Alexander Heron's 1942 book Sharing Information with Employees is the first ever written on employee communication, and I'm arguing it's also the best. But it's not perfect. As I tried to imagine this scene, I had to laugh. —DM

"One of the best jobs I ever knew of making 'company investment' take on a life meaning is done by a manager of a small plant employing about five hundred," Heron says. "This manager systematically plans to see each new employee soon after he joins the organization. He plans the conversation so that he can ask the new employee why he prefers to work for wages rather than to work for himself. Of course, the answer is almost always, 'I have no capital. You gotta have capital to work for yourself.'"

And here is where the trouble begins:

We can see the new employee wiping the sweat off the back of his neck and trying to appear befuddled: "Gee, boss, I never thought of it that way!" And meanwhile wishing fondly to quickly get to work digging clinkers out of the furnace. But the boss isn't finished.

No, Heron: An employee who has been condescended to in this way—and at the very moment he is most powerless to argue with the chief, perhaps by pointing out that if he's to "pay for the investment he uses" maybe he ought to receive some of the fruits of that investment—will be forever hostile to everything management ever tries to get him to understand about company finances.

And readers,  you'll be even more gobsmacked at Heron's foolishness here when you read the next installment of this series, which explains with sensitivity and insight when and under what circumstances an organization can get employees to receive information about economic "reality."

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:

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 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

When in 1992 I moved abruptly from writing poetry about the meaning of life in college to writing prose about the practice of employee communication in Chicago, Hugh Iglarsh eased the transition. He was the editor of The Ragan Report and my boss, and he didn't think having intellectual aspirations and working in the employee communication trade press were mutually exclusive. So he and I explored this business pretty earnestly together for a year, and we've remained friends since. So last week I was tickled to alert Hugh to this series I'm doing on this old book I discovered. Here was his response, delivered to me with astonishing speed, and putting Alexander Heron's book into an important historical perspective that my analysis ignores. Thanks, Hugh. —DM

Very interesting both in its assumptions (e.g., that employers—and by extension, capitalism itself—are fighting for the allegiance of their workforce against strong opponents) and its limitations (I haven't seen a mention of the concept of "upward communication," i.e., communication). It has a distinct New Deal sound to it—that the basic institutions are at risk, and can only be salvaged if the working class gets a bigger slice of the pie—in terms not only of wealth, but also information and the implications of information, participation and dignity. Now that we are coming out of an age of neoliberal triumph, in which supposedly there was "No Alternative" to the rigors of globalization, Heron does indeed seem relevant again. The collapse of the economy shows that a system that revolves around paper wealth and ignores basic human needs can't sustain itself.

The book reflects a historical moment. To defeat fascism, the USA had to produce 100,000 airplanes a year. The workers' productivity was as important as the soldiers' courage. Yet the intense labor struggles and radical consciousness of the Depression years were still very much in workers' minds. The result was a liberal industrial policy, in which classical capitalism, with its naked exploitation and resultant class conflict, would be transformed by broad-minded intellectuals (such as Heron) into a kind of social or high-road capitalism, where workers were (at least rhetorically) conceptualized not as pure costs but as sentient human beings. The bosses were grudgingly willing to accept this arrangement—temporarily —because the alternative was losing the war and hence the whole American empire.

The New Deal vision is a better arrangement for everybody—but the forces of bean-counting abstraction have proved stronger than the counter-forces. Ultimately, the strategy became de-industrialization, creating a society in which people either shuffle money, move information or paint nails. All to maximize short-term profits within hollowed-out, downward-spiraling corporations and to pre-empt working-class power, by turning producers into credit-hobbled consumers. But it doesn't create real wealth—in fact it drains wealth out of productive enterprises into usury—and we see the long-term consequences.

I certainly hope that the crash of 2008 leads to a deep rethinking of what an economy is and what human beings are for. However, both the industrial plant and the local economies are weaker now than they were in 1943, and the New Deal solution of economic stimulus and revamped industrial relations is unlikely to produce the same results. One response to an economic-political crisis of this sort is fascism, the tendency of the Bush/Cheney administration. The other is a movement toward humane socialism—i.e., a broadening of the commons, a strengthening of the social fabric and a rejection of greed as the dominant impulse in life.

Anyway, what interests me about this book—even more than the employee relations angle—is Heron's take on the media. His categories of "reluctant" willingness (comparable to what the CIA calls "limited hangout"), "paternalistic" willingness and "propagandist" willingness perfectly describe the attitudes and purposes of the MSM. Heron's essay opened my eyes to the reality of the corporate media as a kind of house organ — one less enlightened than the communication vehicles advocated by Heron.

As for Heron's central creed:

"The aggressive willingness to share information with employees is practical because, honestly and wisely followed through, it will induce a constructive co-operation which cannot be bought or forced."

Well, that's saying a lot. What's even more important is an aggressive willingness to listen to employees. Workers will feel like partners when they have real input, when their safety is considered, when they feel secure and respected, when their bosses aren't making more in a day than they are in a year, when the company is concerned with quality and not just profits, when the tone of the enterprise is communal and not sociopathic, etc. Certainly communication is a good start in treating employees like people. But when you begin a conversation you don't know where it will go—that's the whole point—and I wish Heron would focus not just on divulging information but on obtaining it. By writing only from the point of view of the bosses (as far as I can tell, from what I've read here), he reveals his own standpoint of enlightened elitism.

Anyway, thanks for posting these excerpts—they're useful advice for those in the trade, as well as wonderful historical documents. I look forward to seeing more of Heron's wisdom and your commentary.