Posts Tagged ‘internal communication’

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From Solitary to Social… Becoming a New Communicator

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

By Heather Marks

Heather Marks, Avery DennisonOver the last few years, a common theme has emerged when talking about the future of the communications profession: a shift from creating communication to enabling it.

That doesn’t mean that what I’ve spent years learning and practicing is worthless. To me, it implies that I now need to take everything I know and learn how to apply it differently.

Eeek!

Over the years, I’ve noticed that many employee communicators would rather wrestle with words on paper than engage in live conversation, much less negotiate with clients who think they already know what they want. Probably the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do is force myself to confidently push back and convince a client to stop long enough to consider taking a different approach.

That’s why I’m so passionate about measurement. If you can measure it, you can sell it to senior management! [Hear,hear! Ed.]

Add in the challenge of convincing a client that it’s time for them to learn something new to become a better leader and communicator… now that’s hard. And for me, the advent of employee social networking requires looking at everything I do from different perspective and developing completely new skills. It’s already time to move from enabling to… connecting.

Here’s what I mean. At Avery Dennison, we’ve rolled out a complete suite of social networking tools for employees as an add-on to our traditional intranet portal. Suddenly, employees are in control of the content –not me, nor our executives. Sure, we can still push messages out, but now those communications are in competition with the energy, creativity, hands-on expertise and passionate exchange of ideas that is occurring among employees, without our help. This meant we needed to change how we thought about, planned and did communications.

Our response

First, we relaxed our internal “corporate” voice to be more conversational and engaging. Frankly, that’s something that needed to happen anyway, and it has made employees stop and actually pay more attention to corporate messages.

Second, rather than expecting our executives to suddenly become expert social networkers – or even be experts ourselves – we’re mining the rich content employees are developing to highlight stories that best serve the company’s vision, objectives, values and leadership principles. We’re not eliminating corporate news stories or leadership messages, we’re just giving MORE space and attention to what employees at every level are saying – encouraging, elevating and celebrating the good work that’s already happening.

People move in the direction of the things they talk about. So, why not find the good “talk” that’s happening and get people talking about it even more?

This has fundamentally changed the work I do and how I do it. I write less than ever before – and I’m actually OK with it! For me, corporate employee communications is no longer about getting direction from business leaders and then sitting down alone to develop strategies and formal written communications. It’s about being curious about what other people are doing and saying, shaping a consistent and meaningful voice out of the communication noise – wherever it is generated — connecting ideas and people, and collaborating.

Not everyone is excited about or comfortable with the changes happening in our profession, and there is still plenty of room for those who prefer writing to socializing and connecting. But, I’m more interested in outcomes than output, and I’m excited to see how all of this plays out.

What about you?

Heather Marks is Director, Communications Technology, Corporate Communications, for Avery Dennison Corporation, the producer of consumer products, pressure-sensitive adhesives and materials.

Follow her on Twitter @HeatherLMarks, where she talks food (as the co-owner of Heather’s Heat and Flavor, the spice/sauce/salsa stores in Lyndhurst and Hudson, Ohio.)

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Posted in Internal Communications, Social Media | 1 Comment »

PowerPoint–Friend or Foe of Internal Communications?

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Trent MeidingerGuest recap by Trent Meidinger.

It can inflict boredom and alienate the masses. Or it can help to inspire and win hearts. World leader? Reality television? No, it’s PowerPoint, and its use in internal communications was the focus of this week’s #icchat on Twitter.

I’ll be honest: When I hear the term PowerPoint, the boredom warning alarm rings loudly. I nearly chose to be outdoors on a perfect fall day here in Minnesota, rather than attend a chat about this widely used but frequently reviled tool. But the growing reputation of Sean’s (@CommAMMO) #icchat discussions drew me in. That, along with curiosity and a thirst for PowerPoint inspiration from special guest The Presentationist –  a.k.a., Tony Ramos – a man who’s devoted his career to communicating clearly with PowerPoint since 1993.

Our discussion confirmed there is a place for PowerPoint – if it’s used wisely.  Sean got things started with a candid question: “Why does PowerPoint suck, especially for internal communications?”

@rjfarr PPT sucks for #internalcomms because it’s boring, people don’t know how to use it well, and it tends to be really impersonal. #icchat

@tonyramos Agreed. Top reason most PPT sucks is too much text on a slide, then speaker simply reads the slides. Most common complaint. #icchat

@ZebraCracker When PPT is used well [rarely] for #internalcomms and distributed as-is to audience w/out speakernotes, it loses potency. #icchat

Solutions brought us to communications fundamentals.

@tonyramos Moving to stronger imagery, less text, story structure aid in better #PPT for #internalcomms

PowerPoint alone won’t do the job. Speakers are responsible for engaging the audience.

@dblacombe I treat each slide as a chance to have a convo with *one* person about a topic I’m interested in #icchat

@dan_larkin I prefer using images only, or images with key phrases. I want an audience connecting with me, not my slides. #icchat

@tonyramos Good models to follow for image-oriented #PPT are Steve Jobs and http://noteandpoint.com/ #icchat

The energy – or lack thereof – put into internal communications was called into play with Diane (@ZebraCracker) asking, “What approach best overcomes the notion that ‘this is good enough – it’s just internal.’?”

@tonyramos Resources funnel to where value/ROI perceived 2 be. Deliver top Internalcomms and aud will see value you accord them. Fight 4 it! #icchat

@Commammo lot of time the need is a leave-behind, not a preso – even Word is better for that…

@dblacombe I’m experimenting with putting up on Slideshare and then blog posting versus handout #icchat

@dan_larkin How you communicate with internal teams influences their communication with customers. There is no “just internal.” #icchat

Sean steered us into the creative aspects of PowerPoint, asking if text is dead for presentations and whether animation and motion are useful.

@tonyramos Q3 Just cuz u can doesnt mean you should. Save animation/motion/builds for when it is critical to understanding the message. Great example of a story told thru sparse text, images, video, soundtrack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SbXgQqbOoU #icchat

@ZebraCracker Depends on audience. There is a time and place for big, stark, powerful text sans animation, etc. Time and place = when on big stage, with big audience, when presenter shd be star of show.

Developing stories to engage audiences is essential.

@tonyramos There’s the key word: engaging. If u r truly engaging/engrossing ur audience, u might even turn off the projector! #icchat

@ZebraCracker Next time would love to chat about these mgrs who spend too much time building slides and too little time with story structure #icchat

And with that, the topic for the next #icchat was born: structuring stories for internal communications. Join us November 2 from 2 – 3 eastern time (North America).

[Note: You can read this week's transcript here.]

Trent Meidinger’s expertise is in internal and executive communications – strategy, counsel, coaching and messaging. He has worked at American Express, Target Corporation and United Healthcare in communications and operations-management roles. He writes about business and personal communications at http://trentmeidinger.com and is a member of the International Association of Business Communicators. Follow him on Twitter as @wheati.

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Web Tools Expanding (Slowly) into Internal Communication

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

A small but eager group of professional communicators met 7 September to explore the current state of Web tools in internal communication and found a slow, but steady increase in their use.  Twitter-based #ICChat totaled more than 200 tweets in a fast-paced, hour-long online discussion from 2-3 p.m. North American Eastern Time.

The most basic tools — e-mail and intranets and RSS — are expectedly common, but social tools — blogging, varieties of microblogging (such as Twitter) and shared document management are seen as near-term priorities.

@irosen: Q1: There is an increased demand on “basics” found on the internet such as RSS feeds, microblogging and embedded media #icchat

@Wedge: Slowly reducing our reliance on emailing Word documents around; moving to intranet web pages and shared space on intranet for docs #icchat

Microblogging, including Yammer, offers the potential for collaboration and instant access, according to the company website. The tool could lower data processing costs by redirecting communication away from e-mail, particularly for the short, direct sort of questions-and-answers an employee might need on the spur of the moment. I made the same argument for RSS and other tools

@CommAMMO: One angle @csledzik is to quantify amt of email traffic – if you banned Word doc attch’s in fav of Google docs/Sharep methods #icchat

@CommAMMO: @wheati @irosen Less email through the wall means lower data proc costs – RSS is seemless, no? #icchat

But reducing direct cost wasn’t a prime driver in one person’s opinion:

@wheati: @CommAMMO @irosen @Wedge Weren’t concerned with data cost. Interested in ease, security of doc access. And “one stop” shop for info. #icchat

Trying to reduce e-mail — for the sake of employees’ productivity — is a critical factor, in my opinion. Aggregating nonessential (but still important) material is a decidedly old-school response, though social tools offer an advantage beyond financial impact.

@jpchurch: We’re about to launch a complete intranet re-do, and introduce more targeted info & collaborative tools. Still far too many emails. #icchat

@jgombita: Q1 If staff, clients R spread out (geog’phy), working with wiki (or Google docs) is effective and inexpensive #icchat

@csledzik: So theres 2 objtvs: 1) reducing data proc. $ & incr’g knowledge sharing. Soft goal is key, but not the driver. #icchat

There currently is no organization I know of which has gotten knowledge management particularly right — though many have made progress: Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Knowledge predates the Web, using Lotus Notes databases to gather info from employees and make it available. Kind of early crowdsourcing…

Microsoft’s Sharepoint suite — with its Wiki-Blogging-Discussions, etc. — came up a fair amount as a means of supporting knowledge sharing, with one participant looking for guidance on initial deployment.

@tnerko: Most excited about #SharePoint for wiki features as most in my company on a 3 year rotation and knowledge leaves often #icchat

The embrace of web tools within the workplace (particularly social media) is a referendum in organizational trust, transparency, according to one participant:

@csledzik: .@CommAMMO I see mgmt thatNot comf. w/ trust or transparency. Don’t understand benefits of sharing inter/externally. #icchat

The latter part of that tweet is pretty close to the truth: Internal communication, generally, isn’t as highly regarded in the workplace as is media relations. We shouldn’t be surprised that internal audiences are subject to fantasies of tight control — one senior leader told me that internal communication was, “a warm-fuzzy for employees” who don’t really care about the business.  It was some years ago, so I’m hopeful that opinions have moderated. But the advent of social media has shaken business leaders to their very boots in fear of loss of control. Control, by the way, that they haven’t had in 50 years, at least.

@wheati: A concern is also about company reputation. Exes want to control and package it, but SM is about neither. #icchat

@jgombita @pointsoftrue that’s why the key is guidelines #icchat

Indeed, guidelines are critical. The trick is to convince leaders that their employees can be trusted to follow them. This is a huge issue in regulated industries, such as securities firms, banks, medical.

The too-fast conversation wrapped up talking about how these web tools — in particular intranets — are measured.

@Wedge: To Q4: behaviour change. Impact, rather than ‘hits’ (although ‘hits’ are a baseline to indicate use / usefulness. #icchat #intranet

@wheati: Loosely…% of front line adopting RSS was one measure. #icchat

@CommAMMO: @wheati Tying the stats back to outcomes, even just simple correls is helpful – language of C-suite. #icchat

@tnerko: Word of mouth and feedback links for now, looking forward to commenting in sharepoint and will run focus groups as well #icchat

Next #ICChat is 21 September, 2-3 pm Eastern (North America), and we’re open to suggestions as to topic and potential guests. Hope to see you then.

What would you add to this? How can we make #ICChat better? Use the comments, or send me an email.

Sean Williams can help you: Consulting, Strategic Planning, Measurement, Training, Writing/Editing.

CommAMMO: One angle @csledzik is to quantify amt of email traffic – if you banned Word doc attch’s in fav of Google docs/Sharep methods #icchat
6:16 pm CommAMMO: @wheati @irosen Less email through the wall means lower data proc costs – RSS is seemless, no? #icchat
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Posted in Internal Communications, Intranet, Measurement, Social Media | Comments Off

Employee Engagement Still Relevant

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

On 24 August, a group of internal communication folks gathered on Twitter for #ICChat, the twice-monthly discussion that a few of us think might be valuable. The topic: Employee Engagement, the Gallup Q12-fueled effort to make employees feel good enough about their organization that they turn into brand champions. (Or peer leaders, or influencers, or advocates, what have you. Pick a term).

This edition was far and away the most participation we’ve had, thanks to interest from several prominent IABC’ers and, no doubt, relentless marketing by Yours Truly (grin).  We’re following in the huge footsteps of Twitter mega-chats like #SoloPR, #PR20Chat, #BlogChat, #B2BChat #PRStudChat #IMCChat and a bunch of others, so 20 chatters and 241 tweets gives me hope.

By the way, #ICCHat and those other # thingies are ‘hashtags‘ – a string of text that makes it so that you can find tweets that contain it when you search on Twitter.  I use a third-party application, www.TweetChat.com, to organize my chatting — it automatically puts the hashtag into the tweet and makes it so you can see the chat stream separately from your other Twitter activity. E-mail me if you need a primer.

If you’d like to work through the transcript, you can find it here. Otherwise, read on for my summary and opinions.

Defining employee engagement was quite the task, as you can read here.  Not much consensus, but many interesting perspectives. I liked @DMarkSchumann‘s line:

“you know, engagement is simple – we all simply want to believe we matter – silly us”

I also loved @JGombita‘s:

“Q1: Employee engagement is when corporate values can talked about without eyeball rolling or sniggers”

@JPChurch said:

Q1: EE is the point where emps are in synch with your org’s goals, know how they affect their own jobs, and can take the ball & run

And the capper of employee-focused employee engagement-ism from @CSledzik:

“Q1: we’ve been using a 1st person description. An EE can say: ‘I fit, I’m clear, I’m supported, I’m valued, I’m inspired.’”

We talked about how to foster engagement — and our answers ran the range from the general, from @HeatherSTL:

“Honestly? Extend trust, hold ppl accountable, reward success :) ”

to the specific, courtesy of @BenjaminRossDC:

“The best way to foster engagement, hands-down, is though profit-sharing incentives”

and @JostleMe:

“helping each individual understand they are part of a winning team that is making a difference”

and @JGombita:

“One of the best ways to foster engagement is if you ask employees for feedback, .actually do something with it”

Walking one’s talk — building trust through authenticity and openness — was another frequently offered mode of generating engagement. Responses to the question, “Why is authenticity, transparency, ‘do right’ seemingly so difficult for organizations to embrace” were fascinating. @JPChurch:

“Because leaders wrongly think those things are “soft,” and have no obvious ROI. Au contraire.”

@RobinRox offered the contrary example:

“Depends on how you get to that bottom line. Container Store site “what we stand for” makes me want to shop there more.”

I could go on, but just read the transcript – there are great quotes (one cool by-product of Twitter chats)…

With so much responsibility falling on the shoulders of leadership, we discussed the role of communication styles on the engagement equation. @RobinRox:

if the leader’s style is so contrary to the “feel” of the company and its values, it is harder to gain a loyal following

@CSledzik:

“Culture of comm. equally important. Nothing beats two-way open comm channels, esp when leadership is involved in the convo.”

@JGombita:

“Q4 don’t think it’s so much whether the leader is an extrovert/introvert, it’s whether s/he actually LISTENS & implements”

@DMarkSchumann:

“[...]engagement only matters to employees if leadership demonstrates that people matter”

@JPchurch:

“Must be careful not to change comm efforts too much to match exec style, though – messages must be genuine & lasting.”

@DMarkSchumann

“no longer can a leader delegate engagement to others – it is the job”

It was a terrific conversation.  You could see for yourself.  If you’re not on Twitter, just sign up for a name — you don’t have to do the rest of the stuff we Twitter-people do if you don’t want to.  Just use the account for participating in Twitter meetings like #ICChat.  By the way, we resume our discussion September 7 at 2 p.m. Eastern time — topic is likely “Emerging Internal Web Tools/Trends.” Hope to see you there.

By the way, Jostle’s Brad Palmer wrote a summary here; and D. Mark Schumann did so too.  Many thanks to all of you.

Q1: EE is the point where emps are in synch with your org’s goals, know how they affect their own jobs, and can take the ball & run #icchat
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5 Reasons Why HR & PR Don’t Get Along

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Ask any corporate communicator who they want to report to and they’ll say, “the CEO!”  Now ask who they’d NEVER want to report to. They’ll say, “HR.”  why is that?

Our corporate cousins in Human Resources have many of the same issues that we do. They want to be seen as strategic resources, not mere tactical cogs in the wheel. They struggle to be taken seriously outside of their functional silos.  They fight for budget and resources with some difficulty, because they “don’t drive sales,” or “don’t understand the business.”  By these lights, we should be strong partners — the shared pain of the back-office services would seem to be a logical impetus for a good relationship.

My own experience demonstrates that possibility. Goodyear’s (now retired) Kathy Geier was a trusted member of then-CEO Bob Keegan’s cabinet.  She reached out to me often on all kinds of matters, and recruited me onto a task force on business process optimization. Many of her team sought me out (and I, them), and we forged a strong, positive relationship. KeyCorp’s Diane Coble and Jeff Darner (since moved on) and I enjoyed similar mutual respect and partnering. Even my brief tenure at National City Corporation included positive experiences working with HR.

But in other organizations, jealousy, turf wars, even outright stiff-necked opposition are the order of the day. Why?

Here are 5 reasons why HR and PR don’t get along.  Next week, 5 ways YOU can build a good relationship with them.

1. HR thinks they’re smarter than PR. There’s a stronger academic body of knowledge in HR, a business school connection missing from most all PR programs, which reside in Journalism.  They think their college experience was more demanding and quantitative than ours.

2. HR is hungry for budget and control.  They want more than just the functional duties of compensation, personnel, etc.This is key to their strategic aspirations; the “support services” model often puts an HR person in charge of all the support functions, elevating them to higher pay and bonus as a result of larger budgets and spans of control.

3. HR often believes that only information critical to the employee should be communicated to them — and that means comp/benefits, business conduct and training opportunities should be top of the fold in the employee newsletter and front-and-center on the intranet. They believe that they know more about communication than we do (and sometimes they’re right, but that’s another post).

4.  HR provides training in many fields, so it believes it knows better how to train managers to be communicators than we do.

5. HR likes checklists. Communicating something is an output to be checked off, not a process with a closed loop. They prefer push to pull, wanting to declare that a communication has been sent and therefore is complete. This is especially fraught when discussing how to measure the effectiveness of communication activity.

Just a reminder — these aren’t hard and fast rules, they’re examples. Your results may vary.  In fact, share your thinking here!  Do these resonate with you? Am I full of it?

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Posted in Internal Communications, Public Relations, Strategy | 4 Comments »

Getting in Touch with My Inner Geek

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
bit of a mashup from Integrate 2010

Death by IT PowerPoint - well, just illness...

A couple of weeks ago, I attended that IT conference I wrote about before, Integrate 2010: Uniting the World of IT.  The group putting it on was the Greater Cleveland Local Interest Group of ITSMF-USA, which is a professional association for IT Service Management.  As I mentioned, it was great — I learned something new, met some interesting people and commiserated with yet another staff function that feels unappreciated. Here is part one of some observations about the sessions and speakers I saw.

George Spalding, VP Global Events, Pink Elephant

Spalding is a jovial, pink-faced man with round tortoise-shell glasses and a somewhat unconventional delivery for his speech, “2000 Years of IT Service Management.” He started his piece with a series of slides that took stories from the Bible and refit them into info tech situations. Think “Noah’s Ark” as an IT Enterprise Software project. His point was to show how silly typical IT responses to issues are — “Why do incidents happen? Someone made a change. Don’t we test these things?”

Spalding went on a while with Biblical story-telling, and from my perspective could have shortened the list. His main audience seemed to be charmed — and there was no denying the main messages: “You’re not in the IT business anymore” was the critical nugget — sound familiar? Prior to Y2K, Spalding said, “Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt” gave IT the freedom to do as it pleased. Once the world kept spinning into the new millennium, IT moved into the service business, and now there’s no returning to the old ways. He’s obviously comfortable with this speech and delivery — he could have been even better with some judicious editing, and a bit of presentation skills editing, too.

Michael Lundblad, Rational Worldwide Sales Executive, IBM

Mike Lundblad comes with a story. An ex-Marine officer, he speaks well, commands attention and represents an important company. The content of his presentation, “How to Recover from an Application Heart Attack,” was so far into the IT manual that I really couldn’t wrap my head around it.  He also seemed mainly to be describing products (Rational and Tivoli), rather than offering some type of independent advice or action steps. Of course, maybe that’s par for the course at these conferences — it was my first one!

Bob Balassi, chief technology officer, Maryville Technologies

Bob wore the same suit/shirt/tie combination on the dais as he wore in his program photo. He was a very polished, smooth speaker, but didn’t move at all (missing clicker hindered the show…note: buy your own – and don’t forget to bring it!). The static delivery hurt the presentation, but didn’t kill it. The title of the presentation is too long to include, but it was on what’s called IT Transformation. That’s the wholesale redo of a company’s IT world, moving from being technology driven to business driven. It’s kind of like when PR teams reorg to align more with their clients, rather than their own internal preferences.

His big message was that A) The transformation will continue (209 million Google results); B) Merger situations tend to push IT into the background, but improving these tools in a service format can yield a 25%-40% productivity increase and a rise in net present value of 5%-10% — that’s real strategic value, not just control-oriented window dressing. Could we make a similar claim for a communications transformation?

In another easily adapted bon mot, Bob said change management – both IT and organizational — is critical to success. Adopt-Adapt-Transform is the modality he shared, along with the need to engage employees and top leadership. He said there are stars, skeptics, cynics and slugs (and stabilizers), and you have to know how many of your team are in what category. I could have been hearing from just about any business improvement consultant. He did a fine job, though his PowerPoint was killing me.

More in part two.

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Posted in Communication Skills, Strategy | 1 Comment »

Internal Communications at its Best

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The UK’s Liam FitzPatrick wrote a post decrying the tendency of internal comms people complaining about manager communication incompetence.  FitzPatrick says: “I believe we get the internal clients we deserve.  If senior managers are used to a diet of crap communications support, that is all they’ll ever understand.”

He’s right, and he’s wrong.

The challenge always is whether to keep fighting or just give managers what they want.  FitzPatrick relates a story about a senior manager who wants “intelligence” about what employees are saying and thinking from her internal comms support.  There are a lot of things a skilled internal communicator can do to gather that intelligence, but much of the budgetary process is more output-focused than outcome-focused (echoing the same tendency elsewhere in corporate communications.)

The key for any of us is research (he said self-servingly — my practice includes research services, just sayin;.)

The research doesn’t even have to be quantitative, though tying qualitative assessment to intranet traffic, for example, can shed a lot of light on the effectiveness of our internal comms activities. We don’t have to do formal surveys, which can be very expensive and time consuming, if all we’re looking for is a snapshot to share for planning and strategy.

At Goodyear, we used an intranet poll to get just that sort of intelligence — it was a great window into what at least some employees were thinking, and it gave us a source of content, too.

But, there is no replacement for more formal measurement — even with qualification of our poll results, we still got management questions about the reach of opinion, which is a valid criticism. The old ROPE method (Research, Objective, Programming, Evaluation) still holds truth.

Meanwhile, read FitzPatrick’s piece. It’s worth reading (and commenting — no comments on his blog, so I wrote this post!)

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CEO Transitions Need Employee Attention

Monday, June 14th, 2010

When you’ve worked most of your life in big companies, as I have, it’s easy to forget that major change is a huge employee issue regardless of the size of company.  Big company complexity can be daunting to contemplate, and I’ve heard people pine for smaller firms with the idea that big change would be easier. News flash: It ain’t necessarily so.

Central Federal Corp and CFBank – a four-branch bank headquartered in suburban Akron with 66 full-time employees, according to Yahoo! Finance — is going to find out how easy it will be, now that former kahuna Mark Allio stepped down. According to Crain’s Cleveland Business, Allio offered his resignation at the company’s annual meeting, and now the firm is searching for a new leader, with General Counsel Eloise Mackus steering the ship in the meantime (and “indicating interest”, per the Crain’s piece).

During any big change process — and a CEO transition is usually a big one — employees get distracted; it’s human nature. There are at least 65 people at that company wondering 1) Who’ll be the boss? 2) What will he/she change? and 3) What will it mean for me. It won’t help matters that the company’s financial performance (as with many banks) has suffered during the recession. Now the boss quits and there’s going to be a “process” to replace him.

Employees are ripe for worry, and worried employees seldom give great service, which ostensibly is the raison d’être for community banks.

The tendency of the board and leadership team is to look inward to themselves and the shareholders. Yes, they have a fiduciary responsibility to those owners, but they must not ignore their wider team. I don’t know that they have or have not — but they will need to ramp up the contact with the ordinary employees and be sure they’re equipped with the right tools to manage the customers and prospects.

Here are three “must-dos” –

1.  A note to employees with a draft customer letter — explaining the change and next steps, including a basic timeline.

2.  Questions-and-answers document anticipating what customers, community leaders, friends and family will want to know about the change.

3.  Commitment to a weekly email note and a twice-monthly conference call for managers updating everyone on progress.

It’s not a hard thing to do at all, and following these steps can make it a whole lot easier to glide through the transition.

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Posted in Internal Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 1 Comment »

HBR: Research Shows Futility, Not Fear, Quashes Employee-Manager Dialogue

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

A group of researchers looked into the state of employee-manager discussion and found that fear of retribution is not the leading cause of employee silence.  Instead, it’s futility, at least among the professional class, and among women, a Harvard Business Review story said today.

If this research can be extrapolated, the emphasis we communicator-types have placed on helping managers create a “safe” environment for people to speak up isn’t helping managers get the straight scoop that they need. It’s almost an HR article of faith that humanistic style, paying close attention, smiling and telling people you really want them to share is the path to effective leadership. Now this.

Does employee feedback matter? It does to employees, but we can’t get at the problem presented by this research without addressing the elephant in the living room… When they give feedback, does anything happen to fix the issues they share? It’s just like doing employee surveys — if you aren’t willing to change your organization as a consequence of the research, don’t do it.

The disappointment of truly thinking like a business owner and offering suggestions that go nowhere is soul-crushing. Why do it if it just doesn’t matter? Cue up Bill Murray and “Meatballs.”

On the other hand, what if organizations committed to changing where it makes sense and letting people know. Sounds kind of, well, motivational.

Nah.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Strategy | 4 Comments »

Communication Important in Change Management (Shocking!)

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

A professor from San Francisco State used three quick cases to show that when employees are dealing with difficult change initiatives, leaders have to talk with them.  Stunning, eh? OK, I’m feeling snarky today, I admit it!

Professor Mitchell Lee Marks writes in the 24 May issue of the Wall Street Journal (in the MIT/Sloan Review section) that empathy, making the business case and getting employees to think about the future are essential to getting them to let go of the past and move on. It ain’t brain surgery, but for many business folks, the fact that there are actual people hiding under the numbers on the income statement can be a bit of a shock. Here’s a quick rundown of Dr. Marks’ thinking, and my two cents.

  • Dr. Marks likes empathy, because employees often feel that no one understands their pain. He calls for leaders to acknowledge the feelings of fear and resentment. My Take: That’s an oversimplification. You run the risk of insincerity– remember President Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain…”? You will have to demonstrate that you care — and it’s anyone’s guess whether you’ll be believed. You have to try, but it’s not a certainty that it will work. Nor is it certain exactly what kind of demonstration is most likely TO work. It’s trial and error. A bit of venting IS healthy, but not too much and not too often.
  • Making the business case is the hardest dictum to follow, because the most persuasive facts and data from the leader’s perspective are often not-so-much for employees. My Take: Don’t make the business case into a pie-in-the-sky employee benefit if there is any chance of downsizing, layoffs, firings — whatever you want to call it. Making the business case is like the flip side of empathy, because it’s much more a left-brain activity.  Facts and data eventually win the day, but have some pity for these folks.
  • Looking to the future — the visionary leader sees the next objective, then the next and so on, and is supposed to keep us focused on the future. My Take: I don’t think you can get people to focus on how great the future will be until they exit the “anger” stage of their mourning. The world is changing fast. Talk about customers to move from problems to solutions.

I think what set me off was Dr. Marks’ tone (probably the editor’s tone, now that I think about it). It was as though all of this was brand spanking new.

News flash — every leader should know this backwards and forwards. It’s part of leading.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Strategy | 1 Comment »

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