Employee Communications vs. the Employee Newsletter

At one time or another, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself having to explain what you do for a living to someone completely unfamiliar with your discipline. If your field is employee communications, as mine is, and someone at, say, a neighborhood party asks, you’re eager to slip into your rote 30-second elevator speech (if you have one) before he can say, “Oh, employee communications. I know, you write newsletters.”

Sometimes, I’m tempted instead just to say that “I work for the federal government, but I can’t talk about it,” give a conspiratorial wink, and leave it at that – better that than the alternative of explaining why “employee communications does not equal employee newsletters” to someone who won’t care to understand the difference and will quickly lose interest in your refutation.

Amazingly, I ran into a variation of this absurdity earlier this year when invited to pursue an assignment to help improve the internal communications of a local company. The business employs nearly 10,000 people at several sites around the U.S. and Canada. The head of Human Resources had sought outside support for the employee communications team that reported to him.

His “team” consisted of three hard-working, dedicated and intelligent (though very junior-level) people. I quickly sensed they were overwhelmed and poorly directed, and that they were looking for shortcuts to get things done – “things” being that which they sensed their boss wanted done or what he told them to do.

With respect to communications, their types of shortcuts aren’t always good things. I’ve seen companies grow too comfortable with their established modes of communicating. These tools become part of the fabric of the organization, even after they’ve lost any meaning or value to their audience. Unfortunately, I got the impression this was the case here.

I soon concluded that their desire to “improve internal communications” really came down to wanting an outsider’s fresh approach in order to improve the quality of the monthly employee newsletter: i.e., better-written and more interesting stories, and more appealing layouts and graphics. Roughly half of the employees did not have access to computers, so the tried-and-true printed newsletter was how they learned about their company – if they were interested enough to read it.

But had anyone gone to the trouble to determine whether in fact this tool was the most effective way of reaching the employee audience? Was it bringing them the information they wanted and needed? Were people actually reading the newsletter? Was it relevant to them? Was it opening employees’ minds to new ideas and new ways of doing their jobs? Were they connecting its messages to where the company needed to go? What were they doing or expected to do with the information gleaned from its pages? Or were copies of the newsletter just filling mailroom trashcans?

As I began to ask those questions, I sensed they were not being well received – nor would I likely get cogent or informed answers.

When I asked for examples of other internal communications, I was shown a series of sporadic emails from the CEO and his management team on a range of minor and major topics. There was also an “inter-active” on-line “CEO’s Forum,” its most recent entry more than two months old. The inter-active component was not apparent. It was all one-way. An occasional “Letter from the CEO” appeared in the newsletter.

One person said that the CEO and/or his team held infrequent “town hall meetings” to make important announcements, though she couldn’t remember the last one or its core message. For that matter, she couldn't tell me the last time she had spoken to any of the senior people or seen them on site.

The problem at this company and, no doubt, others today really boils down to this: It has become too easy for leaders and managers to let technology do their communicating. In fact, executives are not communicating effectively when their communications are simply emails, newsletters, and on-line postings, where the medium becomes more important than the message. Media, no matter how sophisticated, do not engage employees in the business and its vision.

When a company’s definition and understanding of “employee communications” is a newsletter or email, or when information is expected to “cascade” (I hate that term) down into the organization as if by magic, it’s likely indicative of a deeper, more harmful problem. It means that little consideration is being given to the real communications that should be occurring within and across the organization – the daily face-to-face exchange of ideas, insights and information between and among leaders, managers and employees; communications in which leadership engages the organization in the company’s mission and vision.

And when that’s the case, when leadership is trying to take the company one way while the employees are going in the opposite direction because they’re misinformed or uninformed, the problems multiply and fester, resulting in poor financial results and weak long-term growth prospects.

Because the decision-maker in this case, the head of HR, seemed so set on fixing and improving the newsletter as the solution – without fully appreciating or even being interested in delving into the company’s deeper issues and challenges – I took a pass on the opportunity. This company’s problems were far more than a boring newsletter. They were, in fact, far worse than its HR director knew or could have imagined. No sense beating my head against that wall.