can update Intranet sites from there, can't they?)

We felt puzzled and threatened by all those millennial kids coming into the workforce, with their goody-two-shoes Gen Y values and their canny ability to communicate with each other without the help of wizened, cynical intermediaries like us.

And we wondered how much longer we would be communicating about "employee engagement" before it gets replaced by another jargony term for the same vain attempts of large organizations to cope with the existential morass that is the modern workplace.

Well, it's pretty clear 2008 is going to be more of the same.

Woo hoo!

I say "Woo hoo!" because these anxiety-inducing trends are such gigantic, interesting challenges that there's truly no better time to be in internal communications. Never has what we do mattered so much. 

Before I decide what will happen in 2008, let me look back at what I saw coming in 2007. At the start of last year I made a bunch of pompous predictions, most of which were vague enough to keep me off the hook, 12 months later, as I freshly prognosticate again. The only prediction that I clearly blew was the most specific: that Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson would add another 50 episodes to the vast audio bank of their podcast, For Immediate Release. The prolific duo produced twice that, and Shel and Neville continue apace.

So, here are my predictions for 2008:

1. This will be the year that every Fortune 500 company, every government, every big NGO -- pretty much every organization with more than 200 employees -- will have a social media strategy, which will include an employee component. Some will dive in, others will dabble. But this trend will touch EVERYBODY in 2008. In February 2009 the Gold Quill Awards program will be swamped with social media entries, just as it was swamped with corporate Web sites in 1997.

2. Smart communicators will use this sweeping trend as an excuse to start a meaningful conversation with their CEOs about what it will take to connect with employees and build a strong internal community. Others will blindly do stuff just because it's trendy, wasting huge amounts of money and further alienating employees with needless information delivered in new ways.

3. Facebook will launch a sister network designed for business (along the lines of Linkedin, but better) that will become extremely popular, but will prompt many companies to install clunky internal social networks in a vain attempt to keep their "walled gardens" closed to the outside world. In a related trend, employees will start bringing their own wirelessly connected personal laptops to work so they can stay hooked up to their social networks during the day. Some will get fired for this, making headlines and inspiring others to follow.

4. There will be a global shortage of internal communicators. This will be driven by the rise of social media and the increasing desperation of corporate leaders as they try to figure out how to improve employee engagement. Salaries and job positions for employee comms professionals will finally begin to approach parity with external communications.

So, 2008, bring it on! I'm ready, and so are communicators everywhere. It's going to be one hell of a year.