Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

What’s the purpose of employee communication?

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Books This is the first 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. I hope these posts, and the discussions they may inspire will amount to a white paper on employee communication. —DM

So as we stipulated yesterday, corporations are by definition social organizations, because they affect so many areas of our social life. So Boots readers agree with author Alexander Heron, who sets out to name the purpose—not of "employee communication," a term that I don't believe appears in this book—but merely of "sharing information with employees."

The first purpose, he says, is to inspire employees to take a sincere interest in their work, which appears to have been as difficult a problem 67 years ago as it is today.

Why aren't employees interested in their work?

Because organizations are big and work is so specialized that workers don't feel a sense of ownership. And since 1942 was closer to the Industrial Revolution than 2009 is, Heron could see the real and psychologically devastating shift in "ownership" that the typical worker had endured.

"Instead of his grist mill, the miller's son owns a number on a payroll," Heron writes.

Employers had failed to recognize that "a place on our payroll, a job in our plant, is the only 'property' the average worker possesses from which to derive his livelihood," Heron writes.

We deplore the fact that he does not seem to take an interest in his job; we overlook the fact that he has an interest in his job—a possessive interest, if you please. Until he can recognize this possessive interest, he is not likely to take an interest in the job in the sense of putting himself into it, protecting it and fostering it in all its relationships.

Employee engagement, anyone? And here's how Heron says it relates to employee communication:

If we had fully recognized the interest in the job which belongs to the worker, perhaps we should have done much more to tell him about the features of his job which do not come to his attention in his highly specialized function—perhaps the function of watching four automatic machines turning out twenty units per minute of the precision-tooled cam which eventually goes into position 23A.

Perhaps we should have given him a chance to see, or at least read about, the structure of the finished product and the place and importance of his specialized piece or part. Perhaps we should have let him know the important characteristics of the steel he handles and where it is made. Perhaps we should have told him the market outlook and how much 'livelihood' his job promises for next year. Perhaps we should hope to have him know the burden of taxes borne by his job, what the highly paid executive does to insure the existence of each job in the enterprise and a hundred other facts.

Heron's a good writer, isn't he?

It's amazing to read the above, because it's an at-once sepia-toned and freshly expressed echo of what employee communication consultants espouse now.

But in our next installment, which I'll post next week, what's amazing isn't the familiarity of Heron's ideas, but the jarring strangeness of his claim that employers "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."

How in blazes is he going to prove that point? Don't touch that dial …

Employee communication, in the beginning …

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I've been looking for it for almost two decades, and now that I've found it, I'm savoring it—and I hope you'll savor it with me, bit by bit, as I make my way through.

It's the first book on employee communication—written before the birth of most communication practitioners and our communication buzzwords, habits of thought, sacred cows, tired arguments, lost causes and artificial limitations.

Plainly titled Sharing Information with Employees and published in 1942 by the Stanford University Press, it's written by an Alexander Heron, about whom all I know so far is that he was a "Director of Industrial Relations for a large and far flung enterprise." ("Industrial relations" was a department without a precise modern-day equivalent, which generally oversaw the relationship between management and labor.)Books

The introduction, by a Paul Eliel of Stanford and signed Jan. 8, 1942, claims that a survey of business literature revealed not a single previous book about "sharing information with employees."

… strange as it seems, while all of our general or special works on labor relations, personnel management, and similar subjects have discussed in great detail how to employ specific techniques, none of them have more than touched on the most fundamental of all techniques in labor management: how to convey information to employees. None of them have ever thought it necessary to attempt to answer such questions as: How do you tell employees what you are doing or proposing to do? How do you tell them about the business in which they are engaged? How do you tell them the importance of the project on which they are working?

And it's in his introduction that Eliel introduces the first potentially debatable idea, by claiming: "Implicit throughout Mr. Heron's treatment is consideration of the business as a social institution as well as an organization designed to carry out economic objectives."

Before our first proper installment in this series—which I grandly hope through my commentary and our discussions will amount to a white paper—can we all agree to stipulate that corporations (to which we give so many of our precious hours and so much of our hearts' blood, whose products and services we use, and whose vast resource-taking and refuse-making we live with, whose varying financial stability makes and breaks our livelihoods and sometimes our very lives) are social institutions and not mere economic engines?

Or can we not?