Roger Ebert has a happy reminiscence of his happy days
in Chicago newspapering, and he includes this video of Mike Royko at
the Billy Goat tavern in 1982, talking about softball. See the young
woman staring at this scene? She looks like I feel every time I’m
around a Chicago old timer who can tell a yarn.
There’s nothing like football
More on this in an upcoming HuffPo piece and perhaps a video, but suffice to say:
In a span of no more than 15 minutes yesterday afternoon I was knocked down repeatedly, cheered, yelled at, pitied and patted on the back.
I'm going to miss those girls.
What’s the purpose of employee communication?
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 …