Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

One more time: Why we are ‘sharing Information with imployees’

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Bookcover In this final installment of our series on Sharing Information with Employees, the first and best book ever written on employee communication, we let author Alexander Heron speak for himself, first on how we know when we've created a successful program of employee communication, and second, on the result of such a program. —DM

Heron writes:

If our program of sharing information with employees, through all the channels and methods named above, is completely successful, the result—and the evidence of success—will be questions!

The supplement we must provide is an adequate plan for meeting these questions. Meeting them does not mean parrying them; it means answering them.

Some of the questions will be annoying or embarrassing. Some of these will drive us, the employers, into fields of thought which we have avoided. Some of them will test the completeness of our willingness to share information with employees; they will force us to ask ourselves if we have really meant it.

If there have been conscious or unconscious limitations in our willingness, we shall be in a most unfortunate position, much worse than if we had stayed with the narrow but consistent position that information about the business was none of the business of the employee. …

The employer who supplies to his employees only those facts and figures which portray him as benefactor, or as an object of sympathy, is likely to get no good result from the beginning. The employer who enters a program of sharing information with employees and later admits that he meant it "within certain limits" has injured his relation with employees, probably seriously and permanently.

And the upside of embarking on a rigorous program of employee communication? A happy and meaningful return, for employees and for management of big, impersonal corporations, to the "understanding unit," the 19th-century furniture shop that Heron so vividly described near the outset of the book. This is the place where the workers understood the situation the boss was in and the boss knew where the workers were coming from and everyone appreciated the scope of the operation and intimately knew the customer they served:

The "understanding unit" must come back into industry. When it does, we shall have recaptured the soul of that old furniture shop. Without destroying the efficiency of modern big business, the pooling of capital, the productiveness of great industrial plants, we shall have restored the living, understanding relationship of the good old days. We shall have, among the thousands of workers of the great factory, hundreds of "the understanding units" into which our grandfathers put their strength and interest, because they knew, and understood!"

I'm at once moved and reassured to find such a sturdy foundation for my belief that employee communication is a discipline that theoretically can make American work life—and thus the life's work of more Americans—more meaningful.

I'm also discouraged by the lack of progress we've made since 1942 and daunted by the job that lies ahead and the cloudiness of my own view from here to 2042.

But you know and I know that there's nobody but us—the students and practitioners of employee communication—who share Heron's viewpoint.

And so it's up to us to figure out how to make this theory real—organization by organization, understanding unit by understanding unit.

Let us begin, together.

The vehicles of yesterday, today!

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Bookcover Alexander Heron seems kind of bored, discussing communication vehicles. Like a lot of internal communication big thinkers who have followed him, he has contempt for the reader who demands to know exactly how to get the messages across. "Do I have to do everything for you?!” he seems to demand.
        Nevertheless, his game effort to survey the hottest communication media of his moment affords us insights by comparison and contrast.
        In the next-to-last installment of my series on the first and best book ever written on employee communication, I’ll take them one by one. —DM

The Bulletin Board. Heron’s tips effective bulletin boards might as well be a seminar on Twitter (or the internal communication app, Yammer). He says messages on bulletin boards must be brief, current and relevant, and he issues a final warning about bulletin boards: “Too much matter of any kind will lead to a growing disregard of the bulletin board. Then we can no longer depend on it as a medium for telling and emphasizing those things which are important to our immediate operating plans.” Got that, Kawasaki?

The Pay Insert. Yes, kids, there was a time when “direct deposit” meant you didn’t cash your paycheck at the tavern, but took it straight home to your wife. And in those good old days, the paycheck stuffer was an important means of internal communication because, as Heron points out, “it reaches every employee more surely than any other medium. It occurs at a time of automatic attention; the employee is alert to the arrival of his check or envelope, ready to look at it and check its correctness in some cases, perhaps even see if it reflects a raise. Moreover, he cannot refuse to take it. And almost always in the case of family men the envelope or check will go home and be seen by the wife.”

As old-fashioned as the pay insert is, it occurs to me that reaching spouses is one dimension of employee communication that’s been sorely neglected in recent years (though it was frequently discussed as recently as the 1990s, when I was first studying this business). Is it no longer of any importance at all to give employees’ families a little corporate news and context—or is it just preposterous to imagine they might actually read your corporate horsehockey?

The House Organ. (Not a musical instrument, peeps; the old-fashioned name for an employee publication.)

Lots of modern consultants and practitioners have passed themselves off as bleeding-edge by dismissing “babies and bowling scores” as legitimate content for an employee publication. Well, Heron was making the same point in 1942, recommending a second, “radically different type of house organ”:

Instead of relying on names and news and pictures of employees, to get itself read … it features persons only when an action or achievement is an expression of company tradition or character: an act of heroism by a member of a safety committee which expresses a tradition of interest in safety; or the completion of fifty years of service, which reflects the stability of the enterprise and its practice of retaining its employees. It leans toward direct discussion of the various activities and functions of the company: the safety program, research, sales, plant expansions, new products. …

When it pictures the policy of continuity of employment, dramatized by Lars Olson’s fiftieth anniversary, that policy becomes a little clearer, a little firmer, in the mind of every company agent who deals with employment.

Despite all the technology, employee publications still exist, and Heron’s description above is pretty much what the best ones are still after.

The Line Supervisor. Heron dashes through various kinds of employee meetings, direct mail, the employee handbook and the annual report on his way to making a claim that will cause a bar fight among employee communicators even today:

No medium for carrying information can duplicate or displace the supervisor who lives with employees in their daily work. No program of using conventional media for conveying information to employees can be wisely planned without the benefit of his advice. No information can be completely and intelligently shared with employees without his effective supplementary and explanatory work. No question raised by an employee can safely be diverted around him without weakening him in his essential function.

In sharing information, in building understanding, as in managing the daily work, there is no substitute for the line supervisor.

I’ve never been terribly interested in the ongoing debate between who’s more effective as a communicator—top management or line supervisor—because I believe both are equally necessary. (Which would you rather know before going outside: The temperature or the chance of precipitation?)

What does interest me is how Heron measures the success of all communication vehicles. Going back to the example of the house organ article about Lars Olson and his 50 years of service, Heron asks and answers, “How are we to know whether or not the results are good, whether or not the story was read and its real meaning comprehended?”

Not by the number of letters received from employee readers; these will be few at best. Not by the number of comments which wives of employees make to the manager’s wife. Not by the pride and enthusiasm of Lars himself. The real measure will be the amount of curiosity stimulated in the minds of employees and revealed by them. If the job was well done, foremen and supervisors will be answering questions for weeks to come. Is Lars going to retire? Will he get a pension? Is he the oldest employee in years of age? How many employees have worked here forty-five years? Forty years? Who will be the next fifty-year man? What is the average age of all the employees? Were any of them over forty when they were hired? How come Lars hasn’t been promoted lots farther? Doesn’t seniority count much?

The best job of the best house organ of this type is to stir up interest in its subject, and induce employees to ask questions. If the basic relationship is right, those questions will come to foremen and supervisors. If our program of sharing information with employees has been wisely planned, the foreman or supervisor will know it.

More on those questions—and on how we know if internal communication is working—in the next, and last, installment in this series.

How might we start an effective employee communication program? And when?

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Bookcover In my series on Sharing Information with Employees, the first and best book ever written on employee communication, I've covered (and we've discussed): the purpose of employee communication for organizations, employees and society … what attitudes executives ought to have about communicating with employees … how to make sure what management has to say matches what employees want to hear.
    In this installment, we get down to brass tacks. "How?" asks Heron. In his answer, he describes the character of a solid employee communication program and discusses when and how one might be launched. —DM

Like communication consultants today, Heron distinguishes between communication vehicles and a communication program. Unlike communication consultants today, he does not talk glibly of "behavior change" as the end-all, be-all of employee communication.

"Our objective is a lasting and continuing attitude, not an early and conclusive action. We are not seeking to persuade employees to buy something or to do something specific. We are not even interested in causing them to know some particular fact or to think any specific thought."

Long before employees can be reached on that level, an understanding must be reached, Heron writes.

The first element in the understanding which we should be trying to create is the understanding by employees that facts about the enterprise are not being concealed from them. The knowledge that they can get the information they want is more important than any actual information that can be given to them. Incidentally, in too many enterprises, this knowledge that he can get such information would be just about the most startling information which could be given to the average employee!

Actually, it's not "incidental" at all when one is considering launching or dramatically retooling an employee communications operation. Heron goes on to ask and answer the question, "How can [management] avoid shocking employees and at the same lead them to recognize that they can know the facts about the enterprise which is a part of their lives?"

[Are you listening, Rueben?]

Answer: "There is no sudden way. There is no channel which can instantly make employees conscious of the new possibilities. Any pressing for sudden results, for sudden interest, greater confidence and general acceptance of information by employees is hopeless. The first rule must be that the process of sharing information with employees is a gradual one."

Heron goes on to describe the employee communication program in more detail:

The program must be a continuous one, a method of conduct rather than a campaign. It must be an expanding one, permitting the delivery of ever more information as employees ask for it. It must be forever incidental to the actual conduct and management of the enterprise; that is, it must not become an institution apart from the actual work or operation of the enterprise, nor separated from the management, nor important in any way which overshadows the daily task of getting the work done.

It almost sounds as if Heron is banning communication vehicles and employee communication practitioners. Not quite. "Fully recognizing the popularity of many of these methods, and the fact that tens of millions of dollars are being spent every year on their use, I confess a prejudice against any or all of them as a complete program. I recognize immense value in some of them, an undeniable need for most of them. [But] the proposition to which I hope to lead is that the best of them, selected to fit the exact conditions of a single company, will do the most that they can do when they have invited the flow of information through the natural, functional line organization, the supervisory personnel of that company."

All right, Heron—employee communication practitioners and our programs have to be broad-minded, patient and unobtrusive.

When can we start?

Not now.

"When our employees want to know whether the plant will run full after Christmas, it is almost certain that they will not 'receive' our bulletin-board 'propaganda' about the burden of our social security taxes for the year."

Employees are deeply suspicious of organizations that,

after years of silence, secretiveness, concealment of 'confidential' facts, and grudging release of information under pressure … approached us with a sudden change of front …. If during the days of good business he had considered us incapable of understanding the facts of business life, he could hardly expect us to listen to the hard-luck stories when they prevail. …

The mind of the average American is a naturally sensitive receiving instrument. Through the years of growth of mass employment, the instrument has not been invited to "tune in" on basic information from which understanding of the free-enterprise system can grow. It has not been invited to "tune in" on facts about industry and business, particularly about the business in which it is engaged.

So companies who have seen the light about the need to communicate aggressively with employees must wait for the current recession to recede the way Depression was doing by the beginning of U.S. involvement in WW II, in 1942. "While they are worried about curtailed and unstable earnings, employees are not willing to 'tune in' on messages about anything else."

But just afterward—that's when they will.

Minds which a year ago would 'tune in' only on subjects such as wages, rents, movies, baseball, and more wages are ready today for a whole new range of information. Military and industrial needs for men, chances for new jobs, increased living costs, taxes reaching lower incomes than ever, strikes in defense industries, curtailment of whole enterprises because of [wartime] priorities—these and a hundred new topics have caught these minds. It is a day when enlightened employers can share information with employees more acceptably than ever before. The employee will 'tune in' today.

Will we, in the next phase of U.S. economic history, be ready for the moment?