For Your Approval

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

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.

To hell in a handbasket

I've written quite a bit about the changing values of the workforce and how employers, and communicators, need to pay attention to generational differences as their organizations try to attract new people and retain the ones they've got. And it's clear that Generation Y has unique qualities that set it apart. The incoming generation has a different character. It also has a disproportionate amount of power because of the growing shortage of skilled workers as the Baby Boomers retire in droves.

But I've never really considered how much this new generation of "Millennials" is perceived as a bunch of lazy, selfish, brattish punks who share a mind-boggling sense of entitlement. At a cocktail party last night I met a gentleman -- a Gen X-er -- who actually left a job because part of his responsibilities was to conduct job interviews with Millennial candidates. He was sickened by what he saw as their complete lack of a decent work ethic and their expectation that the employer should be pandering to their every need. When he spoke of them, his disgust was palpable. And I know of at least one CEO who feels the same way.

What an interesting dynamic that's emerging! You've got the generation that's now coming into management roles -- the hardened, cynical Gen X-ers who entered the workforce when there were no jobs and had to bootstrap their way to success -- having to manage a generation whose members have never had to worry about getting a job, don't respect authority and are willing to jump ship and go work for the competition at the drop of a hat.

So what does this mean for communicators? I wonder if these generational differences are going to create an even greater gap between workers and management than exists today.  I worry that the Gen-Xers won't be able to easily figure out how to manage  Millennials and the work environment in many companies will become even more dysfunctional than it is today.

How will communicators help connect these two insanely disparate generations? Social media might be part of the answer. But can you imagine a Gen-X manager blogging, and having to deal with all the smarmy comments from the Gen-Ys? Social media might help connect people and build online communities, but it could also create lots of problems for management because it gives people such a powerful venue for whining and complaining.

Big organizations removed coffee rooms decades ago to save money and reduce office chatter, which is now relegated to the outdoor smoking areas. But social media creates the world's biggest water cooler.

Traditional corporate communication is all about controlling information. In a Gen-Y world where information (and people) are becoming impossible to control, is there a role for communicators at all?

The power of print

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.

Why can't you get a Masters in employee comms?

This morning I got a query from an FYA reader in Spain asking me if I know of any Masters programs in employee communications. A quick note to veteran IABC-ers Les Potter and Wilma Matthews turned up nearly nada. Les doesn't know of any, and Wilma pointed to the only one she knows of, the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication's Masters program, but it's pretty broad.  Current areas of study include "intercultural communication and cultural studies, interpersonal communication, performance studies, organizational communication, and rhetorical studies and public communication." That doesn't really sound like the kind of specialization my Spanish colleague was looking for.

Dear blog readers, do you know of any Masters-level programs in employee/organizational communications?

And, if not, which is probably the case, the question is, why not? The answer, of course, is that employee communications is not generally recognized as a distinct profession, but rather as an offshoot or subset of human resources or public relations.

I think over the next 10 years this is bound to change. I've talked about this a lot: employee comms is on the rise, because of many economic, societal and technological changes that are putting huge pressure on big organizations to smarten up and treat their employees as if they are extremely important, and, in fact, a competitive advantage, to their businesses. We now know that companies who do employee communications well also deliver better business results. This knowledge is going to seep into the corporate world and it will eventually raise the game of internal communications.

This trend will also reach the highest levels of academia, and maybe now is a good time for that to happen.

From my super-powerful position as an obscure blogger about employee communications, I officially call upon the business community - specifically, one of the big consulting firms like Mercer, Towers Perrin or Watson Wyatt -- to fund a new chair in employee communications at a North American university. Maybe IABC and Southwest Airlines could chip in.

Wouldn't that be cool?

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.

 

Sticky ideas

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:

• They're simple. They should be short, but they also must have some depth. Think proverb, not sound bite.
• They're unexpected. You're looking for uncommon sense.
• They're concrete. The opposite of "building shareholder value." More like "We can put a man on the moon in this decade."
• They're credible. Make sure the audience will buy it by avoiding spin.
• They convey emotion. Don't try to convince people. Move them.
• They tell stories. Stories allow people to mentally rehearse an idea by imagining how it is experienced by someone else. Heath calls stories "a kind of mental flight simulator."

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.

A cautionary message from Roger D'Aprix

In today's ragan.com Daily Headlines, reporter David Murray brings us a condensed version of a speech by internal communication god Roger D'Aprix, an old dog who's wary of the new tricks of social media. It's a thoughtful look at the pros and cons of this industry-sweeping trend, and well worth a read.

The staying power of text

There's been a lot of talk these days about the decline of print communication, but here's an interesting article by Joe Mandese in Media magazine about the continuing dominance of text vs. visual/multimedia.

Clinical communication

There's a creepy, clinical edge to how many people refer to employee communication. Anyone who has taken a PR diploma, attended an IABC conference or reads the trade publications serving our field knows what I'm talking about. Strategic internal communication is all about "changing behavior," "aligning the interests of employees and the enterprise," "securing buy-in," "increasing mindshare," or "leveraging human capital."

Yuck. Could we be more Orwellian than this? The term "internal propagandist" comes to mind.

And yet the spirit behind these icky terms is not a bad one -- everyone wants to do meaningful work and to make a difference. It so happens that employee communicators are in the business of influencing behavior and changing attitudes, even if it's in relatively benign ways like making sure people understand the latest changes to the benefits program or urging them to try not to waste money.

But I sure don't like the terminology. It doesn't reflect the changing values of our society, which is rebelling against the hierarchy and paternalism that defined the generation that, thank goodness, is on its way out. And it doesn't reflect how most internal communicators think about their role.

So, instead of influencing behavior, we earn trust and support. Instead of aligning interests, we listen and learn. Instead of leveraging human capital, we tell stories that help build strong internal communities. And instead of securing buy-in and increasing mindshare, we support positive change and start meaningful conversations.

This shift in language is not just turning unattractive words into cute ones. It represents a shift in attitude. It rejects a paradigm centered on clinical control, and recognizes the humanity of what we do.