I just read an article in the New Yorker -- a remembrance by a writer of an experience in a church that would change his friend's life. It's a great read, but it also has insights that are relevant to our role as communicators. Tell me what it means to you.
Every month a couple of editor friends and I get together at a favorite diner in downtown Vancouver and trade stories of our family and working lives.
This morning one of my friends reported on what she's doing lately for a longtime client. She helps out with employee communications, and I was heartened to hear that she's working with the company to revamp its communication vehicles, including starting up a new quarterly employee publication.
"Wow. That's great!" I said. "It's so good to hear someone's paying attention to improving employee communications. So is it a magazine? A maga-paper?"
"No, it's being put out as a .pdf so they can tell managers to print and distribute it at the different work sites," she said, cringing.
"AAAARGH! WHAT A LOAD OF HORSE SHIT! I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS! YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THEY'RE GOING THROUGH ALL THE TROUBLE OF DEVELOPING A NEW PUBLICATION AND THEY'RE NOT GOING TO BOTHER TO HAVE IT PROPERLY PRINTED AND DISTRIBUTED?" My rant went on for at least a couple of minutes along these lines. I have no objection to online tools. But they are part of a balanced mix -- a mix that still should include print -- at least in companies who have front line workers who don't have computers or who are over 25 years old.
"I know, I know. It's crazy," she replied, with more than a touch of resignation in her voice. "I'm just the contractor and I can't do anything about it. That's what they want to do."
This company has several different industrial work sites, and most employees don't have access to computers. Senior leaders think using online tools is modern and progressive. Plus they don't want to deal with the cost of printing and the trouble of distributing. So they leave it up to the line managers who, of course, care deeply about distributing information that comes from head office. Not!
My goodness, when will this madness end? I honestly can't believe how stupid big companies can be -- how they can consciously disenfranchise their own employees by not doing the simple, time-honoured task of printing an attractive, readable publication and putting it in everyone's hands.
I wish a pox on these companies. I hope they have the low morale, high attrition rates, nasty labour relations and poor productivity they deserve.
Had to share this great observation about print as a technology, by Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute and former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time. It's from an interesting book called "What Are You Optimistic About? Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better," edited by John Brockman:
"I am very optimistic about print as a technology. Words on paper are a wonderful information-storage, retrieval, distribution, and consumer product . . . Imagine if we had been getting our information delivered digitally to our screens for the past 550 years. Then some modern Gutenberg had come up with a technology that was able to transfer these words and pictures onto pages that could be delivered to our doorstep, and we could take them to the backyard, the bath, the bus. We would be thrilled with this technological leap forward, and we would predict that someday it might replace the Internet."
Ha! I love it.
It's worth signing up to The McKinsey Quarterly to read a recent interview with Chip Heath, Professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford School of Business and co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The interview includes this bit of wisdom, along with lots of other great insights for employee communicators:
"Leaders will spend weeks or months coming up with the right idea but then spend only a few hours thinking about how to convey that message to everybody else. That’s a tragedy. It’s worth spending time making sure that the lightbulb that has gone on inside your head also goes on inside the heads of your employees or customers."
Heath says sticky ideas share six basic traits:
I love, love, LOVE how the interview ends, with Heath discounting the importance of conveying sticky ideas through sexy media. "If you have the money to produce a movie about your inspiring story of organizational renewal, that's great. If not, just find an inspiring story and put it in your newsletter."
That made my day. Read the whole interview and it will make yours.
Internal publication editors live in an isolated world where they rarely get to see the work of their peers in other organizations.
Lately I've been getting emails from editors asking me to comment on their publications. I love to see other communicators' work, and I'm honored that they care what I think. So I thought, hey, why not turn it into a new feature for my blog?
I'm calling it Internal Publications that Matter. The idea is to give you an opportunity to get some feedback from me, showcase your publication to other communicators, and get comments from them, too. It's a chance for this little online community to share some best practices, and it gives me great blog fodder.
How it's going to work
The ground rules are simple: send me an issue of your internal publication as a .pdf file (try to keep the file size relatively small - I don't care if the photos are a little grainy).
In the covering note, tell me the basic info about your publication (who puts it together, how often it comes out, what's the circulation, who reads it) and answer these two questions:
I'll provide a link to the file in a blog post in which I'll give you some feedback and invite comments from readers.
This blog isn't moderated, and I want engaging comments. But I'll delete posts that I think are purposefully insulting or just plain mean. On the other hand, don't submit your publication if you can't take some ribbing along with the praise and constructive criticism.
And, finally, don't forget: this is the Internet. When you send me a file, I'm assuming you have authority or permission from your organization to share it, and that you recognize that, if and when I post it, it instantly becomes a public document whose contents are your responsibility, not mine or anyone else's.
So, if you edit an internal publication that matters, send me a copy, please!
My old pal Bill Sweetland over at Ragan.com reports on a new study that compares print and online communications. Not surprisingly, print comes out on top. What's surprising is how many organizations abandoned this powerful medium many years ago.
Time and time again I see companies sending out communications to their employees about the company's position on important issues -- with no attribution to anyone. Stuff along these lines:
"Bigco is embarking on a new customer service strategy designed to delight our customers by delivering our products more quickly and with fewer defects. The strategy is consistent with our values and will be rolled out in the coming weeks. The company is hopeful that it will improve our competitive position in the industry and it promises to improve our relationship with many customers and win new ones....blah blah blah."
It happens every day, and it drives me crazy. Companies wonder why employees don't trust them, and why they're skeptical about the contents of employee publications. And yet they continually put information out without anyone's name attached to it. If you're reporting on some simple facts, that's fine. Report the facts. But if you're making any value statement at all -- like whether something is good or bad, or why it's important, then quote an actual person. And, better yet, talk to that person and get a real quote from them!
If it's a story about a change in benefits, quote somebody in HR saying why the change is being made. If it's about a regulatory issue, quote the government relations person. If it's about the direction of the company, quote the CEO. But don't - PLEASE don't - just throw together a bunch of mushy, positive sounding words together that say almost nothing, in a tone that's boring to read, attributed to no one.
This seems so bloody obvious to me, but I see senior communicators do it all the time just because that's the easiest, simplest way to do it, and because they're used to doing it that way.
I've had enough, and so has everyone else who reads employee publications. This practice must stop immediately. Communicators who do it are making their companies look stupid, and eroding employee trust, whatever's left of it.
And you can quote me on that.
Barry Nelson, creator of The Storyboard, a source of feature articles for internal publications, is one of the smartest guys in employee communications, and I've written about his unique service in a previous post. Barry believes that organizations have become too focused on strictly business-related internal communication, ignoring the real, on-the-ground interests and concerns of most employees. Read more about his take on the problem, and the solution -- something he calls "workplace journalism" -- in his article in the September issue of the Journal of Employee Communication Management. It's must-reading for anyone involved in internal communications.
For the last four months I've been the interim managing editor of a biweekly employee publication, leading a team of contributors from across a big company. I helped my client launch the company-wide newsletter, which replaced six regional publications.
We just published our ninth edition, a 16-pager packed with news, features, great photos and not-so-great photos, lists of new hires, service anniversaries and retirements, a person-on-the-street interview, project updates, the results of a contest, and so on.
Being a newsletter junkie, I look forward to getting the first box of papers delivered from the printer. There's something primally satisfying about the smell of fresh ink on the page.
As I held the latest edition in my hands and thumbed through it, I thought to myself: this is Web zero point zero. My hands and eyeballs are the still the most sophisticated browser on the planet. For every employee who picks up the publication, it's going to get 16 page views, to put it in webspeak. Even if only half of the employee base picks up the publication (which is more uptake than many online newsletters get), that would be 2,000 readers times 16 page views, equals 32,000 page views per issue.
Even if the reader just glances through, maybe reads a few headlines and cutlines here and there, lands on one or two stories and reads them, that's already more communication in a five- or ten-minute browse than most intranet sites can accomplish in a week, if not a month...if not ever. And it's easier to read than a glaring computer screen.
As my friend David Murray says, the employee publication is no longer a news vehicle because of the speed of online communication, but it's still relevant because it's often the only physical manifestation of a company's brand, its values and its culture.
I agree. And good old ink on paper is still one of the most effective communication channels in the corporate world. It's a shame so many companies still cling to the notion that the print employee publication is a thing of the past.
Sometimes I try to be funny, but my wife Kate Zimmerman is a humour columnist, and actually is funny.
This is one of her latest pieces, which appear every Sunday in the North Shore News. It's about internal communication so I thought it would be of interest to readers of For Your Approval.
For more of Kate's work, visit her Web site or check out her blog, Kate of Late.
____________________________________________________________________
SUBMISSION TO: Terror Times, the internal online Al Qaeda henchmen newsletter
FROM: Lexi Donnelly, Employee Number 6009
DATE: Spring, 2007
TOPIC: Introductory column from our new party planner
Lighten up!
with Lexi Donnelly
Hola!
Allow me to introduce myself: I am Mr. bin Laden’s new party planner, Lexi! He has brought me in to raise Al Qaeda henchmen spirits and help you connect with each other. I’ll do that through festive gatherings I’ll be organizing at secret locations all over the world and announcing in this newsletter. As Mr. bin Laden says, “Above all, terrorism should be fun!”
To get that fun going, Mr. bin Laden asks that, in your future correspondence with him, you dot the “i” in “bin” with a happy face. “For what is a smile but a frown turned upside down?” he sagely asked me the other week, and I’d never heard it put quite so perfectly. No wonder you all revere him and do his bidding, no matter how nefarious. Ha ha!
Anyhoo, I’m old pals with Osama, as I call him when we’re face-to-veil. We met at Jeddah University, where I first noticed him through binoculars at a frosh week sock hop, leading the all-male conga line. He was a party animal back then -- he took charge of recruitment for one of the harder-to-fill fraternities and did a fabulous job. At graduation, he was headed into his family’s construction business and I was just taking on the role of comptroller at Enron; we joked at the time, from opposite ends of an enormous room, that someday our paths might cross again.
Flash forward to early 2007. I had found myself ready for a career switch after my decade of keeping Hollinger International on the straight and narrow when I saw Osama’s ad online, on Craigslist.
I thought you’d get a kick out of hearing about my first encounter with our mutual boss last week. We met poolside at the Dubai Hilton. He wore sunglasses and a ballcap reading “Death to Whoever” over his turban to ensure that he would not be recognized. As you know, he is one of the world’s most wanted men, and not in the George Clooney way. (I wore a floor-length black sheath with my eyes showing, but you probably guessed that already! Ha!)
Osama began our conversation by saying that morale at Al Qaeda was at an all-time low. “I tell my henchmen they will receive their rewards in paradise, but this is not enough for some of them, especially the Gen-Xers,” he told me morosely over a cup of tea. “They complain of the dangers in the work and say their lunch and coffee breaks are ‘abbreviated.’”
“Osama, baby, look at yourself!” I advised him. “Seriously. Why the long face? How do you expect to lighten things up around here when everything with you is doom, gloom, and paradise later? Why no paradise now?”
“That’s not how we operate,” he said sternly.
So I pushed him in the water, and we were off to the races! He started to guffaw, the ball cap floated away, and he could barely hoist himself out of the pool with the weight of his sodden robe. “Ah! Zany hijinks! I had forgotten they still existed in this world gone mad,” he said, climbing up the ladder, wheezing with laughter.
“You know, if you weren’t so uptight, you could have pulled me into the pool with you,” I told him a bit flirtatiously, though I knew he had multiple wives. For half a second, I thought he’d do it. But then he remembered the same water would have touched both our flesh, or something like that, and politely excused himself to change robes. Half an hour and many solo cups of tea later, he reemerged with several grim-looking bodyguards who now stood between him and the pool.
“Where were we?” he asked pleasantly. “Oh, yes, how to inflame the spirits of my people so they will re-dedicate themselves to my mighty works.”
“What about a good old-fashioned hootenanny?” I asked. I never really run out of ideas.
“Men and women singing together?” he asked, his brow furrowing. One of the bodyguards began ostentatiously polishing a machete.
“No? How ’bout a rodeo?” I offered, picturing the men on one side and the women on the other side of an arena.
“Men interacting with cloven-hoofed animals?” Osama asked, his brow furrowing even deeper. I worried for him -- wrinkles were clearly in his future.
“What would you say to a Mexican fiesta, with piñatas resembling hated world leaders?” I proposed.
“Now you’re talking,” said Osama. “For party favours, automatic weapons that the guests can use to open the piñatas!”
In my experience, weapons and morale-boosting parties don’t mix, as I remember telling Lady Barbara Amiel Black when she showed up in a dangerously pointy bustier for one Hollinger shindig. So I offered an alternative.
“I was thinking of something more cheerful and upbeat -- a little dancing, a little spicy food, sombreros, a mariachi band. Kids running around stoning chickens, cackling maniacally. Maybe we could even have a contest to see who has the best maniacal cackle!”
“I like it,” said Osama, trying out his own madman’s chuckle, which needed work.
So that’s what we’ve come up with -- the first of many prospective company parties. Keep watching this space for more!
Here are the gory -- or should I say glory? Ha ha! -- details.
You and your family (females and infidels excepted) are commanded to congregate in Cave 2060, You-Know-Where, on Sunday, April 1 at 11:30 a.m. for a Mexican fiesta, Al Qaeda style. Expect fiery tacos, soothing guacamole and displays of machismo such as eating the tequila worm without, of course, touching any tequila. Bring a change of robe as we’ll be importing a small ocean and you could get wet.
No need to reply. We know you’ll show. Of course I will not be there, but rest assured, a good time will be had by Al … Qaeda! Ha!
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