One of our Associates, John Daly of UT-Austin, uses “amenity creep” … the continuing expansion of amenities hotels must offer guests to stay consistent with the competition … to illustrate how leaders can create unrealistic employee expectations by providing tangible ($) rather than intangible (”attaboy!”) rewards.
Today Silicon Valley Biz Ink offers an interesting reward and recognition case: The in-office DVD rental machine EarthLink is providing for employees. Trivial benefit and example of benefit creep, or as the press release says, “an excellent way to bring an element of fun to the workplace”?
Employees typically attribute little sincerity to mass emails from the CEO thanking them for their hard work. But when the CEO goes on to say he’s giving his bonus to their kids, employees may be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. From the AP:
Ford Motor Co.’s chief executive, Bill Ford Jr., will give his first official bonus–worth about $1.5 million–to company employees for their children’s college tuition.
…
In an e-mail to employees Thursday, he thanked “the thousands of Ford employees in our extended family who’ve made our growing success possible,'’ the Detroit Free Press reported Friday.
Click here to read more about convincing decisions.
MIT’s Technology Review has an excellent primer on social networking technology and its potential business applications.
The premise behind this new social-networking technology is simple: you may know a lot of people from work, college, church, or your neighborhood, but you probably don’t know exactly who their friends are—and forget about their friends’ friends. But join an online social network and invite a few acquaintances, and the software will begin to reveal previously hidden second- or third-degree connections that can lead to an interview, business meeting, or tee time with that elusive potential client or employer.
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Today’s Wall Street Journal “In the Lead” column, Missing From Work: The Chance to Think, Even to Dream a Little, addresses the recent explosion in corporate e-mail and the toll it has taken on electronically tethered managers:
Managers complain that the relentless flow of computer messages disrupts thought processes and kills creativity. There is no quiet time available during the workday, or even after office hours, to digest information, to ponder fresh ideas, to concentrate wholeheartedly on a difficult problem, or even to daydream. Instead, the expectation that messages from colleagues, bosses, customers and suppliers will be answered promptly requires that employees think only in short bursts, moving quickly from one topic to another.
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Loews Hotels CEO Jonathan Tisch has been walking the talk–literally–and professes to have become a more enlightened leader as a result.
“I lugged two bell carts with 15 bags for a family of 10 to their rooms and didn’t get a tip!” Tisch vented on the TLC Web site.
“The air can get a little thin when you are at the top,” he said in a company memo. “My respect for Loews Hotels’ employees has grown, and the experience changed the way we make decisions about everything from uniforms to methods of service.
“There is nothing like walking in another person’s shoes, even if it’s for a short time, to open your eyes to their world.”
Read the whole thing.
I’ve shared with clients this prediction: By the end of 2005, any organization that really appreciates internal communication as a strategic business function will have figured out how to use weblogs to increase communication effectiveness. In fact–and as this article in the latest Fast Company attests–many respected companies are already there.
The burgeoning blog world–1.6 million keyboard tappers at last count–is making big inroads into corporate culture. From tech companies like Microsoft and IBM to decidedly nontech outfits like Dr. Pepper, companies are starting to use blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool. To meet corporate demand, both UserLand and Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with enterprise-level products later this year.
Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential campaigners are already on board. Unlike email and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for information at a later date, and internal blogs aren’t overwhelmed by spam. And unlike most corporate intranets, they’re a bottoms-up approach to communication. “With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you understand where things are going more,” says Halley Suitt, who wrote a fictional case study on corporations and blogging for the Harvard Business Review . “Even better, you understand them faster.”
As the article goes on to describe, blogs’ informal, “inherently open, [and] anarchic nature” make many companies nervous. These companies, I believe, have their heads in sand. Here’s why:
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NASA’s AMES Research Center is exploring “subauditory speech technology”:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers have found that placing small button-sized sensors under the chin and on either side of the Adam’s Apple could gather nerve signals that can be processed by a computer and translated into words.
“What is analyzed is silent, or subauditory, speech, such as when a person silently reads or talks to himself. Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement.'’
Like it or not, March Madness will distract many of your employees. So you might as well seize it as an opportunity to build camaraderie. That’s the takeaway from this article in yesterday’s USA Today:
A recent study by a job placement consulting firm suggests that while interest in the tournament might cost more than $1.5 billion in lost productivity, an organized office pool might ease that financial blow.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas of Chicago estimated that workers spending 10 minutes a day talking about the tournament during its two-week run cost employers $1,525,500,000. That figure is based on an employee pool of more than 39 million earning an average of $15.56 an hour.
“By having some type of organized and sanctioned event or pool, companies might actually reduce the overall disruption to the workday,” says CEO John Challenger. “Companies that can leverage employee interest in the tournament … are going to have a more loyal and productive workforce.”
A causal relationship between Tournament office pools and employee productivity and loyalty? I suspect that Challenger just made that up…but as a devoted bracketologist, I’m not going to argue.
I was asked by a colleague of a client today … a Public Affairs professional who’s ramping up his level of work and counsel … what books I might suggest to someone looking to elevate their advisor game. Here’s what I rattled off, some of which we’ve posted about in the past, and some of which is new. It’s just my take, but I think each book helps an advisor to leaders better understand communication, organizational dynamics, and the profession of offering counsel. Here’s the list:
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We constantly send books to clients, and a book we’ve been giving recently is Buck Up, Suck Up, and Come Back When You Foul Up by James Carville and Paul Begala (yes, that Carville and that Begala). It’s slender, it’s paperback, it’s entertaining, and it’s a fast read (although you do have to look past some political posturing). And while it offers memorable reminders of many core communication tenets (e.g., be open with bad news, communicate in stories, etc.), more important is the book’s advice on managing political capital—a topic from which we feel leaders in general and communication professionals in particular can benefit.
A favorite communication-related passage of mine:
The people you’re trying to reach have been raised in the sound-bite culture. They’re used to professional politicians, admakers and entertainers getting to the point in a matter of seconds. You need to do the same. You can’t expect people who only listen to their president for a few seconds to listen to you for an hour and a half.
Get the book here at Amazon.
