Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, I’ll talk to them! says the executive who reads Alexander Heron’s serial moralizing about the importance of communicating with employees. But what, pray tell, am I supposed to say? Good news! That’s what Heron gets to next, in Chapter Five of Sharing Information with Employees. —DM
Heron’s list of proposed employee communication topics is remarkable only in that it’s pretty much the same stuff we talk to employees about today: company finances, company position in its own industry, company products in their uses, expansion plans, sales and order prospects, research activities, industry outlook. And the like. (The list does also prominently include “company history,” which companies these days cover in five minutes in employee orientation. But don’t get Studs Terkel and me started on the subject of cultural Alzheimer’s.)
Heron starts to get interesting—and simultaneously begins to address the fierce “upward communication” types who read Writing Boots—when he writes that leaders can’t simply decide to share that which they think employees ought to know.
“Our own experience is not a true guide as to what information will enable the employee to understand the business,” Heron writes. “The information which will do this is the information which answers his own questions. We must plan to share with him the information he wants to get.”
And how, asks the executive—or the VP of corporate communication—am I supposed to figure out what that is? Heron’s answer is comprehensive and more jarring to the modern ear, I suspect, than to that of his 1942 reader:
Still others will relate to rumors which have blossomed on the “grapevine,” chance comments in casual conversations, and comments which reflect unfortunate misconceptions of many phases of the business. These chance expressions of mistaken ideas are priceless indications of the subject matter on which employees both need and want information. The fact that employees have heard, remembered, and repeated a wrong report is evidence that the subject involved is one in which they are interested.
Whatever the source of our ideas of what employees want to know, a careful listing of that supposedly desired information will produce something quiet different in form from our own list of classes of information which we hope to share with employees.
Did you get that, all you strategic communicators, who use mechanical terms like “message drivers,” who prattle on about “behavior change” and who treat employee communication as a tidy thing that more or less fits on a three-page strategic plan?
Think of the inherent talent and learned skill that Heron is demanding of the communication manager, who must sensitively and insightfully intuit what employees want to know about. And we’re not talking about doing a few focus groups or surveys here, because employees don’t know themselves what they’re really curious about.
We’re talking about someone who can move around the organization with intelligence, charm, intellectual curiosity and dogged ambition in order to understand this corporate community better than any other single person in it. (Hey, remember when the employee communication business was populated by ex-journalists? For good reason! So when and why did we decide reporters were no longer good candidates for employee communication? Well, hell, there sure are a lot of them with free schedules these days.)
And once he or she has come to understand the workforce, division by division, location by location, department by department, the internal communicator needs to use that knowledge to communicate what the organization wants communicated—the shared reality that will become the “understanding” between management and employees that Heron prescribes.
So the CEO or the VP of human resources wants employees to understand corporate finances. Short of sending each one of them to business school, fat chance—unless you find a way to meet employees where they live.
“We cannot intelligently assume that employees are interested in the broad subject of wages as an element of operating costs,” Heron offers by way of example, “but we can recall very clearly that John Brown wanted to know why his job pays only $32 a week while the same job at the Jones Corporation pays $38. …
We have agreed in the abstract that employees should know more about company costs. But we may not identify this conclusion with the unreasonable desire of the salesgirls to know the real cost of the hairbrush which sells for $3.00 and on which their sales commission is only 18 cents.
We may not, but we must. Heron is saying that anything short of seeking out employees’ questions and answering them—with management’s agenda and the general health of the corporation in mind, it goes without saying—is inadequate and will be ineffective in creating a healthy understanding between employees and management, in getting everyone in the organization moving in the same general direction.
To the employee communicator in 1942, with only the paycheck stuffer, the house organ, the bulletin board and the “employee mass meetings” at his or her disposal, Heron's must have been a daunting assignment.
And to the modern employee communicator, still daunting. But with a communication blog and Twitter, cheap videos and podcasts, it seems possible to communicate with employees with the spontaneity and suppleness Heron’s communication prescription demands.
But that still leaves the intellect, intuition, charm and the drive to be desired.
Communicators: Do you have it?
Note: In the next installment of our series, we’ll make a brief and amusing departure from my general portrayal of Heron as an employee communication prophet. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say those who find Heron a wee bit condescending will have their day. —DM
Ok, I agree with some of this, but I have to take exception to a couple of your comments that struck me as a little unfairly disdainful and a tad smug:
“Think of the inherent talent and learned skill that Heron is demanding of the communication manager, who must sensitively and insightfully intuit what employees want to know about. And we’re not talking about doing a few focus groups or surveys here, because employees don’t know themselves what they’re really curious about.”
I agree that employees sometimes don’t know exactly what they want to know, but if a ccommunicator actually HAS the sensitivity and intuition you tell us we should, I’d suggest that one can (and I actually HAVE) run focus groups and designed surveys that DID in fact elicit some real and legitimate areas that could be, and should be communicated. Just because an avenue isn’t a one-on-one, face-to-face situation, doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be helpful.
Which leads me to my other issue. You say:
“And once he or she has come to understand the workforce, division by division, location by location, department by department. . .”
And, in a perfect world, I’d agree completely with you. Unfortunately for me, I don’t live in a perfect world, so I can’t spend all day everyday visiting all locations, and chatting at leisure with any and all employees I come across [thereby taking them away from THEIR work] to gather these ideal sources of information about their perspectives, challenges and wants. I have a boss too, and he or she usually has a very long, detailed list of tasks that I’m expected to deliver, so I simply don’t have the luxury to be a wandering Socrates, much as I might wish I did.
Let me hasten to add, that doesn’t mean I don’t completely agree with you that I have a responsibility [and, I do consider it a top priority] to find ways, even within the ridiculously silo-ed corporate environment, to make real connections with as many employees as is humanely possible, and develop a relationship with them that not only allows, but invites and encourages the flow of information. However, to discount some of the tools [like surveys and focus groups] that will allow the modern communicator to interact with employees and still deliver on all the other demands they have, seems a bit rigid to me.
Interestingly though, I didn’t find anything at all “jarring” about Heron’s list – it’s almost precisely the environment I work in everyday. What I find fascinating is how consistent the recommendations, the issues, and the remedies are despite a 60-year span of time.
First, Kristen, I have no doubt you have what it would take to do what we’re talking about here. Your tale several months ago of squeezing a lively town hall meeting out of stone convinced me once and for all of that.
And what you did there required an understanding of power and personalities far more subtle than you could have ever ascertained in formal measurement vehicles.
“And, in a perfect world, I’d agree completely with you. Unfortunately for me, I don’t live in a perfect world, so I can’t spend all day everyday visiting all locations, and chatting at leisure with any and all employees I come across [thereby taking them away from THEIR work] to gather these ideal sources of information about their perspectives, challenges and wants. I have a boss too, and he or she usually has a very long, detailed list of tasks that I’m expected to deliver, so I simply don’t have the luxury to be a wandering Socrates, much as I might wish I did.”
Of course this is right. But we’re discussing the IDEA of employee communication here, not its workaday practice in our dreadfully fucked up world-class organizations. Should we limit our discussion here to what’s possible with your long to-do list and your “ridiculously silo-ed corporate environment”?
In challenging communicators to consider whether they have the drive and the skill to do what we all agree could and should be done to communicate with employees, I’m asking us to make sure our own house is in order before we start thinking and talking about how organizations might reorder themselves or reorganize our jobs to do the kind of genuinely effective employee communication that Heron is discussing here.
I’ve known a lot of communicators who, presented with this kind of challenge, would leave immediately for an organization where they could do their little daily news briefs and write the employee publication.
Hell, I might be one of those communicators myself. Heron’s challenge is profound and logistically mind-boggling.
But I sure would like a chance to find out. Wouldn’t you?
No argument with that at all. I’m fully in support of challenging ourselves and each other to keep the demon complacency at bay.
Just so long as we at least keep the nasty realities in the backs of our minds, so we don’t just wax philosopical ad nauseum about a “Brave New World” and thereby never actually DO the excellent, valuable things Heron, and you, suggest.
P.S. I appreciate the kind words!
Kristen, I don’t worry about keeping the nasty realities in the backs of our minds, I worry about pushing them there for long enough to think about what Heron’s talking about. But your last post tells me that my last post ought to be “The Heron Now,” a series of real-world recommendations for those who want to apply Heron’s principles in their modern communication jobs.
If you’re going to do that [and I think it’s a GREAT idea], you might want to try to get paid for it, and write a book instead of giving it away for free!
Strunk & White
Heron & Murray
A good idea.
Second the book motion.
You must state somewhere in your forward that you expect “Heron & Murray” to be as thoroughly villified as “Strunk & White” after 50 years, providing that your book sell as many copies as S&W.
Err, foreword.
Thank Heavens we don’t use typewriters anymore, no? Corrections were a pain.
Or perhaps thank IBM and Microsoft et al.