HR Magazine just released their list of the 50 Best Small & Medium Places to Work. According to Steve Kerch, personal finance editor for CBS MarketWatch:
The perks and freebies certainly help make any workplace more comfortable. But what stands out among all the firms named in the survey is their commitment to employee communication — not just delivering pertinent information about the company, but actually listening to employees.
…
At one of the top companies in the survey, management has enacted more than half of the roughly 150 suggestions employees have made in the last year. When’s the last time your boss did anything with your ideas besides put them in the shredder?
Just five years ago, you could actually conduct communication network research … find out who talks to whom, and with what frequency, so you could identify the connectors and opinion leaders in an organization. Not anymore … between email, instant messaging, cell phones, blogs, and all the other communication channels at our disposal, asking people keep logs of their communication (which are central to the research methodology) is now simply too difficult.
But the demise of organization-wide network analysis isn’t the only consequence of channel proliferation … another, more important consequence is the rise of what we call audience inattention: the challenge of getting a recipient to attend to a message given the vast increase in the volume of communication in which most people now engage. But it’s not just about awareness … making the message stand out … it’s about retention … having an audience attend to a message well enough that they process its meaning.
The problem is described by Linda Stone, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Corporate and Industry Initiatives and founder of Microsoft Research’s Virtual Worlds Group as “Continuous Partial Attention.” Regarding CPA, Inc.com noted:
[It’s] just the way it is nowadays, said Microsoft’s Linda Stone, vice-president of corporate and industry initiatives. Despite her bureaucratic title, Stone is a creative thinker who has coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the way we cope with the barrage of communication coming at us. It’s not the same as multitasking, Stone says; that’s about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we’re scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: “How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?”
The coaching point: On the sender side, CPA is a significant problem. The only practical advice: keep messages concise, keep them consistent over time, and if you’re a leader, commit to communicating a few strategic messages with extraordinary depth, rather than communicating many things only marginally well.
On the receiver side, you need to create space in your day and your work to process information. In coaching leaders we ask them to “shackle” the new media: to know when to turn off the cell phone, close Outlook or Notes, and process what they have. Stone notes this as well:
She says: “It’s crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today’s business books suggest that speed is the answer to today’s business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key.”
Indeed. If you’re attending to everything at once, you’re attending to nothing. Disconnect from the media for a portion of each day and process … you’ll do better work, and the world will adapt around you.
From all that we’ve read and heard about Yahoo!, most of us have this idea of what it would be like to work there…the folks at Yahoo! have not been shy in showing us that they’re generally informal, unpretentious, and well…quirky. It’s a part of their external brand.
From the corporate section of their website, you can view a list of their values. Not a surprising list…excellence, teamwork, innovation, community, customer fixation, and fun. All made sense…but the list seemed incomplete. This is Yahoo! I expect to see something a bit more unconventional (although, they do mention how they love to yodel).
And then I saw it. The link to what they don’t value. It’s quite the list…check it out. My personal favorites: bureaucracy and decaf.
View our take on communicating values here…
For our clients who wear both the internal communication and PR hats … we’ve seen thought leadership become a priority for many of you over the last couple of years. MarketingSherpa posted a case study today about a CEO who started a weblog, external to his company’s website, where he posts his industry-related ideas…seems as though it’s proven successful.
Chuck was kicking around the idea of using a blog as a corporate communication device. I never got that excited about it being an official thing because a lot of corporate blogs are thinly disguised press releases dressed up to look hip,” Libin explains. “We have better resources to get out press releases.
But, PR guy Chuck Tanowitz persisted. “What better way to position Phil as an industry thought leader than to create a body of work that would continually grow?”
Plus, Tanowitz shared a frustration common to many PR pros. Libin had lots of insights into the state of the security industry and its place in 21st century life, but scheduling time to meet with him during working hours or getting him to write formal columns was nearly impossible. When you’re running a quickly growing company, and jetting around the globe for meetings, think piece ideas aren’t at the top of your to-do list.
Check out the rest of the case study…
Did you shower this morning? How about write a note to an old friend? If not, Al Franken would say that’s poor correspondence hygiene (P.C.H.) and it’s bad for your network. In his book, Oh, The Things I Know, he takes an unsurprising, sarcastic slant on life’s lessons, including the importance of writing personal notes. All politics and kidding aside, he makes a good point:
“Personal notes are the glue that binds your network of valuable contacts together. Never miss an opportunity to make a new friend or touch base with an old one by writing a personal note.”
Leaders are known for writing short personal notes to the people that can help them accomplish their goals:
“Former President George H. W. Bush is famous for spending the last part of every day writing personal notes to friends, supporters, and ofttimes, to people he just met … In fact, many political analysts believe that the relationships forged by his simple act of common courtesy were the key to his ascent to the presidency.”
In the current issue of Fortune, Stanley Bing offers sound advice to newly minted MBAs:
–Don’t say everything that’s on your tiny mind. In the beginning, reserve your thoughts for those who seek them.
–Be nice to people. But don’t be sucking on their ears every chance you get. Nobody likes an obviously insincere person, so keep it subtle.
Read the rest of this entry »
Encourage Employee Socializing addresses not the company holiday party but optimizing the flow of information among employees:
When Cross and Parker, who are both affiliated with IBM’s Knowledge and Organizational Performance Forum, studied the social networks at more than 60 organizations, they saw certain patterns of interaction. Four types of employees are particularly important in social networks.
- Central connectors are the few people in every group whom everybody turns to. They are the decision-makers, the experts. However, when the demands of the job grow bigger than a central connector can handle, this person may inadvertently slow down others by not responding quickly enough.
- Boundary spanners are people who link two or more groups of employees who are separated by location, hierarchy or function (for instance, IT and marketing). This role is important when different expertise needs to be shared—for instance, when coordinating the design, manufacture and marketing of a new product.
- Information brokers serve as conduits. Remove them and communication inside the group is greatly diminished.
- Peripheral people are the outsiders. Sometimes these people are underutilized and sometimes their professional or social skills are lacking. Occasionally, though, they are peripheral by design, as in the case of research scientists whose time is best spent in the lab.
Naturally, those categories resemble Malcolm Gladwell’s Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
