Employee Communications and Engagement

Two recent news items shed light on how employee communication continues to be redefined and the sticky issues surrounding it.

A recent survey by a California-based business software company found that more than 43 percent of large U.S. corporations employ people to monitor outbound e-mail. A story last Wednesday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch said the area’s largest employers routinely check e-mails sent by employees to make sure they’re not leaking sensitive information.

A story published by Reuters on Saturday tells about the latest mainstream technology to be adapted by some corporations. Web logs – shortened to “blogs” – essentially are online journals written by everyday people for public consumption. One indication that blogs are picking up steam is that some bloggers received press credentials so they could write about the Democratic National Convention in July.

Now corporations are looking at the potential for blogs to be used as tools to enhance knowledge sharing and communication among employees. Not surprisingly, Microsoft and IBM are two leaders in the effort to introduce blogs to corporate America. The idea is to allow employees to post blogs on the company intranet – or perhaps even the public Web site, depending on the target audience – so they can share information more quickly and efficiently.

I work with companies to help them figure out the best ways to facilitate communication – from business leaders to employees, from employees to management, and laterally among employees. The flow of information is essential to any organization’s success and the less painful the communication, the better. Anyone who works in an organization with more than one employee knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Electronic media can greatly enhance communication. It’s difficult to imagine what we ever did before e-mail was introduced to the workplace. (Some might wish it never was as they spend hours a day creating and responding to e-mail.) Intranets, which are Web sites for employees, also can make communication and the flow of information easier. It looks like blogs might be the next big thing to find its way into our work lives – just as some companies also use message boards, chat rooms and desktop video.

The problem is that while many companies embrace the new technology, they also worry that it might be fraught with security problems. E-mail and Web-based technology offer just another way for proprietary information to leak to competitors, customers, the news media, and perhaps even criminals. This is true, but nothing kept employees from carrying sensitive documents out of the building with them in the days before e-mail. Nothing keeps employees from having one too many at the neighborhood block party and blurting out the name of the new product.

There simply are no perfect safeguards. The best business leaders can do is to set clear expectations of employee behavior, put as many safeguards in place as possible and – hold onto your seats – trust employees to do the right thing.

Just as open communication in our personal lives depends on a certain level of trust, the same is true in our work lives. I am not suggesting that companies should open the gates and throw caution to the wind for the sake of open communication. That would be foolish. However, there comes a point at which organizations must treat employees as responsible adults.

Routinely monitoring e-mails might be necessary in this day and age, but is it really necessary to completely restrict employees’ use of communication media? Such a hard line sends a bad message to employees, who then become increasingly distrustful and suspicious of management.

I expect blogs won’t become as ubiquitous as e-mail in American companies. I don’t believe there are many companies that trust their employees enough to give them that kind of freedom of expression. On the other hand, it’s interesting to think about the possibility of free-flowing information from one responsible employee to another.

 Robert Holland

An employee describes what led to leaving a job they loved, in an organization they respected, and people whom they enjoyed working with.

“Why did I leave? Good question. I was tired. Not like you might think, although I was physically tired sometimes.  It might sound funny, but was tired in spirit and tired of feeling that way. 

 “I had been at the company for about eight years when I left.  I really wanted that job and was excited when I got it. It was someplace I really wanted to be. For the first five years I was as engaged as they come. I felt like it was my company.

“When I started management said they wanted employees to make the company better, to make a difference. Sign me up! Even with the long hours and bad take out food those were great times. I was always looking for things that might improve or scuttle a project or decision and talking to others about what was going on. I made a difference, learned all the time and helped the organization achieve its goals.  It doesn’t get much better than that, does it?

“Back then I knew I was appreciated too. Management would comment on my work and seek me out to participate in all kinds of  projects. And although my co-workers and I didn’t always agree, we always listened to each other. That was the really great part. The respect everyone had for each other. Those project meetings and even the casual hallway conversations built trust across the organization and gave us a deep understanding of the business. We knew we could count on each other and we were doing important work.

“About two years ago things started to change.  First we were growing and couldn’t keep up; everyone was spread so thin we were lucky to just keep things together. Then the market shifted and management decided to cut staff. It was the first time they didn’t ask for our involvement. Those of us who were left had to absorb additional work. There had always been pressure to meet short-term goals, but this was different. Suddenly speed trumped thinking and understanding.  Questions weren’t appreciated. I was seen as resistant to change, a troublemaker. It’s not true; I know speed is important, but we kept missing important information just when we needed to really be on our game.

“Eventually I stopped trying. I just did what I was told. I know I had insights that could have helped us, but it didn’t matter. No one was listening. While I still liked and respected my co-workers, even those I disagreed with, I eventually realized I didn’t know as much about the business and its problems as I had. Neither did they. We had stopped learning. Decisions weren’t as sharp. Relationships weakened. When we needed to pull together, not only was the ‘can do’ spirit missing, so was the real knowledge.

“Like I said, coming to work used to be fun. When it became just a job I finally admitted to myself it didn’t matter if I was there. I got tired of not having fun, so I left.”

Things to think about:

U.S.  job satisfaction continues to fall

Employee attitudes and expectations about work have changed

Employees are more confident about finding a job

The clock is ticking. How much fun are people having in your organization?

1. Strategic communications help a business achieve its objectives. That is their purpose.
2. Effective communications are those that produce measurable results and they can be a competitive differentiator.
3. There are costs associated with communicating, but there can be costs associated with not communicating as well. Internal communications seek cost-effective and creative solutions to solve complex communications challenges.
4. Employees are drowning in information, but starving for understanding. Our job is to make the important interesting.
5. Credibility is the foundation upon which effective communication is built. Unless it is believed, a message has no worth.
6. Face-to-face communication is the most desirable form of communication because it is immediate, personal and interactive. Most employees say their immediate supervisor is their preferred and most credible source of information about the business.
7. Communication is, by definition, a two-way process. Feedback mechanisms must be part of every employee communication.
8. Communication is a management responsibility. Internal Communications supports leaders by serving as consultants, facilitators and resource partners.
9. As in any effective strategy, form should follow function. The medium is the message.

INTEL

Always pause and think before posting. That said, reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate. But if it gives you pause, pause. If you’re about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, don’t shrug it off and hit ‘send.’ Take a minute to review these guidelines and try to figure out what’s bothering you, then fix it. If you’re still unsure, you might want to discuss it with your manager or legal representative. Ultimately, what you publish is yours – as is the responsibility. So be sure.

Perception is reality. In online social networks, the lines between public and private, personal and professional are blurred. Just by identifying yourself as an Intel employee, you are creating perceptions about your expertise and about Intel by our shareholders, customers, and the general public-and perceptions about you by your colleagues and managers. Do us all proud. Be sure that all content associated with you is consistent with your work and with Intel’s values and professional standards.

It’s a conversation. Talk to your readers like you would talk to real people in professional situations. In other words, avoid overly pedantic or “composed” language. Don’t be afraid to bring in your own personality and say what’s on your mind. Consider content that’s open-ended and invites response. Encourage comments. You can also broaden the conversation by citing others who are blogging about the same topic and allowing your content to be shared or syndicated.

Writers can find inspiration anywhere.  Because I write mainly about workplace environments and company culture, I turn to a fairly conventional source- the business sections of the newspaper.  There’s usually something in every issue that gets me wondering. This week a business customs column inspired me to wonder about “what’s not spoken’.

Let me explain.  In the column a reader asked what to do about cubicle-mates who participate so loudly on conference calls that he or she is seriously distracted.  Thrilled to see a question so directly related to the types of interpersonal challenges I see as an Ombudsman, I raced to read the answer.  Boy, I was disappointed.

The author offered these suggestions, which are reasonable but certainly don’t promote communication:

Ask your supervisor to tell everyone to be more aware of noise

Ask your supervisor to relocate you.

Listen to music as a diversion. 

You see the problem? None of these strategies encourage collaboration. It’s almost implied that it wouldn’t be appropriate for the reader to make her colleagues aware of the situation or engage them in collaborative problem-solving.    I wondered if there was a message in what wasn’t being suggested.

Here’s what I heard as the message: avoid talking = avoid conflict. 

By not mentioning talking as an option for resolving things, the author is actually discouraging the use of talking.  Talking directly to each other is still one of the best ways to solve problems, I think.  Yet, the author chose to ignore that tool, saying “I prefer the path of least resistance whenever possible.’  Guess that means communication is the path of most resistance?

I bet many managers and employees across the country share a similar preference for avoidance and silence.  The trouble with that stance is that old, unresolved conflicts eventually resurface, often at the most inopportune moments.

Don’t read me to say I think it’s wrong to ask for help to facilitate communications in sticky situations.  I’m only saying that open discussion is a better first option.

Here’s my recommendation to the reader:  Talk to each other. 

Just like the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  The quickest way to end a dispute or disagreement is to talk directly and honestly with those involved.  Talk is such an effective yet inexpensive tool I wonder why people don’t do it more often.

Dina Lynch

You’ve seen them. The business goals at almost every corporation usually read like this:

• Create synergies with our business partners.
• Increase market share by 6% in targeted markets.
• Enable innovation by implementing new research and development team.
• Drive revenue to 1.2 billion internationally.
• Improve relationships with distributors and vendors.
• Ensure that employees are satisfied and developing.

 There! Did you catch it? Aside from the terrible overuse of corporatese, did you notice that employees were last on the list?

Though this company had told its employees over and over again how important they were to the success of the business, each time a list like this came out, the employees were last. As if they were an afterthought, if they were even thought of at all.

How do you think employees feel when they read this list. Important? Think again. They likely think, “Gosh, those first five things must be the really important ones because they came FIRST. And, I’m guessing that the last bullet about employees was added on by one of our senior managers who, as everyone was walking out of the boardroom and congratulating themselves on a job well done, stopped them and said, ‘Hey, we forgot to put anything about the employees in here. We’d better fix that cause they might get mad and think we forgot about them.’”

What those leaders obviously forgot is that it’s a leader’s job to understand that the people who follow them are human beings with human feelings and human hearts and human fears and human hopes and human wants to do better and be recognized and respected and cared for and understood and appreciated and needed.

Don’t tell your people they’re your greatest asset, then treat them like they’re your last consideration. It hurts.

So, instead, let’s imagine what the list would like with one small, but very significant, change:

• Ensure that employees are satisfied and developing.
• Create synergies with our business partners.
• Increase market share by 6% in targeted markets.
• Enable innovation by implementing new research and development team.
• Drive revenue to 1.2 billion internationally.
• Improve relationships with distributors and vendors.

 Now, imagine how your employees would feel reading this list. Pretty good, right? And guess what, if your employees feel good about themselves, and about you, and about the company they work for, you’ll reach those other goals on the list.

In fact, you’ll probably exceed them.

All from putting employees first.

Jim Warda

Internal Social Networks are starting to appear inside some organizations. Early adopters are finding positive business results by helping employees connect through “internal Facebooks.” By effectively harnessing these new networks, organizations are seeing positive impacts on internal brand building, as well as employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation — which leads to higher levels of productivity, revenue, and profit.

But the world of the internal social network is the opposite of command & control. That said, reasonable guidelines, a group of informal influencers, and a posse of community managers who help keep the dialog lively and the network on track.

It’s clear that no matter where your company is on the social media ladder, social networks and Web 2.0 skills are becoming a part of today’s work landscape. All businesses need to be aware of how to deploy networks for higher ROI, collaboration, innovation and customer service.

Join the Communitelligence Webinar, Building Employee Branding And Engagement With Internal Social Networks on March 17. You’ll come away with a much clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t in this brave new world of internal social networks from companies that are already figuring out the path to success. The webinar is led by three experienced experts:

• Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media,Mayo Clinic
• Polly Pearson, VP Employment Brand and Strategy Engagement, EMC Corporation
• Paul Pedrazzi, Vice President, Product Strategy, Oracle
  

To help attendees get immersed in the subject, Paul Pedrazzi provided a brief overview of Oracle’s journey to social networking.  He is also quick to say:

“There isn’t a magic bullet.  It depends on the organization.  Some do it for engagement and retention (Best Buy). Others do it for knowlegde sharing (Boeing).  I think the best reason is the one that matches what matters to your business.”

To give a flavor of what will be discussed in this webinar, Jake Kuramoto of Oracle AppsLab has written a brief history of Oracle’s Connect.  Since this is an exerpt, you may want to go here for the complete story, including a description of Connect’s Third Version.

Oracle’s Connect began in July 2007 as the IdeaFactory. We were collecting ideas from teams in Applications Strategy, and none of the usual ways (email, spreadsheets, wiki) worked for a team whose sole purpose was to (ahem) innovate.You can see the legacy of the original IdeaFactory in Connect today by paging through Ideas.

Here’s a taste of what it looked like:

Connect 1.0
Ideas were great and pretty successful, but we’d always planned to add social networking into the mix. Aria has always been the corporate directory, and we love it. We wanted to add a dash of social though, so in August 2007, Rich debuted Connect, which was IdeaFactory plus social networking and some other nice features.

Traffic went through the roof. We quickly realized there was strong demand for networking inside the firewall, and with Connect 1.0, we were off and running.

Here’s what the first version of Connect looked like.

That 1.0 version underwent several UI makeovers. The next version added the short-lived Connect logo and removed the AppsLab branding and centralized the navigation a bit, teasing features to come.

The last 1.0 UI went from gray to white with a more Oracle standard logo and look/feel. I think Connect 1.0 had this UI for the longest amount of time. People were really accustomed to it.

Connect 2.0
After a long break to build and start up Oracle Mix , we turned our attention back to Connect, armed with even more ideas that had sprouted from Mix. Connect 2.0 went live in June 2008, adding SSO integration and a fully revamped architecture and infrastructure.

The big new feature in 2.0 was Groups, which we had built into Mix first. Now people could collaborate in ad hoc ways for work or personal interest.

The blue was a shock to many, and we got more than one negative comment about it (as compared to the white/red).

So, that’s the brief UI history of Connect over its 18-month existence. We’re back to the white in Connect 3.0, and I think we’ll stay with a clean look in the future. We’re already kicking around mockups of the 4.0 version, which is taking shape now.

Philanthropy Journal’s Ret Boney talked with communications consultant Ruth Kinzey about keeping employee morale and productivity high during difficult times. Kinzey is president of The Kinzey Company, a Salisbury-based consultancy that works with both nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Question: The recession has been hard on nonprofits across the country. They are responding to heightened needs in the community while working harder to raise money. In response, many are cutting costs, freezing salaries or even laying off staff. How does this difficult working environment affect nonprofit employees’ morale, job satisfaction and productivity?

Answer: As a whole, employees are tired. Whether in the nonprofit sector, the service sector or the manufacturing sector, everyone is seeing their organizations become leaner in some way, whether through layoffs, reduced benefits or fewer hours.

Due to economic conditions, this has permeated the workforce life such that everyone is asked to do more with less. So employees, as a whole, feel they’re giving a lot to their employers. On the other hand, many people are grateful to have a paycheck.

But what’s important, and what gives the nonprofit executive director some real opportunity, is knowing there are ways to make employees feel valued.

If employees feel valued and feel appreciated, they are more willing to put in more hours or take on additional responsibilities.

And by boosting job satisfaction and morale during the difficult times, it’s easier to get employees to stay in their jobs after the external environment has improved.

Q: How can nonprofit leaders use internal communications to boost morale and job satisfaction?

A: A common complaint from employees is they feel like they’re being kept in the dark. The internal communications piece plays a critical role because it allows management to share the vision and the progress of the organization.

First, if you provide information about where your nonprofit is headed – whether that is toward tough times, a higher fundraising goal, or adding a service – make sure your employees understand the vision.

Employees are your best ambassadors and if they can’t communicate the vision to others, then you can’t fully leverage your communications.

By the same token, be sure to keep employees informed about the organization’s progress toward goals. That’s important in keeping them energized.

It’s also vital to provide opportunities for employees to share information with one another. When there are a lot of demands on employees, it’s easy to get focused on your own to do list.

By sharing information, employees find out what is happening throughout the organization and can help each other identify creative solutions or opportunities for efficiencies.

To do this well, a nonprofit may have to have more meetings – but they must be run efficiently. Information sharing also can occur through written communications.

A third critical factor is recognition. It’s important to provide a form of measurement for employees and to celebrate their successes.

Make sure employees know how they are being measured and provide small rewards for a job well done – even if it’s just a hand-written note or an hour off of work. Simple gestures can go a long way.

Q: What is the best way for nonprofit leaders to communicate about difficult topics (like layoffs, salary freezes, or budget or program cuts) with their staffs, boards and supporters?

A: The most important thing a nonprofit manager can do is to keep communication channels open and prepare employees for any bad news.

If you’re doing your job as an executive director, you will see what’s on the horizon. Nonprofits don’t get to a crisis level in two hours.

Not only does this keep employees from being surprised by bad news, bringing people along with you as you see situations develop can be a help to the organization

Sharing information with each of your audiences – employees, board members, volunteers – provides them the opportunity to generate creative solutions.

For example, regular donors who have had to curtail donations because of personal financial difficulties may be able to contribute in other ways if they know what organizational needs exist.

Board members might be able to donate professional services or surplus office equipment, and employees might know of people who are currently out of work who might want to volunteer while looking for employment.

That said, when you share difficult information with employees, you have to frame your communication positively but honestly and then stick with the key message.

For example, if you’ve missed an important fundraising goal, you could say “I know we didn’t meet our goal and we worked hard for it, so we are asking you to be resources. No doubt there are other ways we can continue serving those people who need us.”

Then, tackle the challenging times as a team and be receptive to ideas and suggestions.

This can be difficult, but if you are leading a nonprofit, you must keep an optimistic outlook and encourage your employees to see things from a creative standpoint.

By empowering your stakeholders and providing well-deserved recognition of employees’ hard work, you can add to productivity and improve morale. And if you can do this well, you’ll be building your own career and creating a loyal following because you proved you can stay positive and approach problems with creativity.

Remember: All organizations now are being forced to reevaluate their economic models and approach things differently, so this skill is a valuable asset.

Ruth Ellen Kinzey, The Kinzey Company is a corporate reputation strategist, consultant, and professional speaker. Want to hear more about a specific topic? She can be reached at (704) 763-0754 or http://www.kinzeycompany.com.

Teams can’t function well when co-workers don’t trust one another. Building and maintaining trust in the traditional, physical workplace is difficult enough, but the process is even tougher in a virtual environment, where people often have to work with people they haven’t met in person.

Some biologists believe that we are hardwired to distrust everyone except our own family members. Studies have shown, however, that trust can indeed be actively accelerated and maintained on virtual teams even when they have to be assembled on the fly with employees scattered across the globe. According to our research, the following best practices will help:

Leverage “swift trust.” Recognize that when groups first form, people are usually willing to give others the benefit of the doubt. The prevailing feeling is that “we’re in the same boat together”: success will reflect well on everyone, whereas failure could hurt people’s careers. So people initially operate in a positive atmosphere of “swift trust.” (This is what colloquially we might call the “honeymoon period” of a relationship). This is particularly true if the group is under pressure to perform so that, in effect, people have little choice but to trust each other. This is easily seen on a movie set, where actors, stuntmen, the director, makeup artists, set designers, the camera crew, and others collaborate intensely from day one even though they might have been strangers before.

There are two ways to assure you take best advantage of the benefits of swift trust. Managers should 1) tout the competence of the different team members and 2) ensure that the team has clear goals that everyone understands. Over time, swift trust tends to decay, but it can help hold a team together until another type of more lasting and tested bonding has a chance to develop: interpersonal trust. This brings us to the next point.

Pro-actively build interpersonal trust. When assembling a virtual team, managers often assume that people will mainly be interested in what their fellow team members can do, as opposed to who they are as individuals. Wrong! When looking at a resume, CV, or bio of someone, people will often latch onto personal details, such as hobbies and other outside interests, including charities the person supports. Why? Because they want to get a better sense of that individual and to see if they might have anything in common. One theory is that we tend to trust others who we perceive to be similar to us because we believe that those individuals will react to various situations in ways that we can understand (and even predict).

Managers can help encourage such personal connections by starting meetings with a “Take 5” for people to talk about what’s been happening in their lives, both professionally and personally.

A member of a virtual team in one research study happened to live in the Washington, D.C. area during the sniper attacks in 2002. During a conference call with her fellow team members, she described what she was then going through. This prompted a co-worker in the Philippines to talk about the violence there from insurgents. Conversations like that help build empathy, which then paves the way for trust.

When my colleagues and I work with physical teams, we use the art of storytelling over meals, and the same principles can be applied to virtual teams during teleconferences. Although that might feel awkward at first, it’s a powerful way to create empathy. Another recommendation is to invest in an intranet site with social-networking features that enable employees to learn about others. Such measures are especially important in a virtual environment, where people have much fewer opportunities to connect through chance encounters in the hallway or in the company kitchen.

The article, How To Make Facebook Your Company Intranet on bmighty.com caught our eye. 

James Lukach, Manager Online Communications, Siemens is speaking on this subject at INTRANET INSIDER WORLD TOUR LIVE 2009, Conference and Intranet Manager Workshop, New York City, April 16-17.  Jim’s session is titled:

• Facebook and the Future of Employee Communications

According to the article, setting up a Facebook group is a snap, but using Facebook groups as your company intranet has a few more wrinkles, including how to handle private business information.

Setting up a private group on Facebook, as Serena Software has done, isn’t complicated. But turning it into a functioning intranet requires a little more planning and preparation. The most obvious concern about Facebook groups is the apparent lack of privacy — generally, you can both search for them and view them before deciding whether to join. But with an intranet, you don’t want anyone other than your employees to open a window into what’s happening inside the company. Fortunately, Facebook provides a solution to this dilemma: The administrator can set group membership to “invitation only.”

Read the full article here.

Practice better communication in our personal lives. Each of us brings our personal communication style to work with us. That can be good or bad, depending on how well our communication style serves us at home, with family and friends. I’m willing to bet a leftover fruitcake that most of us believe we could improve our communication skills and that if we did so, our personal relationships would be much more fulfilling. So, let us resolve to fix our communication problems at home by being more active listeners, by being more aware of how we communicate nonverbally, and by taking moments to play back what we say and how we say it. Then let’s see if our workplace communication skills improve, too.

Say what we mean and mean what we say. People know when they’re being fed a load of … leftover fruitcake. When we seek to avoid the awful truth and opt instead to obfuscate, our co-workers, bosses, employees, customers and business partners see right through it. We’re fooling no one when we engage in doublespeak or try to “spin” something to our favor. One of the greatest things we can do to improve workplace communication is to resolve to speak and write with clarity and purpose, even when it hurts.

Recognize communication as the vital business process it is. Whether we acknowledge it or not, communication is a process that drives business decisions and employees’ behaviors. Smart, high-performing organizations recognize communication as an important business process and harness it to help achieve goals. They engineer the communication process so that the business’s investment in it pays dividends through efficiency, reduction of waste and higher productivity. They provide the right tools for two-way communication between management and employees. And, yes, they measure the effectiveness of communication processes so they can eliminate or fix the things that don’t work and build on the things that do. None of this happens, however, if we do not resolve to recognize that communication is a powerful business process.

Focus first on face-to-face communication. Study after study reinforces the fact that people want real, personal interaction with their bosses and the leaders of their organizations – not just e-mails, memos and nice Web pages. Nothing says “you’re not important” more than an impersonal mass e-mail announcing a business decision that was made weeks ago and has already been rumor-milled. And nothing says “you are important” more than a boss who pulls employees together to give the details in person and gives everyone an opportunity to ask questions and make comments. People come to work every day and decide whether they will invest themselves in their work or divest themselves from it. The most critical factor influencing that decision is their relationships with their bosses – and relationships aren’t built through e-mails and memos. That’s why resolving to choose face-to-face communication first is a wise investment of time and energy.

Cut people some slack. None of us is perfect, not even the men and women at the top. We have weaknesses, flaws, insecurities, and shortcomings. Sometimes it’s easy to cast stones at others for their failures to communicate as well as we’d like. In my experience, however, I’ve found most people are sincerely trying to do what they believe to be the right thing. I, for one, resolve to give a little more benefit of the doubt to the business leaders and employees who just don’t seem to “get” communication.

I wonder how many of these resolutions will live to see February?

Robert Holland

This week, I was leafing through Ad Age. Four stories grabbed me. There was enough content for me to pontificate on for a whole year. Beside the stories they told, the articles also revealed interesting themes. They all support the idea that our industry is in transition, and that ad agencies, PR agencies, marketing consulting firms and clients need a new way of thinking. Let me share with you some of what I read.

• Nike CEO William Perez (former CEO of SC Johnson) was fired after only thirteen months on the job. The headline read: “The CEO forgot: Ads Rule at Nike.” The subhead explained:”…behind the scenes: Perez viewed ads as expense, and it cost him his job.”

Here’s my translation of this event…culture is everything. Perez failed to understand that ads had built the aura and the brand which Nike stands for. Phil Knight was not about to allow someone to play with his passion. This wasn’t about money savings or efficiencies: At Nike it’s about “doing it”. Perez underestimated both the nature of the Nike culture and its power when he made his cost-cutting moves. At Nike, management is a team sport, and consensus, buy-in and enrollment are imperative if change is to happen.

The Second Story…

• “Ford Motor Company engaged the consulting firm Accenture to conduct a far reaching media optimization and media measurement program that could greatly influence its ad launches, spending and media mix. The program could potentially affect the type of work Ford’s agencies do.” (As it happens, I used to be the Director of Worldwide Marketing at Anderson Consulting, Accenture’s predecessor).

I can see it now…Ford’s ad agency staffers at Y&R, JWT and Ogilvy are probably panicking, running through their hallways shouting, “That isn’t fair…we should be doing that work!” The fact is, they are right. Perhaps the ad agencies should get the work. But there’s a good reason why they didn’t. They just don’t provide the same rigor and the same process methodology that a consulting firm does. Agencies should be asking themselves why they aren’t getting opportunities like this. WPP’s CEO, Martin Sorrell’s nightmare, of agencies losing ground to consulting firms, is coming true and picking up momentum. I think it can only get worse for the agencies–unless they rethink what they do, what type of talent they hire and where they add value beyond creating advertising.

Now for the next story…

• “Jim Heekin, newly installed CEO of Grey Advertising, is dismantling Grey’s old systems. He’s installing critical account planning to be on par with creative and account management. This represents a marked change for Grey.” Good for Jim! The article goes on to tell us how Grey’s strategy had little clarity, how they would often waste the time of creative teams hunting for a creative strategy insight. Guess who paid for that wasted time?

I have always endorsed the idea that creatives should be focused on creative ideas not on the message or the strategy. Creatives just don’t have the training for that; after all, they are art directors, writers and designers, not strategists, analysts or researchers. McDonald’s calls it a “Framework for Freedom.” They say, let the client management, researchers, and strategists come up with the key messages, target audiences and buyer motivators. Then let the creative teams get on with their job-creating the design, sound and motion around the idea. That way the creative output is more focused and compelling.

I would go one step further. I say that the agency should take the leadership role. Agencies need to become facilitators, working side by side with the client’s management, marketing and sales teams, together with the ad agency’s team of media, account management, creative, planning and production departments. Everyone should be collaborating, all together at one time at one table. This saves time, ensures buy-in and produces better ideas.

Nice going Jim. Keep stirring up the pot…change in the ad agency world is good. One caveat, one piece of advice…move the culture along with you…don’t let it bite you in the rear the way it did Bill Perez at Nike. Win over the clients, and win over the internal agency staff. If you don’t believe me just look what happened to your counterpart Ann Fudge at sister WPP agency Young & Rubicam. Internal politics, a strong insular culture, fear of change and being an agency outsider prevented her from being successful in the job.

• The last piece…”Ford is putting the consumer at the center of their rebirthing marketing program with hopes of turning around the company fortunes.” Ford had no choice, we’re told, but to change to meet the demands of the market rather than the other way around.

This is news? Where have they been for the last twenty years? The Ford Motor Company I knew and worked for from 1981-1991 (when I was a senior ad executive at Y&R) always put the customer first. It was about Quality is Job #1; Lincoln – What a Luxury Car Should Be; and Have You Driven a Ford Lately?Those were consumer insight campaigns. They answered consumer questions and they helped satisfy the buyers’ needs and wants with products that they wanted to drive. Remember the Mark VI, the XR4Ti Merkur from Germany and the Mercury Sable and Ford Escort? Wonderful cars, terrific insights and great market successes. I’m glad to hear Ford is finding its way back to the insights that contributed to its most recent glory days. But, as the company has said, Ford must also win over its own people in order to lead the market. Ford’s employees need to become educated, motivated, inspired, and enrolled to recognize what the pursuit of a consumer driven strategy can yield in the way of success and market leadership. I hope they get it straight. I want them to succeed.

So what’s the common thread to these stories?? What key messages can we learn from them? I see many lessons here.

Sharing Strategic Marketing Responsibilities. The ad industry (and some clients) still doesn’t recognize that marketing should not be centered just on the creative product. Focus should be the shared collective responsibility of the client, the agency, the sales channel and the customers. Together they can create products, marketing strategies and award winning advertising that will meet the needs and wants of the market and present the right message and image. No one group should abdicate its role to the other. This work needs to be done together.

Rigor, Process and Methodology. In a world of investment bankers, strategy consultants, and greater value accountability to shareholders, agencies have to step up to the plate and incorporate new rigor, methodology and process into their planning and accept their responsibility for results. The old way just doesn’t work, and neither will moaning about the loss of consulting assignments and revenue. Agencies must go way beyond planning the new ad campaign and refashion themselves to gain deep analytical understanding of their client’s business operations and challenges. They need to get themselves invited to the board room table out of respect for their strategic insights and counsel and the confidence they convey, not just to get approval for their new ad campaign.

Culture. Everyone involved in marketing has to recognize the power of culture and the power of the employees when it comes to embracing a new strategy or marketing initiative. Company culture does matter. Respect it, and make it work in your favor by helping the internal constituencies become educated and informed. Help them become motivated and inspired and–eventually–enrolled and engaged. This will take time, patience and process, and the knowledge to do it right. Don’t leave this important task to chance. Deploy change management experts who have methodologies and processes that can help.

Abundant Mentality. Marketing people on both sides of the table need to embrace the notion that a great idea can come from anywhere. What’s more, when everyone adds to an idea, it can only get better, brighter, more compelling. Every great idea is a shared responsibility based on an abundant mentality about solving consumer problems with compelling solutions that grab people’s imagination and attention.

Leadership. Current advertising models fashioned back in the sixties and seventies are not relevant today. The marketing industry needs fresh ideas, new approaches and leadership to recognize that. The industry needs leadership that recognizes a need for new, outside-the-box business models. Marketing people need to rethink old management structures–incorporate new media, the internet, buzz marketing and 1to1 marketing–and establish new metrics and accountabilities so clients will value what they do. Leadership should come from both the clients and their agencies, both immersed in freshness and innovation, not stuck on a single idea. Leadership needs to re-examine everything: compensation, accountability, media optimization, market research methods and integrated strategies and costs.

So. What I garnered from reading my four Ad Age articles can be summed up this way: Our business is changing. We can react and let it change us, or we can take the lead and we can change it. 

Could it be that the simple act of communicating regularly with employees and involving them in business decisions could lead to greater business success?

Many company leaders think so and point to their successes as proof. One of those is Baptist Health South Florida, based in Coral Gables, Fla., and recently ranked 59th on Fortune magazine’s 2006 list of “Best Companies to Work For.”

The Fortune list is serious business. Many companies use it as a powerful recruiting tool. Capital One, one of Richmond’s top employers, made the list several times during its growth years in the late 1990s and heavily touted it to prospective employees.

The recognition’s importance goes beyond recruiting, however. The reasons behind the ranking are what really matter – and help the 10,900-employee nonprofit company maintain a voluntary turnover rate of only 7 percent. Ask any corporate executive if low employee turnover translates into low costs. Better yet, ask Baptist Health South Florida CEO Brian Keeley if employee retention is important when dealing with a global shortage of nurses.

Equally important is the fact that satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers. “If we treat our people well, they’re going to treat our patients well,” Keeley told Sun-Sentinel columnist Marcia Heroux Pounds. Part of treating its employees well is involving them in employee advisory groups. Management seeks the groups’ input and employees express concerns or make requests through representatives on the groups.

For example, one employee asked if the hospital could help manage the rising cost of transportation to and from work due to skyrocketing gasoline prices. Beginning in March, Baptist Health South Florida will offer its South Miami workers discounted Metrorail cards through payroll deductions. Other locations will soon receive the benefit as well.

All of this translates into better patient care as evidenced by numerous awards Baptist Health South Florida has received for the quality of its patient care. For example, it was named the best place to give birth in Miami-Dade County by South Florida Parenting magazine and consumers have chosen it as the most preferred hospital in Miami for many years.

The best thing about communicating with and involving employees is that it really doesn’t cost that much. Mostly, it requires a change in attitude – one which views employees as necessary and vital partners in business rather than “resources” to be “managed.” Then, it requires commitment on the part of business leaders to make time for communication.

As Baptist Health South Florida demonstrates, it is time well spent.

Robert Holland

“We don’t know each other, so we don’t care what we do to each other.”

Those words were spoken by the president of union representing police officers in Falmouth, Mass. He was talking to a reporter for the Cape Cod Times about tensions between town management and rank-and-file officers, but he could have been talking about any number of workplaces anywhere in the world.

Things got so bad in Falmouth that the police chief hired consultants to lead the 66-person department in conflict resolution. Participants identified poor communication between department leaders and patrol officers as the main problem – an issue that could have resulted in the police chief losing his job. Town administrators cut his proposed contract from three years to 18 months and ordered him to resolve the problems.

Patrol officers asked their bosses to be more visible, to communicate more openly, to offer praise for jobs well done, and to come visit the off-shifts from time to time. That doesn’t seem to be a particularly difficult list of demands, but the police officers said it could make a huge difference in their job satisfaction. They also asked for improvements in health care and shift changes, which union reps will address in collective bargaining.

The Falmouth Police Department is not alone in discovering that a lot of problems can be solved by simply improving workplace communication. My business partner and I are wrapping up a communication audit for a large organization that revealed many similar issues. In focus groups and through surveys, rank-and-file employees described a culture of distrust – a problem they say could be helped if leaders would just take the time to be more visible and to communicate openly. The audit led to nearly a dozen specific recommendations for improving communication.

Communicating openly means many things. It includes simple acts such as saying “hello” in the hallways and elevators. (It’s amazing how much a friendly greeting or brief conversation with an executive means to an employee who truly wants to feel a part of the corporate family.) On the other end of the spectrum, it also includes important activities such as explaining the business plan and employees’ roles in executing it, answering questions and hearing people’s concerns and suggestions.

The Falmouth Police Department is considering giving patrol officers access to a new intranet so they have access to more information they need to do their jobs. Of course, an intranet is a wonderfully interactive communication tool, so it could help solve a lot of other problems, too.

Robert Holland

You might not want the company snooping into your e-mails, but electronic surveillance seems to be working.

It’s a creepy feeling to think someone might be reading your e-mails. Even if you’re using the company e-mail system for legitimate business rather than sending mushy-grams to your true love, the idea that someone is monitoring your missives just reeks of Orwellian control.

An increasing number of companies, however, are monitoring employees’ e-mails for a good reason and with impressive results. It seems this invasion of workers’ personal space might reduce companies’ risks for financial scandal.

The “Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal” is an online resource for information and advice about how companies can comply with the law aimed at rebuilding the integrity of corporations in the wake of Enron and similar scandals. Sarbanes-Oxley raises all kinds of questions about what is private, privileged information and what must be disclosed. The bottom line is most companies are bending over backward to make sure they don’t even appear to be corrupt.

One of the results of this tightening-up is a closer watch over employees and the information they share in the course of doing business. Thus, one survey found that 93 percent of companies have formal electronic communication retention and review policies. So, for example, if you forward the link to this article to a co-worker, your company probably knows it.

The same survey – self-servingly conducted by Fortiva, a company that provides secure e-mail archiving – also found that of those companies with such policies, 63 percent said that e-mail surveillance has improved their ability to see exposure to risks as a result of employee communications. As a result, 26 percent of companies said they have fired employees as a result of information they discovered through e-mail surveillance.

Companies seem to be achieving the intended results. Employees appear to be more aware of the risks inherent in e-mail and subsequently are monitoring themselves. Eighty-three percent of companies say they do not prohibit employees from sending or receiving personal e-mails on the companies’ systems. Yet, 79 percent of businesses believe e-mail monitoring is deterring employees from sending or receiving e-mails that violate corporate rules and policies.

I’m a proponent of open communication in the workplace. It’s essential that employees have the freedom and opportunity to communicate candidly without fear of reprisal – even if the communication is critical of company policies or specific people. Also, business leaders must be free to “open the books” to employees and share all the information people need in order to do their jobs.

With freedom comes responsibility. Employees owe it to their employers to know the rules when it comes to the kinds of information that can be sent and received using company systems. Employees must protect proprietary information and they must feel empowered to “blow the whistle” when they see something that doesn’t look right.

In the end, communication of every kind and at every level is a powerful tool for business. The fear of Sarbanes-Oxley and the resulting surveillance by companies shouldn’t deter it.

Robert Holland