The Washington Post has a worth-reading account of Microsoft’s recent decision to restructure its employee benefits plan. It’s an interesting case study of the intersection of corporate policy, employee attitudes, internal communication, feedback, and personal publishing.
This article from Fast Company, A Little Help from Your Friends, provides some good background on how businesses use, or are thinking about using, social networking technology. (For more background on social networks, check out Alan’s previous post … and for more extensive background on social networking technology, check out Jeff’s previous post.)
So how does it work? These programs scan contacts in your address book, appointments in your calendar, and senders and receivers of your email, and then make maps of all the relationships they find among your contacts—and even go so far as to calculate the relationship “strength” based on the frequency with which you interact with the people in your network (we’ll get to that in a second).
bq. If it works for romance, why not commerce? A handful of companies have begun using Friendster-style social networking to help businesses and professionals find a perfect match. We’re not talking romantic partners here, mind you, but access to previously unreachable customer leads, investors, business partners, job candidates, and employers.
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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”?
Does giving employees a half-day off during the holiday season for shopping or other errands count as a convincing decision that communicates the organization’s values? Or, given recent layoffs, does it communicate a lack of attention to organizational priorities?
And what message does a higher-up reversing the decision send?
Explore the case of the DHR Employee Shopping Day here at the Decatur Daily News.
In a follow-up to Jeff’s earlier post, here’s a link to Tufte’s website, where you may purchase The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, and his classic, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (which is required reading for all communication professionals).
While his essay is only available for purchase, you can read his analysis of a key Boeing slide here, which is a case study in its own right. Some other informative resources:
* Scott Steffens writes about Tufte’s essay here at his Contact Sheet weblog, and comments on Tufte’s and Jakob Nielsen’s contradictory advice on how to present information online.
* The New Yorker published an article by Ian Parker, titled Absolute PowerPoint, which is worth reading.
* Aaron Swartz posts a parody of Tufte’s essay … his argument presented as a PowerPoint outline … here (also on a weblog).
* We posted here the Gettysburg Address via PowerPoint.
* Last but not least, you may find our own guidance, CRA’s one-page Principles of PowerPoint, here.
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As many of you probably read, John Caudwell, CEO of the UK phone retailer phones4u, recently banned the use of internal email across his company (from CNN.com: Firm bans e-mail at work ). Caudwell discovered that his employees were not solving customer problems as quickly as they once had and he attributed this deceleration to unnecessary email shackling employees to their computers.
Based on his informal research, Caudwell figured that his employees spent three hours per day on unnecessary email, which equated to $1.6 million per month. The majority of this email was not spam or personal—it was from inside the company and related to customer accounts. Rather than picking up the telephone or walking down the hall to ask a question, employees emailed each other and then had to wait at their computer for the response.
Now, is Caudwell’s reaction a bit extreme? Maybe. Do we all get caught up in this email game on a regular basis? Probably. Does it cost us time away from your internal clients, external clients, or direct reports? Surely. So, extreme? Maybe. But definitely not unreasonable when you think of the time we all spend crafting and proof reading email and waiting for responses to our strategically developed (and often unread) messages (when we could get a quick answer by standing up or lifting the telephone receiver).
We see this situation almost everywhere we go, and many of our clients surely smiled when they read about Caudwell’s reactions…the scenario and Caudwell’s retort confirm two pieces of our advice perfectly…
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When clients ask “What really communicates?” here’s our response (with the channels listed in descending order of their communicative potential):
* Policy Decisions
* Reward & Recognition Systems
* What’s Being Said by Opinion Leaders in Informal Networks
… and last of all,
* Formal Internal Communications
Our general advice: if you want to send a message, make a policy decision or change what you measure and reward. It appears the US government is slowly trying to apply this lesson, based on this Federal Times report: Is Merit Pay Worth the Risk? Experts Say Yes — If Agencies Get It Right. Unfortunately, members of Congress aren’t so certain the government can pull it off. From the article:
“Before the federal government can establish a true pay-for-performance system, we must ensure that a valid performance-management system exists,” said Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, a leading voice for government reform in Congress.Voinovich and other lawmakers have argued in hearings that merit-pay systems are good in principle but difficult to design well. If designed and carried out poorly, they argue, merit-pay systems could create work forces that are embittered, demoralized and undermined rather than motivated, well-focused and high-performing …
… In short, there are many critical ingredients that make a merit-pay system successful, experts say: well-planned incentives, performance goals and performance measures, fairness, buy-in from employees and managers, good communications, training for managers, effective internal grievance procedures, and money.
Of course, we’re a bit befuddled by the concern, given that most publicly-traded companies have used merit pay systems for decades. Nonetheless, this issue is an excellent example of an organization attempting to change cultural priorities and behavior by communicating through policy decisions, and is worth watching as an emerging case study.
We posted in March, and again in May, about how the Columbia inquiry at NASA was suggesting that poor internal communication was a central element in the sequence of events leading up to the disaster. The inquiry board has recently released their report, and they confirm that internal communication was indeed a failure point. According to CBS News:
Members of the board also found that communication was stifled in NASA and that the safety program often was “silent” because engineers with safety concerns were intimidated into silence.
That makes poor communication at NASA a cultural issue, and the commission’s assessment should be case study reading for all leaders and internal communication professionals. You may find the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report here.
In March we published a post about how internal communication at NASA was an area of focus in the Columbia investigation. The story continues to develop, as this Washington Post article illustrates:
One of NASA’s top congressional supporters complained yesterday that concerns voiced by some mid-level engineers about damage done to space shuttle Columbia’s left wing during liftoff did not reach senior administrators until after the shuttle disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1.Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) faulted the agency’s internal communications system for preventing important information and analysis about the shuttle’s condition from reaching senior administrators. She called for the creation of a “bottom-to-top” information clearinghouse to avoid a repeat of the mistake.
The story hints that information technology can provide that clearinghouse, although our experience suggests that without appropriate protocols such tools can easily make the problem of information overload worse. In all instances, the process of internal communication is more important than the product … and in cases like that at NASA, the real trick is to develop protocols and tools that help senior leaders separate urgent information from heaps of important data.
When CEOs speak at investment conferences, they sometimes say things that send the wrong message to the folks back at the office.
For example, just months after the Qwest/US West merger in 2000, CEO Joe Nacchio told investors at a Banc of America Securities Investment Conference that most of the layoffs he anticipated would occur among the ranks of former US West employees. He then added that: “Because you wear a clown suit doesn’t mean you work for the circus. We’ll take off the suits and get down to work, then we’ll send out the clowns.”
Although the comment is somewhat cryptic, to thousands of former US West employees, Nacchio’s meaning was clear: “You are clowns.”
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