Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

A painting of a meaningful workplace

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Books In this latest in my series on Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on the
subject of employee communication, we sit back and behold not a fantastical New Economy future of employee engagement, but homely old vision of how business used to feel to employees—and, in the opinion of author Alexander Heron in 1942 and blogger David Murray in 2009, the way they ought to feel again. —DM

In order to create an "image that will remain with us throughout our troubled study of the misunderstanding in industry today," Heron paints a realistic picture of "a time and place in which the realism of the worker's mind was in contact with the realities of industrial enterprise, in which his innocence of abstract economics did not involve a baffled attitude of misunderstanding."

Gather round:

We might find our picture of the old understanding in a wagon shop, a grist mill, a cotton mill, a pottery or cutlery shop. Let us find it in a furniture shop. Perhaps eight men work there. One of them is the boss. He owns the shop, but he works there, visibly. The other seven receive wages. The work done by the boss is not all done with tools; sometimes he uses a pencil. He draws designs, writes occasional letters, puts down figures about wages, costs, and prices.

The other seven know, quite closely, how much money the boss had saved up from his earnings as a journeyman before he started in business for himself; in other words, how much "capital" he had and how long it took him to save it up.

The shop or factory is on the same lot as the house where the boss lives; he owns it. The other seven know how much his taxes are each year. They helped to build the ten-by-thirty addition to the shop last year, and they know how much that cost. They were all in on the discussion before the new lathe was bought, and they remember the price and the freight. They remember how the boss borrowed some of the money from his wife's sister.

They know that the dining room "suit" on which they are working now is for Jane Winton, [who] used to be Jane Carey, the schoolteacher, before she married Bill Winton, the banker. They know it has to be as good as the furniture she saw in Buffalo, and that if it is good Bill's mother is going to give the boss an order for another lot which will keep them all busy through the winter.

They see the finished job emerging under their skilled hands, day by day. They know how difficult it was to get the seasoned walnut, and what it finally cost, what price is to be paid for the finished job, how much the boss will "make" on it, and how much of that will go to pay off the loan from the sister-in-law.

They know that the boss has gradually built a reputation for honest quality and skilled workmanship and that they are part of that reputation. They know why once in a while they have had to wait a little for their wages—when the taxes had to be paid before the money came in for the new counter and fixtures at the drugstore.

Above all, they know the boss. Their attachment to him is basically not sentimental but practical. He is the salesman who gets the orders which bring work to them. He collects the money which pays their wages. He managers to accumulate the working space and the equipment. They are realistic enough to know that they can get their full and fair share of the income of the business. They laugh at anyone who talks of the conflict between labor and capital, between them and the boss.

They know. Because they know, they understand. And in that full and simple understanding they "put themselves" into every job.

Heron does not hope to break down big organizations and return to the idylic picture he paints. But he insists that "the essential elements" of the dynamic "must be restored to American industry if the free-enterprise system, or even the American level of living, is to survive. … True, this group in modern industry will not be the whole establishment. But within every establishment, such a group relationship, multiplied or repeated many times, will be the channel of the needed knowledge, the area of the needed understanding."

Join us next week, as Heron explains why companies don't communicate. He acknowledges, "There are honest objections to sharing information with employees …."

Dad, the old truck has done its work

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On the eve of tomorrow's 5:00 a.m. departure to deliver my beloved Scout to its new owner in Cleveland— almost 10 years since I gave in to my dad's "feverish, sentimental, problematic fascination with old cars," as I called it in a magazine story—I drove my five-year-old daughter to school in it, for one last ride.

(Don't tell my wife.)

"We're gonna miss this stinky old truck aren't we?" I said, referring to the noxious mixture of gas, oil, grease, antifreeze and exhaust that I smell on my clothes even now, back at my writing desk.

"It's stinky. But it kind of smells yummy," she said, and then fell silent for 30 seconds before adding thoughtfully, "It kind of smells like candy, or honey."

Father, son, Scout

What do we owe an employee?

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Books
 This is the second of a series of posts on Sharing Information with Employees,
a 1942 book I've found that I believe is the first ever written on the
subject of employee communication. In the first post, we discussed the author's familiar sounding explanation of the purpose of employee communication. This post takes us further afield from the current thinking. —DM

Like every employee engagement consultant and entrepreneur boss you meet on today's streets, Alexander Heron believes the purpose of employee communication is to inspire the employees to take "ownership" of their work. But Heron argues that employees inherently have an ownership of their jobs, and it's the company's responsibility to honor that ownership and help make the employee a more intelligent, broad-thinking actor.

And responsibility, as we're about to learn, is not a word Mr. Heron is afraid of. Listen to him describe the difference between what the company owes a day laborer—"He has given us eight hours of honest work as he agreed. We have given him $4.80 as we agreed. He owes us no more; we owe him no more."—and what it owes a long-term employee:

Assume that the second man was twenty-five years old the day he came to work. He "fitted in," he learned our ways, he gained experience, he acquired new skills, he took on new responsibilities. As he did so, his rate of pay was fairly increased. As the years pass he is suddenly forty years old—above the average age of employees in American industry. He has been our employee for fifteen years. His present rate of pay is $1.00 an hour. His average rate for fifteen years has been eighty cents. He has given us 30,000 hours of honest work. We have paid him $24,000, at the successively agreed rates. Can we close the books on him? Can we say he has given us the agreed hours, we have paid him the agreed dollars, and there is no more owing, by him or by us?

Hell yes! cries the modern corporate manager, as he or she has done since corporate America two decades ago blithely declared the end to any kind of contract between employees and management. Be your own free agents, they said. Manage your own career. You're all mercenaries—we're all mercenaries! But Heron responds:

He has put into the job more than the 30,000 hours. He has put into it, into the enterprise, fifteen years of his life. They are not just fifteen years, either; they are the fifteen years which should be the foundation of all his later life earnings. Those years are his investment in the enterprise. We cannot give them back to him. We can pay off a bond-holder, or buy out a stockholder; but we cannot buy out the investment this worker has made. We wanted him to stay with us and put in those years. We want him now, as through the years, to protect and promote the business which is his job, as if it were his own. And it is his own in a way which neither he nor we can change. He is not the same man at forty than he was at twenty-five; the difference has been invested in the enterprise.

I know what you're thinking. So does Heron:

True, he has gained in some ways. He has gained skills, knowledge, maturity. He may have gained some reputation for special expertness in some line. He may have money in the bank, an equity in his home or in a life insurance policy. On the other hand, he has lost youth, adaptability, salability. He has lost fifteen years of the promise of future usefulness to any enterprise. He has risked or staked his chances of employment and income, during middle age and later years, on the future soundness and success of this enterprise. He can take away from him his acquired skills, knowledge, and reputation; he cannot withdraw the investment of the years of his youth. The important question is, has he invested those years or merely spent them?

The case is tragic when a man so invests his priceless years in an enterprise which goes merrily on without him, exploiting the youth of newer, younger men. The case is tragic; but it is very rare. …

The major tragedy occurs when not one man but many deposit priceless years in an enterprise which they all discover, too late, is unsound. In a year when their habits have become fixed and their heads partly gray, their ages are from forty to fifty and their periods of employment have reached ten, twenty, or thirty years, they find that the enterprise is not the lifetime of security they thought they were buying.

This places on us an obligation, the mutual understanding of which  is the key to constructive co-operation. That is the obligation so to plan and manage the enterprise that it will be the anchorage for middle age which the worker has a right to expect.

What corporate executives were saying when they told employees to be free agents who didn't have a right to expect anything was that they didn't have confidence enough in their strategies to ensure workers an "anchorage" for six months from now, let alone for middle age.

Fair enough. But that's not what they tell investors. They assure investors today just as they did in Heron's day, that they understand the obligation to maintain their faclities, conduct sufficient R&D to keep up with customer demands, stay abreast of the latest business technologies and processes, and created "a personnel in management, production, and sales which has reproduced itself, has trained its understudies."

Employers must, Heron concludes, "render this service to the investor of years as much to the investor of dollars."

And the corresponding employee communication responsibility?

First, we must recognize our inescapable obligation to manage the enterprise in such a way as to furnish middle-age security for those who spend their years of youth in the enterprise as wage earners.

Second, we must encourage them to expect and demand this kind of management as their truest form of social security.

Third, we must share with them the information which will create this attitude and which will continuously show them whether or not their long-time interests are being conserved.

Then and only then can we expect to find them shaping their attitudes and actions in terms of the future security of the enterprise in which they have such a priceless stake.

We can dismiss all of the above as hoplessly old-fashioned only until we realize that it's merely an exaggerated, absolutist-sounding version of the values of the companies—how they dwindle!—that we still most admire.

Southwest Airlines, for instance, wouldn't shrink from this basic philosophy. Neither would S.C. Johnson, with which I've had long and happy association, or Northwestern Mutual or Wegmans, for which I've also worked. You think Bill Gates would think of all this as so much sepia-toned silliness? No, he'd say: I did my best. Ballmer, you're up next.

In our next installment, Heron asks a question whose relevance in the post-meltdown climate shocks the senses:

"Are we, as employers … ready to see that our free-enterprise system is doomed unless it can be understood by the great majority of our citicizens, constituents, and beneficiaries?"

And he describes quite simply how employee communications people who would go about creating this understanding need only to return to the employee his or her own native economic intelligence by using "the language of … realism."

Could it really be this simple?