Posts Tagged ‘transparency’

Employee Engagement: HR Claptrap, or Communication Result?

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Today’s #icchat, moderated by @susancerulla and featuring @lindabeth on Twitter spilled over for an hour or so, at least for a few internal communication experts. @mklein818, @wedge and @danasml had a Tweet-convo that featured Mike’s opposition to engagement as an appropriate focus for internal communicators. He and Dana went back and forth a while defining the term (and disagreeing), and Mike averred:

“Why ‘m critical about ‘engagement’ stuff –one-size-fits-all approaches dominate and many employees don’t need to sing comp song”

I think this is the crux of the argument.  The Gallup Organization has been doing engagement research for a very long time, and it’s Q12 system includes, “I have a best friend at work.”  In their defense, they have tons and tons of data that support the idea that social matters are a huge part of employee satisfaction. But to me, in the modern age, this is irrelevant.

The engagement infrastructure wants to systematize employee sat, distill organizational behaviors to a checklist of things to do and declare victory.  But we know that different employees are motivated by different things. If we focus on productivity as a function of satisfaction (positing that productive employees are more into their organizations than unproductive ones), does individual happiness at work count?

I know that if we help our employees better understand our business, competitors, processes and strategy, they ought to be better at their jobs. Workers need to have the information they need to do their jobs. I know that providing information in a way that’s valuable and resonates with workers is critical to that process of building understanding. And I know that workers who have a clear understanding of how what they do every day fits into the organizations objectives tend to be more knowledgeable about the business and better at their jobs.

So, do they need to “sing the company song,” as one of Mike’s tweets read?

No, they don’t. Look, employee happiness is too dependent on factors outside of my control. I need respect and involvement. The #icchat today was on how to make employees ambassadors, and the central thought was that it’s a fairly organic process that requires organizations (especially leaders) to walk their talk. You can’t create raving fans among employees by starting an ambassador program, for gosh sakes. It will be the rare organization who’s ready to ask their employees to step up. But, if there is a sense of shared sacrifice (that is real), shared purpose, shared potential success — you’re in the game.

The term “engagement” has been abased, turned into a supposed cure-all for corporate cancer. It isn’t. If an organization isn’t transparent with employees, treats them like children, doesn’t give them the responsibility and accountability they need to be successful, loads them with useless trivia and then asks them to be influencers in their personal orbits, that organization deserves scorn.

There’s going to be more on this topic, that’s for sure.  To take part in the discussion, join @susancerulla, @lindabeth and me each Monday at 1 p.m. Central/ 12 noon Eastern U.S. time. Oh, and read today’s Tweet Stream too.

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A Manager Who Can’t Communicate Can’t Lead

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

“As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.” It’s been years since Peter Drucker offered that bon mot, but it certainly seems to be truth. The New York Times’ Corner Office feature, which runs Sundays on page two of the Business section, talks to business leaders of all stripe, and each of them has something to say about the importance of communication to their business style.

Dec. 6, Joseph J. Plumeri, Chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings (the insurance broker whose name now graces the former Sears Tower in Chicago), was Corner Office’s subject. He said:

I spend 25 percent to 30 percent of my time calling my associates — whether they had a family problem or pulled off a great deal and brought in a new client, or saved a client. Two-minute phone call, or handwritten note. I can’t begin to tell you how important that stuff is. E-mails are easy, but sometimes they get in the way of really feeling how somebody feels about your effort.

Is it time consuming? Yes. But that’s what you’ve got to do…

Plumeri goes on to say that helping people understand and believe in the choices the company makes is essential to realizing business vision.

On Dec. 13, Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer, a Netherlands-based information services company, says “Every culture is very different in how people make decisions” as she relates how her leadership style changed over time according to the communication styles of her team.

In the Netherlands, where our company is based, people really want to be heard early in the process. So if you just go to someone and say, “I want you to go take this product and enter this new market,” most likely the first response they’ll say is, “No, and let me tell you how that won’t work.” What they really want to say is, “I’m not going to commit yet to that objective until we have a chance to really sit down and explore how we’re going to do that, what your expectations are, and how we measure success.”

Then, when I work with my Italian colleagues and the Spaniard colleagues, what you find is they can’t always tell you how they’re going to get something accomplished, but they manage to get it done.

Shocking news, really, that one’s leadership team expects to have a clear strategy in place before acting, and wants the freedom to choose how to accomplish the goals they’re responsible for.

What concerns me is how few middle managers (or even executive managers) have undertaken the sort of self-examination that both McKinstry and Plumeri evidently have. In 20 years, I’ve met only a handful who embrace the power of participative communication. By the way, they’re the leaders who typically win in the marketplace.

Why don’t more organizations evaluate the communication strength of their leaders?  One reason is the perception that you can’t hold people accountable for “soft” skills. Yet, we know that there are very strong correlations between effective communication behavior and employee understanding and comprehension. So, if we want an informed, educated workforce which understands the business and their role in it, their managers will need to be the ones providing context and leadership.

Therefore, let’s evaluate communication skills among managers and come up with ways of helping those managers improve and thrive. It’s not too difficult a concept.

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Discussions you should read

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Several good ones:

Rich Becker — great discussion in the comments on social media concepts…

Brian Solis — Do we need to redefine “influencers?”

Chuck Hemann — What impact on social media use/adoption does organizational culture have ?

Paul Seaman — The Excellence theory says PR is about fostering relationships. Paul disagrees.

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Ethics in PR: The Social Media Question

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

In the political firestorm that engulfs the United States, one side claims the other has no principles, whilst the other claims their opponents show a slavish devotion to ossified beliefs that make no sense in modern America.  Moral relativism, one side’s rhetoric goes, has brought our society to the brink of destruction. Outmoded thinking, the other side’s speaking points read, has made our country a cruel, Darwinist dystopia, where “survival of the fittest” is played out in policy.  For some reason, the ongoing debate of tea parties and new Fascism makes me think about public relations.

The collapse of centralization of news and the growth of social media is fueling a similar decamping in our profession.  On one side, those who believe that social media is an incarnation of evil, bent on destroying the concept of objectivity and authoritative sources, not to mention the homicide of the public relations industry. On another side (there are more than two), those who see social media as the democratization of information and the dissolution of concentrated media power, elevating ordinary people and adding to the diversity of voices in the media mix.

The ethical questions percolating for me these days relate to our role as PR people in participating in social media.  In the sense of the “Excellence Theory,” social media should represent the triumph of two-way, symmetrical communication; active engagement of organizations and their stakeholders, seeking mutual benefit.  But it seems to me that organizational participation in social media is still largely an asymmetrical game of persuasion, of message sending rather than dialogue. Marketers dominate the conversation online, devaluing PR objectives regarding reputation in favor of metrics focusing on revenue generation.  Organizations continue to struggle to find applications for social media inside the enterprise (speaking broadly here; fully aware there are exceptions), as despite efforts to embrace openness and multi-directional communication, command and control is difficult to release.

The dilemma for practitioners is especially acute for agencies and suppliers, and the ad value equivalency debate is an example. AVE has been discredited for years, but is still in common use because many clients demand it. They understand it, and AVE provides a shorthand description that they find useful.  The Institute for PR Measurement Commission recently condemned the practice, with one member writing that just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right.  When a client pays an agency and asks for AVE, we should say “no,” goes that argument. But the fear is that, “If I don’t give them AVE, they’ll go find someone who will.”

On the social media side, should all organizations use social media?  What is our ethical responsibility here? I’d be hard pressed to say that everyone should embrace social media.  I cannot make that claim, that is, if I care about giving good advice to my client. It’s not much different than telling a client reflexively that they need an intranet, or a newsletter, or a video. I need to understand the client’s objectives before I jump to tactics.

That doesn’t even address the more serious ethical challenges represented by social media.

Look at the Astroturfing issues, from fake blogs to agency staff commenting on client products.  Is the free market of ideas and caveat emptor sufficient to rein in those who have no compunction about engaging in such tactics?

I have always been an idealist with respect to media, seeing the years between Edward R. Murrow and Watergate as the pinnacle of journalism, heroic reporters, courageous editors and committed publishers digging for The Truth, all with peerless ethical grounding. The disappearance of even the pretext of objectivity in journalism (reaching its zenith — or nadir — with MSNBC/Fox News/The Washington Post/New York Times) has disgusted me, even as I admit that objectivity was a goal, not a reality according to my own journalism professors. We could aspire to objectivity and embrace fairness, something few media outlets now even attempt, at least by my crude measure.

Certainly the outright failure of the trust equation (media, government, business all suffer), should be laid bare here. One must evaluate the media’s biases and objectives, and caveat emptor reigns there, as well.

People determined to do wrong will find a way if their personal ethical compass permits. Maybe that’s the scariest part of all of this. We’re relying on individuals to manage their own ethics in a time when ethics are subjective, not objective, and right and wrong are relative concepts.

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Thinking Theoretically About Social Media

Monday, October 12th, 2009

One terrific side benefit of teaching PR Theory and Ethical Practice at Kent State University this fall has been reading a whole lot of interesting work from outstanding PR scholars.  William Kennan and Vince Hazleton of Radford University contributed a chapter on internal PR that got me pondering certain aspects of the Social Capital Theory as it might apply to social media.

Two items in particular in their discussion stood out. 1) The existence of a network of connections and its effect on relationships and related outcomes; and 2) Identification, the extent to which people see themselves as connected to others.

The network, the opportunity to send and receive messages that contribute to the creation, maintenance and expenditure of social capital, is a pretty obvious bridge to social media. A fair number of people think that the network is the outcome of social media use, rather than a tool for some other purpose. But let’s stay on target (we could amble down that path for hours…). My own use of social media has focused on this purpose — expand the network and see what effect it has on my ability to forge a new business. The social capital theory indicates that the network itself takes on a role apart from its human factors; that the existence of the network influences relationships and relationship outcomes.

We can see this effect in action when members of one person’s network interact with each other and cross into other networks — not for the specific purpose of dialogue toward an outcome, but merely for the sake of discourse. That discourse creates additional meaning — leading to different understandings among network members.

Secondly, identification might originate with some kind of common interest or purpose, either large or small depending on the specific subject.  The organization typically wants its employees to identify strongly with the organization, to feel strongly connected to it — that’s the heart of much employee engagement activity.  Social media users appear to identify with other users — being “in the club” commenting on Twitter gives the users a sense of belonging that they find important or pleasurable. That may be one reason, as Mark Schaefer observed, there seems to be cronyism among the social media mavens.  Heck, there seems to be cronyism among users of social media in general.

This all leads me to reinforced suspicion about whether social media can replace mainstream media.  With a tendency to see social media use as a measure of self-worth (and therefore to see people who don’t use social media as somehow inferior — “they don’t get it!”), the ability of social media to adopt a third-party objective perspective is compromised.  We can debate whether any media can be objective — if you have a strong perspective, people will know where you stand, rather than guessing about it — but making caveat emptor work requires some amount of transparency.

Authenticity can’t be a mask, it needs to be real and grounded in personal ethics so that one can judge the source and properly execute “buyer beware.” Otherwise, the identification among members of the network becomes more important than being honest.

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More from Big D – Part 2 ‘Words, Actions Matter…’

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Big D continues: “The job of the president’s communication advisors is to identify in advance (better than after the fact) any threats to the president’s preferred meanings and to neutralize them rhetorically. (In fact, the oft-stated claim about how much a president values soldiers’ lives is exactly that sort of pre-emptive rhetoric, designed to head off the opposite claim – that the lives of America’s youth are expendable to the powerful class – before it’s even made.)”

I believe we are in violent agreement here, except for the notion that we can inoculate against the president’s say-do disconnect with rhetoric alone. The president’s actions in these matters are of great importance, as D points out.

Maintaining control over key meanings is almost always possible, although it is sometimes easier and sometimes harder to accomplish depending on how the context shifts across time. For example, if a president’s own son is among the soldiers sent to fight a war, it is a relatively easy task. If, on the other hand, the president cancels a program to provide basic armor plating for military vehicles used by soldiers fighting that war, it becomes relatively more difficult, ceteris paribus. Both examples are elements of the broader symbolic environment (i.e., context) that influences interpretation, but that environment does not entirely determine interpretation.

Agreed.  The environment is not the entirety of interpretation. As a counselor to leadership, I argue for no attempt to spin or otherwise mask the reality of the organizations actions – much literature in crisis communication says much the same thing.  Big D adds:

Certain types of management make certain types of communication relatively more or less difficult. I am then in a position to say to the leaders of my organization that their actions could put at greater risk our ability to defend certain identity claims and could require a different communication strategy (which might or might not be successful within any given time frame).

Excellence theory applies (perhaps without attribution) dialogic and rhetorical theories. Its focus, however, on the management of the function and its underpinnings of empirical research does seem to de-emphasize other theories. Jeff says that Excellence: “…doesn’t really address…the actual way that symbol systems work through discourse to construct meanings that then become the basis for action. That’s the hard stuff, especially when you’re talking about public communication. [Excellence focuses] instead on the easy stuff – management – which is why [Prof. James E. Grunig is] so popular.”

D believes (and I agree) that management effectiveness is “a hell of a lot easier to measure and explain than communication effectiveness. PR people, however, are seldom going to out-manage the managers, and they are too ready to throw up their hands or have no clear answers when the communication work gets most difficult, which is also when it becomes most important to the organization.”

I don’t think we disagree at all – I am, however, differentiating effective communication from the assumption that it can cure everything, every ill that befalls an organization. The PR measurement Holy Grail is quantifying the impact on a business of communication activity – and the inability of PR to overcome bad management action is often used as a pretext to criticize us and what we do.

Lastly, Big D writes:

Here’s the bottom line for me: Over the past few years I probably interviewed more than 25 people for communications positions at my company. Only a handful, at best, could provide even a rudimentary explanation of how messages related to actions, i.e., how exactly it is that the words they were responsible for stringing together were connected to the outcomes the organization sought. Most of the applicants could talk for hours about project management, working with outside agencies, and so on, but few of them knew a damn thing about communication itself. Do we really need to wonder why we get such little respect as a profession?

We certainly should be experts on communication – why it works and how to improve it – but we also must apply the management function as well. In the course of applying Excellence, we’ll rely upon Rhetorical and Dialogic theories and the traditional mass media theories of forming opinion. I don’t see these as mutually exclusive.

A great discussion. Thanks D!

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Handling ‘No-Win’ Media Stories

Monday, August 10th, 2009

The Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan.  The U.S. House wants to spend $550 million on new jets for themselves. Banks fork over billions in bonuses after receiving trillions in U.S. taxpayer funds.  How’d you like to be the PR folks who need to handle those issues?

When I was relatively young in public relations, our top-five execs were poised to gather up a prodigious pile of cash, stock and options — they hit their targets, and then some, for the year.  The main way they’d done so, however, was to cut headcount by 10 percent across the board.  Preparing the internal communications for that proxy release (which would include the compensation details) wasn’t an easy task.

There were good business reasons for the compensation strategy, not the least that there were contractual obligations — they were owed this compensation. The packages had all been vetted by the compensation committee of the board of directors, comprised only of “outside” directors — people who weren’t also employees of the company.  The goals for the year were bottom-line oriented, aligning the interests of the executives with those of the shareholders.  A substantial amount of the dollar value of the pay was long-term compensation — three years’ deferred. And, the largest portion of the package was in restricted stock and stock options, both of which were designed to keep high-performing executives at the company for several years.

After reading the proxy, I felt reasonably comfortable with the reasons for the high pay.  I wrote a paragraph not too different from this last one in a questions-and-answers document for managers, answering the question, “Why did these executives get such high compensation?”

The corporate treasurer called me, with a smile in his voice, and said, “This is an argument you can’t win. Let’s not try to explain the reasons for the packages. Just say that there may be questions as a consequence of news media coverage and refer interested parties to the Proxy.”

I was pretty disappointed.  I’m a fan of sharing the reasons behind decisions. Of course, the danger here was the snicker factor.

The snicker factor is the likelihood that that people will snicker when they read the explanation, that the intent of being transparent and honest will instead be seen as spin.

The reality is that executive pay is a tough story. The reality is that contracts tend to insulate execs from downside risk, that the independent directors are execs at other firms, their motives suspect… You can almost hear the conversation around the water cooler, visualize the Tweets… “Yeah, right! These guys all take care of their own, they’ll do anything to get their piece of the pie, what do they do around here, anyway?”

Do we only explain if there is a likelihood of winning the argument? That certainly would simplify the measurement of our efforts in these matters. By the way, I’m aware of at least one company that, as a matter of policy, separates proactive and positive PR from reactive and negative PR. They feel like they have a great track record and lots of positive reinforcement.  It’s not exactly what the Excellence Theory calls for (two-way, symmetrical), but it has its fans.

For another firm, staying out of any no-win story was the primary objective, and they did (and do) a fine job of it.

As long as we define our function as one of advocacy — and are above board about it — this makes perfect sense.  In those circumstances, we adopt the model that calls for non-participation if there is no objective benefit to our organization. We increase reputation risk by not participating, but perhaps that’s the main question: How risky is participating and explaining compared to staying away from such controversy?

It seems to me to be a question of certain risk versus uncertain risk — we know the snicker factor will kick in if we participate. We don’t know what will happen if we don’t.

Avoiding the devil you know can be a compelling strategy. What do you think?

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‘20-somethings’ Push Cisco Toward Social Media From The Top

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

John Chambers has a terrific reputation as a CEO who “gets” communication. The Cisco Systems chairman and CEO once spoke at a KeyCorp senior management retreat that I attended and wow’d the crowd with his openness, honesty and frankness.  In Sunday’s New York Times, Chambers talked about how his leadership style has changed with the advent of Web. 2.0 tools.

I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a different leadership style — more collaboration and teamwork, including Web. 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I’d be video blogging and blogging, I would have said no way. And yet our 20-somethings pushed me to use that more.

When I heard him speak some years ago, Chambers talked a lot about communication as a critical competency for leaders, recounting how he left voicemail messages, sometimes 100 per day, for various members of his team. Sometimes he was responding to inquiries or comments from leaders, sometimes he was dishing out praise to individual contributors.  He focused on the personal nature of voicemail, the individual tailoring of the message and the need to “touch” employees in a human way.

There’s no doubt that social media tools can be effective in some ways in that context, but I’m certainly not going to be as motivated or appreciative of a video blog as I am a personal message, even on voicemail.

I don’t know whether Chambers’ video blogging and other blogging has replaced his use of voicemail. I hope not. I like Web 2.0 tools as additional vehicles for mass communication and some kind of interaction, not as a replacement for personal contact.

I’m also concerned about the effective measurement of these tools. Many of my colleagues in the Institute for PR Measurement Commission have very strong opinions about that.  There’s been spirited discussion on that topic.  There certainly is some clarity on the value of social media, but what’s not clear thus far is the financial return on investment in social media in a general sense.

Social media acolytes want every company and organization to engage with their various stakeholders in social media, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a good fit for everyone. I do believe that every organization should explore the use of social media, and monitor what’s being said about them there; it’s foolish to do otherwise, as several companies have learned to their peril. For certain organizations, this will represent a game-changing shift, particularly for large consumer brands and universities.

Customer service alone is fertile ground for exploiting social media — imagine reduced call center traffic, fewer email complaints, etc.

Cisco’s Chambers told the Times he finally asked, “why do you want me to do this? And they said, ‘John, if you don’t do it our company won’t learn how to do this. It won’t be built into our DNA for the way we interface with customers, our employees. The top has to walk the talk.’” Chambers’ willingness to “walk the talk” says a lot more about him, as a leader, and Cisco as a company than the specific tools employed. And that’s the reason he and his company are worthy of my admiration.

Chambers, near the end of the interview, lists the attributes he looks for when evaluating a potential new hire. “And I look at their communication skills, and one of the largest parts of communications is…” He pauses for dramatic affect, letting the reporter fill in the blank with, “listening?”

“You betcha. Seeing how they listen, and are they willing to challenge you?”

It’s not about social media, it’s about finding the right tools to interact with customers and employees and demonstrating commitment to communication. Social media certainly can help organizations listen, but it’s not going to replace every other mode of communication at our disposal.

Or am I wrong?

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‘Dr. Doom’ sees $3.6 trillion in bank losses

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

NYU’s econ maven Nouriel Roubini hasn’t yet glimpsed any sign that the system financial crisis is abating.  In the WSJ Tuesday, the “professor who called the housing and credit collapse” and his co-writer paint a horrifying picture of bank losses yet to come, and call for an interesting solution for the government to apply.

  • Getting toxic assets off of bank balance sheets is essential, Roubini writes.  It’ll be a bloodbath for the firms, which will need to reduce dividends as well as cut salaries and bonuses, and there will be failures. Of course, how this is really different from last year, I don’t know.

  • The public relations issues that the ongoing crisis foment are legion — not the least of them will be the tendency of companies to clam up during a time when they most need to speak up. Transparency isn’t situational — it carries myriad risks at any time, but opaqueness also is a risky play.

  • Here are three things the banks should do immediately:

    • 1. Recognize that their employees can help manage the significant customer impacts arising from bad news. Prepare them and their managers and call upon them to reach out to customers all of the time.
    • 2. Take your medicine: The news media is going to focus on the worst aspects of the crisis and its impact on your firm — don’t be surprised by this and don’t try to talk them out of it. The best you can hope for is that your most urgent message (sometimes two or three) can be included in the story.   Don’t ignore “bad press” with either customers or employees — you need to have ongoing dialogue with your stakeholders anyway, so talk about the story and where you felt it went wrong. (but don’t throw rocks at the media, it’ll never work…) The stories are a pretext for conversations.
    • 3. Consistently remind your stakeholders of your commitment to them — and your plans for working through the issues. You gain much more from talking about these things than not.

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