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Leaders of reorgs typically fall into one of two traps when communicating with their employees. We’ll call the first one wait and see and the second ivory-tower idealism. Perhaps you have seen one, or both, in your own reorgs.
In the first trap, wait and see, the leader of the reorg thinks everything should be kept secret until the last moment, when he or she has all the answers. The leader makes the reorg team and leadership swear to secrecy and then is surprised when the news leaks to the wider organization (it always does, we’re afraid). As the reorg team starts to engage with the rest of the organization, the rumors round the water cooler increase: “They were asking what my team does”; “I had to fill in an activity analysis form”; “I hear that 20 percent of jobs are going to go.” Everyone thinks the real reason for the reorg is job losses (whether it is or not). The leader, desperate to get in control of the situation, pushes the team to develop “the answer” so that he or she can tell the organization. Without an “answer,” the leader feels that any communication would come across as defensive. At most, the executive approves some question-and-answer sessions on the reorg. But a full-scale communication needs to wait. Eventually, the leader has the answer: the reorg team produces a high-level org chart. The leader then announces the new organization: here are the new leaders, here is the structure, some job losses are necessary, but this is going to help us deliver fantastic results. Employees, hearing this, hear only that their boss’s boss’s boss is going to change and that some of them are going to lose their jobs. Nothing their leader has said counters the impressions they formed at the water cooler.
Ivory-tower idealism fares little better. In this version, the leader of the reorg is finally getting a long-achieved objective: all the issues of the old organization will finally get fixed; everything the leader wanted to do, but was held back from, can now be achieved. The leader can barely contain the excitement. So psyched up by the possibilities that the reorganization offers, the leader decides to start the process with a webcast to all staff, telling them about the exciting business opportunities it will open up. The leader follows this up with a series of walk-arounds in the major plants and offices, discussing the opportunities and getting input on some of the challenges that people face in the organization today. The leader puts a personal blog on the company intranet....
Today, with all the internal communication tools available to a workforce, emailing seems almost primitive. Though many organizations still use email, most are trying to reduce the number of emails sent in favor of a simpler, more efficient form of internal communication. Employees are relying more on intranets or enterprise social networks.
Rio Rancho Public Schools has eliminated routine "all staff" emails, such as weekly school bulletin updates, by posting such important news on the intranet. (Here's the RRPS case study.)
Though you might not be ready to eliminate every "all staff" email and all one-on-one emails, you can improve internal communications with these powerful tools:
When it comes to engaging employees on the journey to enterprise social, getting 75,000 employees or 50% of your staff to actively use one network is about as ambitious as it gets.
Veyronique Vallieres, Internal Communications and Community Manager at ABB, worked a long time on adoption as part of the company's vision to break down internal silos and enable greater collaboration across 100 countries.
"We are one of the global leaders in power and automation technologies providing literally thousands of products and solutions to reduce environmental impact around the world. Being aligned internally as an organisation is not only crucial, it is essential."...
Owned media, paid media and earned media have made up the content marketing tripod for a long time, but now the stool has a fourth leg: employed media. Find out how you can give your content effort...
...A while back, I wrote a post on the concept of a Center of Content Excellence — a new discipline and resource charged with propagating the power of content marketing, maintaining standards, and reducing duplication of effort.
Employed media is an important part of any Center of Content Excellence.
The idea is simple: If all sorts of folks in your company would and could use your great content in their interactions with the world, they’d amplify its impact many times over....
Now more than ever, brands are influenced not by the ads or image they put out to the public, but what consumers are actually saying about the brand.
... Leading brands are turning to employees to amplify brand content, engage on behalf of the brand, curate content, listen to conversations, and even to help with recruiting. Employees have unique experience and expertise that can be extremely valuable to customers and prospects.
Check out these numbers from Cisco’s employee program: - Employees have 10x more followers vs. corporate accounts. Plus only 2% of the employee’s audience overlaps with the audience of the corporate accounts. - Employees share 29% more URLs about the company vs. corporate accounts - Employees URL reach is 2x vs. corporate accounts...
The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer, a trust and credibility survey that collects data from more than 30,000 people, found that regular rank-and-file company employees have more credibility than executives. While this might seem like bad news for companies – it should be considered a fantastic opportunity. By turning employees into trusted brand ambassadors, companies bring their strongest asset and their most vocal internal advocates in direct contact with their customer base....
Do you think your employees love their work? Think again! These are the telltale signs that your employees are starting to disengage. ...
Bringing telecommuters back into the office has never created such an uproar! Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s cuts to telecommuting, sparked catcalls from women’s groups, questions from academics, anonymous complaints from Yahoo employees and polarized opinions in the media and at office water coolers around the world. On CNN, four experts practically choked each other trying to advocate their polarized points of view on this story. It’s a fun clip to watch but it showed how strong and divided opinions are on the issue....
Like many communications professionals, I am sure I’m not alone in wondering what internal communication activities have been taking place at supermarket giant Tesco in the wake of the horsemeat story. What have they told store colleagues? Are the internal and external messages aligned? How are employees feeling about the headlines?
Organizational core values are a primary determinant of culture, employee satisfaction and business performance. This article addresses six core value topics that CEOs and business executives should know about. The Six Topics Below is the core value list: Core values are the building blocks of organizational culture.The process of defining, measuring, and improving core values can be an excellent vehicle for improving organizational culture.Core values provide a common language to address unacceptable behaviors in a less threatening way.Core values guide decisions and emphasize what is important to the business as the organization continues to change and improve.Core values influence business performance.If core values have not yet been established, a step-by-step process described in this article can be followed to discover them....
As much as the media felt that public relations was a barrier between the organization and the media, many employees felt the opposite was true. Public relations professionals were the barrier between employees and the media (and sometimes the organization), especially when they asked all media calls be diverted to their department. Otherwise, the only time public relations might be in contact was when the pro needed a briefed subject matter expert for an interview or someone to sign off on a quote. With some public relations professionals including social media within their sphere too, some people say the same thing about social media. Employees on social networks ought to refrain from writing, speaking, or talking about work. Really?...
Shel Holtz examines the challenge of communicating layoffs to employees and its impact on company reputation and other key audiences. the social media era makes it even more difficult to manage information..
...The research found that global best-in-class companies share four principal qualities in the way they communicate with their employees: - They have an employee-centric focus that drives communication strategy - They set benchmarks and goals that align with corporate goals - They measure performance and success toward goals, while tracking employee attitude - There is a deep-rooted desire to always improve communication with employees and build upon current success....
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Joel Gascoigne, CEO of social media tool startup Buffer, shared a 3500-word post in which he explains why he’s laying off 10 of his 94 employees. In contrast to bloodless posts from the likes of Inteland Microsoft, it indulges a different sin: oversharing. A lot of my correspondents forwarded Gascoigne’s post to me, hoping I’d praise it because it is so different from the other CEO communications I’ve shared. And there is a lot to like here: it’s extremely open, fair, and honest. Gascoigne is living his sincere promise to be transparent. But a CEO should be communicating the realities of his or her business regularly, not dropping it all at once in a 3500-word lump along with a layoff. What a team wants from their CEO is to share what’s relevant, not to share everything. This is a good example of how it’s possible to overdo transparency....
If you’re the kind of boss who fails to make genuine connections with your direct reports, take heed: 91% of employees say communication issues can drag executives down, according to results from our new Interact/Harris Poll, which was conducted online with roughly 1,000 U.S. workers.
In the survey, employees called out the kind of management offenses that point to a striking lack of emotional intelligence ;among business leaders, including micromanaging, bullying, narcissism, indecisiveness, and more. In rank order, the following were the top communication issues people said were preventing business leaders from being effective....
Who can best defend a brand’s reputation on social? According to a newly published Weber Shandwick study, the answer may come from within.
The study, conducted in collaboration with KRC Research (full PDF here), concerns trends in “employee activism”, or the ability of those within an organization to become its most prominent defenders. An online survey of 2,300 employees in 15 different markets around the world found that:
- 50% of respondents have shared something relating to their employers on social
- 33% of the sample did so on their own without encouragement from their bosses....
Dominick's is (or was) a chain of food stores in the Chicago area that dates back to 1918. The outfit has gone through several changes of ownership and in 1998 it was bought by Safeway. Apparently things haven't been going that well because Safeway announced a couple months ago that they would be closing 72 Dominick's stores and laying off more than 6000 people on December 28th.
One of the employees about to get canned -- a young fellow named Steve Yamato -- made a humorous SciFi video which showed dragons, monsters, asteroids etc squashing Dominick's employees and he titled the mini flick: "Thanks Safeway." Then he posted it on YouTube.
When Yamamoto arrived for his last day of work -- he was told that he was suspended. Huh? He (and 6600 other people) were going to be cashiered anyway - but Safeway decided to mop the floor with him as an example for remaining employees perhaps...
How corporate speak makes a tough decision look even worse in this internal memo to remaining employees...
"At Rogers Media, we are committed to delivering world-class content to consumers. It’s a new era in the media industry, one that is challenging yet full of opportunity. These changes are driven by the rapid pace of technological advancement, the increase in global choices for consumers, and an ever-changing advertising market.
Today we made changes to our business that will allow us to continue to make investments in our priority brands and strategic growth initiatives, and better position us for the future while helping us effectively manage our costs...."
As marketers, we’re always searching for a formula for how to be successful — but there’s no formula for this:
While watching Wistia’s recent dance video promoting a feedback survey, I realized that it wasn’t the production, the camera, or the lighting that made the video so compelling, or explained why I watched and shared it with friends. It was the personality of the company’s people shining through.
Wistia offers an incredibly comprehensive guide on how to make incredible marketing videos for your company, but there’s one vital ingredient to successful marketing that can’t be taught in an instructional video.Today, it’s company culture that creates marketing messages that spread. It’s that secret sauce that’s impossible to replicate....
What started as a phenomenon on a more personal level is now extending its reach to work and offices.
The obstacles to being creative inside an organization are many, varied and tough to overcome … but it all starts with taming the approval process.
Writing for organizations is hard. Being creative inside organizations isn’t easy. Sometimes, it seems as if everything is set up to prevent us from creating the kind of content that people will actually read and pay attention to. A recent informal survey of communicators at one of my writing seminars revealed six common barriers that people face as they labor to create better content. In no particular order, here they are:...
Nearly half of all U.S. companies still ban workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn while on the job. However, the 100 Best Companies to Work For embrace social media, going so far as to allow their employees to represent their brand online, resolve customers issues, and create online content. Even highly regulated organizations like Mayo Clinic, Deloitte and USAA are able to reap the benefits of social media while many of their peers are still fretting over IT challenges, security concerns and productivity loss. If your organization isn't using social media for employee communication, here are 10 reasons to reconsider...
The director of the Nielsen Norman Group said the top 10 intranets of the year did more than just streamline and pretty up. They pulled people together. To have a top 10 intranet, you've got to think about more than just a website, Amy Schade, director at Nielsen Norman Group told the hosts of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum's monthly IBF Live program. "We're looking for what's usable, but also what's inspirational," she said. Schade said many of this year's winners made significant usability changes. For example, faceted searches—which enable users to search within categories rather than in one big chunk—were big this year. Making major changes to content was another thing the top 10 shared....
Electronics retailer Best Buy prides itself on its low prices and customer service. Unfortunately, that care didn’t extend to its employees with the closure of 15 stores and 900 employee layoffs in Canada. Like many consumers, I wasn’t surprised to see Best Buy and Future Shop store closures. Analysts expect Best Buy to close another 200 to 250 of its 1,056 US stores in 2013....
Often companies “roll out the new re-branding” to employees. and the marketing team then quickly puts a check mark in the done box and they’re on to the next. Often brand managers focus only on the communications deliverables and not the holistic reality of creating passionate brand ambassadors from within the company. B2B, midsized companies, and especially tech companies are notorious for this painful disconnect. Not many companies are deeper tech than Xilinx. They design and supply programmable electronic systems. For simplicity just think semiconductors. Yet, they are a well branded company, which is unusual for their industry....
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Two biggest blunders durring a re-organization? "Wait-and-see" and "ivory tower." Both lead to failure.