For Your Approval

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.

 

NASA's Vision Crashes and Burns

I've written before in this blog about the value of written vision/mission statements. Here's one of the most inspiring I've ever seen:

"To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers...as only NASA can."

Wow! That's vision. Beyond the obvious and vaguely kitschy allusion to Star Trek, it's a sentence that's poetic, easy to understand, and captures one's imagination with its boldness and humanity.

A recent news item in the New York Times reports that NASA's inspiring mission statement was "quietly altered" earlier this year to this:

"to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

The key piece that was deleted (other than the poetry of the thing) is "to understand and protect our home planet." According to the Times, the change

"comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the "understand and protect" phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions."

The "understand and protect" phrase was used last year by NASA climate scientis James Hansen to defend his work. Hansen generated a lot of press by accusing political operatives of threatening him for speaking publicly about the danger of global climate change. So the mission statement change looks like the kind of draconian, paternalistic, politically motivated decision that has become a hallmark of the Bush administration.

Politics aside, it's a great example of how to destroy employee loyalty and engagement. The inspiring NASA mission statement was adopted in 2002 under Bush-appointed NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe after "an open process with scientists and employees across the agency." Which is how a good mission statement should be created, if you want it to resonate with the people who are responsible for delivering it.

Imagine if you're someone who was involved in the development of the 2002 statement. At a company I used to work for that was famous for its draconian CEO and its Kafkaesque bureacracy, we called these kinds of situations "BOHICA moments." BOHICA stands for "bend over, here it comes again."

Some, I'm sure, will be dusting off their resumes, but where else would anyone at NASA go to find similar work? The Chinese or Russian space agencies? Instead, like most demoralized employees, they will lose their motivation and start thinking of their jobs as paychecks rather than sources of fulfilment and pride. Productivity and quality will go down, costs will go up.

I feel sorry for the 19,000 employees who have to deal with this B.S. And I'm reminded of how important it is for communicators to do what they can to bring inspiring vision statements to life.

If someone changed the wording, and meaning, of your mission statement tomorrow, would anyone care?