Changing Perceptions of Change

The perceptions of change and the range of reactions to it that occur within today’s businesses are as varied as the businesses themselves – and rightly so, because organizations are all unique, with their own ingrained cultural attributes and histories.
       Every organization has gone through trials and triumphs, and each such experience delivers with it lessons that become part of their story and institutional memory. These ultimately shape companies’ attitude and approach toward their futures. It is that which guides them forward in how they deal with change.
       So it’s no surprise to see how two very different companies react today to multiple changes occurring in the external worlds in which they operate. These two companies are as different as night and day.
       First is a large, 100-year-old American manufacturing company with deeply held traditions. The CEO worked his way up the leadership ladder, as had his predecessors. The CEO and his leadership team are accustomed to defining the current reality and directing how their managers and employees should respond.
       To date, the company has seen steady growth throughout its life. But it is beginning to experience a downturn in that pattern due to a range of external factors beyond its control. Fortunately, the leadership recognizes and acknowledges those forces.
       Our second example, Company Two, is a professional services company that went through agonizing trials through the economy of 2008-onwards that resulted in many of its competitors going under or merging, and many others emerging far different than they were going in. Company Two falls into this latter category: a different company today than it was in 2007. 
Different Approaches to Change 
So how are these two very different organizations dealing with change today?
       The traditional command-and-control company is struggling. People are waiting for the CEO to tell them what to do. And so far, he’s only told them to become empowered and start taking risks. But this runs against what they’ve actually experienced. So people are cautiously hanging back, watching and waiting.
       Company Two, on the other hand, rightly acknowledges that change is already happening to them. The leaders at Company Two speak of what they must become. But they do so in the present tense. Its leadership sees that change is something that they must be doing now. In other words, they cannot afford merely to plan for change. They must live the change constantly – right now.
       Done right, this far more aggressive approach to change becomes a company’s new culture. But this is a remarkably different approach to how most companies deal with change today.
       Conventionally, in the context of the business, most people think of change they will undertake as a moment in time. They say that change is imposing itself on them and they must figure out how to respond. It is something they will do at some point in the future, as though planning to pivot and head off in another direction.
       On the other hand, as we've grown accustomed to this notion of change as a constant state of affairs, we have come to realize that we must continuously prepare for change that will always come at us. This is a new concept for most organizations. It is almost as foreign as trying to conceive of time as the fourth dimension.
       Not only must we be prepared for change. We must assume that it is already happening to us and so become now what we must be tomorrow.
       That said, what would the world look like to Company One after it has planned and fully executed its internal changes? Likely, that external world will have further evolved, necessitating further changes.
       Perhaps this is what Company Two discovered in the midst of the turmoil of the economic crisis of 2008: that change must become a permanent mindset and way of operating.

When Leaders’ Words and Actions are Out of Synch

The higher on the corporate ladder managers are, the more likely it is that people will listen to and heed what they say. Not surprisingly, then, when CEOs and other business leaders say one thing but do another, the effect may not be to their liking.

      I’ve seen this first-hand more than once, the best example being a client company from a few years ago.

      We first met at an industry conference. He was head of employee communications for a mid-sized global professional services firm, and was sitting next me during a presentation on employee loyalty. I could see during the presentation that he was absorbed, but also looked troubled.

      At the coffee break afterwards, we introduced ourselves and traded business cards. Our small talk about the presentation we’d just heard provided a natural segue for him to tell me that his company was enduring an untenable attrition rate and poor loyalty among employees – both consultants and support personnel. His CEO was not happy about it and placed the blame on employee communications.

      When I offered my off-the-cuff ideas on the challenge, he listened and nodded thoughtfully. We then went our separate ways, to different presentations.

      I next heard from him about a month later when he called to ask me to meet with him and his communications team to discuss in greater depth the problems he’d mentioned to me at the conference. He thought an outsider’s perspective would be valuable.

Low Loyalty Scores

In addition to the unacceptably high attrition rates among the firm’s consultants, internal surveys indicated low loyalty scores as well as poor understanding of the firm’s mission. After an hour-long discussion where we offered some preliminary insights, the client engaged us to do some digging, and to prescribe a solution.

      Our investigation began the following week, and involved interviews with the CEO and his leadership team, managers, and the consultants who comprised the firm’s front-line team and chief earning power, as well as the various internal support people.

      After spending three intense and exhaustive days in interviews, we reviewed our findings and began working up prescriptive changes and recommendations.

      Though there were a number of potential issues, we readily discerned that the primary problem was that employees were hearing one thing from leadership but experiencing something else entirely different.

      In particular, a recurring theme heard from the CEO was his frequent comment, both verbally and in writing: “We can’t be afraid to step on toes. We must be able to criticize ourselves if we are going to improve.” But, in actual practice, employees told us that the opposite was true.

      In one example after another, we heard about people that had been honest about issues within the company and how they’d offered ideas to address them. But instead of praise from their managers, they had been punished or ostracized by managers and/or leadership.

      More than once, we were told about layoffs that often included people that had offered constructive criticism. It had happened too often to be a coincidence, many people said. In other words, leadership said it wanted self-criticism, but really didn't. They believed their own press and didn’t want to hear otherwise.

      In reaction, people initially began to clam up and keep their observations and ideas to themselves. But when that happened, a second result set in: the atmosphere became poisoned. Problems festered because “people were reluctant to step forward to point them or offer solutions for fear of being singled out as trouble-makers or complainers,” as one young man told me.

Stale Culture

The final effect was that the internal culture of the organization began to go stale. The better, more talented consultants started looking elsewhere for employment, hence the high attrition rates that were troubling the CEO. He knew he was losing good people, but didn’t realize he and his team were the cause.

      In short, our diagnosis said that the stumbling block was not an employee communications problem but rather one of leadership’s words and actions not being in synch. Our prescription, then, was not what the CEO was expecting.

      We requested and got a private meeting with him to tell him what we’d learned, playing back for him some of the comments his consultants had made. He was dumbfounded, and admitted that he didn’t realize he and his team were encouraging criticism while at the same time discouraging it.

      Fortunately for the firm, he responded assertively, immediately setting about personally taking responsibility for changing things. In the ensuing months, we worked with him, his leadership team, and the employee communications unit to re-establish an atmosphere of trust.

      The effort started small, with the CEO meeting with small groups of employees where he owned up to his inconsistencies, promising to open lines of communication and provide means to address the organization’s shortcomings.

      His out-reach efforts were underlined in internal media that spotlighted internal problems and detailed the solutions. Additionally, the media subsequently provided periodic progress updates, saluting the employees that had stepped forward with solutions.

      Over time, the CEO did improve internal trust. But it was time-consuming. Nevertheless, to his credit, he realized how critical it was to the future health and well being of the company, so he made it a priority and, by example, made sure his leadership team did too.

      Checking back with my client a couple years later, he told me he was pleased to report that attrition rates had leveled off and employee loyalty scores were rising. We later got a note from the CEO thanking me for our work, acknowledging the positive effect his change in attitude and approach had had.

Getting Through Our Hitting Slumps

The other day, I was watching a Red Sox game on TV. As a batter stepped to the plate, the announcer, Don Orsillo, noted that he was in the middle of a long hitting slump, having gone hitless for some 15 games.
          Orsillo asked Steve Lyons, the color commentator that night, whether players in that situation get demoralized and spiral even further into a funk. Lyons had played nearly 20 years in the Major Leagues for the Red Sox and three other teams. So his answer was insightful.
          “If you’re in a hitting slump like that,” he said, “you go to the ballpark the next day fully confident that you’re going to go four-for-four. Nobody in that situation goes to the game expecting to extend the hitless streak.”
          And here was Lyon’s most telling comment: “You are not in the Major League if that’s your attitude. And you will not make it in the big leagues if you don’t have tons of confidence.”
          My first reaction was his insight’s application to my own attitude. In fact, that kind of thinking is applicable in how people operate as business managers and leaders.
          Clearly the more successful people in business – the ones playing in the “majors” – are those that can walk away from defeats and see them as learning experiences, who start each new day fully confident that that day they will go four-for-four.

Leaders’ Winning Attitude
By extension, people that become leaders will guide their companies to success if they are able to imbue their people and their organizations with the same attitude, sustaining confidence after defeat, always moving forward with self-assurance.

          Yes, it’s tough to do that. And the leader who is able to consistently buck up his/her team’s confidence through trials and after stinging defeats is respected and, more importantly, heeded whenever times get tough. Communicating confidence like that is not so much words and speeches as it is leading by example.
          For instance, it is instructive to watch how General Motors’ new CEO, Mary Barra, addrresses her company’s current challenges around massive vehicle recalls. Clearly those recalls represent failures and mistakes at several levels of the organization, failures and mistakes that got repeated.
          The task before Ms. Barra is to right the ship and get GM back into a winning formula of developing, manufacturing and marketing high quality vehicles that people want to own.
          To do that, she needs to encourage her people to learn from their mistakes. She must remind them that what once made GM great were its people. She needs to convince them that that excellence still resides within them, and to move forward with confidence as a unified whole.
           Her employees must see Ms. Barra herself consistently operating with confidence, demonstrating through her own actions the central role of excellence and quality. All the while that central tenet must be echoed in her spoken and written words.
          In the end, she will be judged on how quickly and how completely she turns around the ocean liner known as General Motors. It is no small task, to be sure. So if she is successful in the end, if GM resumes its role as the world’s leading auto company under her guidance, she will go down as one of GM’s greatest leaders. And it will be because she led her organization with confidence.

Sustaining a Winning Attitude
Leadership excellence, in that regard, is not just for those who must right a foundering ship like GM. It is also seen in leaders able to sustain excellence and innovation. In that respect, the jury is still out – and getting impatient – with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO who inherited the venerable cloak of excellence and innovation from the late Steve Jobs.
          At the annual Worldwide Developers’ Conference in San Francisco every June, Jobs would habitually thrill Apple fans with groundbreaking new products: iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.
          Since Jobs’ death in October 2011, when Cook took over as CEO, there have been no new such groundbreaking products. Rather, Cook and his team have merely improved existing products and expanded established lines.
          Analysts were getting restless, sensing the vacuum, so Cook told them in late 2013 that 2014 would see Apple introduce a plethora of new products. Earlier this week at the 2014 WWDC, Cook and his team introduced exactly zero new products, only system software upgrades. So we are halfway through 2014 and Cook has failed to make any progress toward his promise.
          As outsiders, we cannot know how well Cook has filled Jobs’ leadership shoes in his nearly three years in the role. Nor do we know how well he has established himself as an inspirational leader. But that tenure should be long enough for anyone to do so, and from outward appearances, it isn’t clear that Cook has succeeded.
          Oh yes, Apple is still thriving and is still highly valued. It still makes great products. And yes, that’s likely because Cook is one of the best operational leaders in the business – the reason Jobs hired him in the first place and the reason he was promoted. But the competition has caught up with and, in some cases, surpassed Apple’s innovation. 
          Has Cook instilled the kind of confidence in his people that Jobs once did? The genius of Steve Jobs lay not only in his innovative vision, but also his ability to convince people they were better than they thought they were. Jobs was the kind of guy who would go to the plate in the midst of a hitting slump and know – just know – that his next swing of the bat produce a hit. Jobs was supremely and contagiously confident. Is Tim Cook? 

          “The greatest manager has a knack for making players think they are better than they think they are.” – Reggie Jackson

"I Speak. You Listen."

The conventional understanding of employee communications can be summed up in four words: “I speak. You listen.”

            In other words, many people believe that employee communications is simply top-down, with messages and information emanating from senior managers for consumption by the broad mass of employees. This approach rests on a set of questionable assumptions:

• Individual employees will actually receive the message when they are supposed to receive it.
• They will fully understand it.
• They will know what to do as a result of getting it.
• They will act accordingly.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Assumptions like that are the height of arrogance and have a tendency to sneak up behind you and bite you when you least expect it. It’s never good for business. 

A hierarchy of responsibilities 

In fact, effective employee communications involves a hierarchy of responsibilities for everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the individual front line employee; a hierarchy that develops and sustains on-going dialogues, discussion and debate up, down and across the organization, among and between leadership, managers, supervisors, and employees.
            A few years ago, we were working with a client company and helped them discover the truth in this, and then helped them implement it – to their enormous benefit, I might add. The hierarchy of responsibilities we developed with them, with a few tweaks, could be adopted for any organization’s communications.
            It begins in the executive suite, with the establishment of strategy, direction toward achieving that strategy, the story behind it, and the rules of engagement – i.e., how the business and people will operate in the quest.
            For their part, managers must comprehend and activate the strategy, interpreting it for their respective teams and/or business units to make it relevant and meaningful to them, and then engage their teams regularly in discussion, dialogue and debate to make it come alive.
            Managers must also establish mid-point and end targets for their teams to aim for, how they will measure progress toward those targets, and be ready and able to adjust and adapt as events and needs dictate or unforeseen roadblocks arise.
            To this last point, that means that managers must pay attention to where the business is going, where their industry is headed, the effects of the current economy on both, and how employees are impacted.
            At the same time, managers must encourage a two-way conversation by asking employees the right questions, and jointly identifying problems, challenges, opportunities and gaps early. 

Employees take ownership 

The last segment of the hierarchy of responsibilities – that of the employees – is the one most often overlooked. In fact, without it, communications, no matter how well planned and executed, will fail.
            Employees’ responsibilities demand that they be independent thinkers. They need to be actively engaged in the business at all times, conscious of its health as well as that of its market and industry.
            Employees must be active listeners, with a strong desire for continuous learning. And lastly, rather than just bring problems to their supervisors, they must pose ideas, suggestions and solutions.
            This set of responsibilities is key. This is employee engagement.
            It’s not enough just to announce a directive that employees be engaged. Employee engagement in a healthy operation is a continuous state of affairs where information flows readily up, down and across the organization, without a lot of impediments or formalities about who can and cannot talk to whom. It’s where people feel valued, regardless of their role, where their ideas, suggestions and solutions are welcomed, even if they can’t be acted on for whatever reason.
            Employees are emotionally tied to the business, conscious of their own connection to its welfare and how their performance contributes to its success… or failure.
            It’s an organization where their good work is rewarded, not just with promotions and pay increases but also with recognition and acknowledgement, or maybe just a simple “thank you” when it’s called for.
            In the end, isn’t that why we do what we do – to contribute to and be part of a healthy, thriving organization, and be appreciated for it?

Employee Activism in a Social Media World

While contending daily with a highly competitive environment and multiple cost pressures, all in the context of constant change, every business today must also deal with stakeholder activism from assorted audiences, especially shareholders, environmentalists, and consumer advocates.
      One segment less frequently discussed is the employee audience, whose activism is quickly emerging as perhaps the most critical one. In a world where social media like Facebook and Twitter have established an increasing presence and value within business, some might conclude that employee activism there carries with it a high risk of harming an organization’s brands and reputation. That might be the case where such activism is not understood or appreciated by leadership, or where employee engagement and internal communications are not high priorities.
      In an insightful in-depth report just released, it becomes readily apparent just how critical this audience segment is, and how businesses can best assure that the activism of their employees reinforces their goals and the business’ purpose, while supporting their brands and reputations.
      “Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunity in Employee Activism” presents the findings of Weber Shandwick and KCR Research, which surveyed some 2,300 employees around the world at companies with more than 500 employees. While their findings may not surprise those of us in the field of employee engagement and communications, they should really open the eyes of business leaders and managers. 

Employee Engagement 
Let’s start from the premise that a healthy business is one that engages its employees, where internal communications is part of the fabric of the organization. Anonymous quotes throughout the report provide helpful insights into how typical employees define employee engagement.
      In an earlier blog, I defined employee engagement as “the ability of an organization’s workforce to assimilate, comprehend and act on the priorities and needs of the business in a timely and effectual manner.” I think that is pertinent in this context.
      Employee engagement in a healthy operation is a continuous state of affairs where information flows readily up, down and across the organization. It’s where people feel valued, regardless of their role, where their ideas, suggestions, and solutions are encouraged and welcomed.
      So if your employees are truly engaged in the business, if your communications are open, honest and frequent, then employee activism outside the business is likely to break to your advantage. As the report notes, “…employees are already taking matters into their own hands and, left unattended for too long, will define their employers’ brands and reputations on their own. Social media enhances this risk, but also the opportunities.” (Emphasis mine.)
      So why not leverage that?
      Weber Shandwick’s 24-page report goes into great depth examining the value of employee activism, as well as its drivers, its upsides and downsides, various social media outlets, how employee activists are using them, and how to encourage appropriate employee activism.

The Value of Internal Social Media 
While much of the report’s focus is on the external social media we all know and use, in its prescriptive section, the report alludes to internal social media as a means of engaging and communicating with employees.
      In fact, there is more advantage to it than that. Internal social media, such as Yammer or Jive, help people better understand and appreciate what their peers are saying about the organization, its products/services, and its customers. In that sense, it becomes a valuable learning and cross-fertilization tool.
      At the same time, internal social media channels can also serve as sources for people to mine for their own external commentary. Lastly, these media allow employees to get accustomed to and comfortable with writing about their employer in a social media context. 
      The meat of the report and its greatest value comes in its second half where it delves into the six different types of employees (“The Workforce Activism Spectrum”) in the context of their relative activism, and how these various segments of employees can be encouraged to become “social stewards” for the organization. 
      The paper parses the six types and their characteristic behaviors, and provides ideas and approaches for engaging them, communicating with them, and leveraging the positives while minimizing the impact of the negatives.
      Certainly employees who defend their companies in personal conversations with friends and family, and who proselytize for its products and services in one-on-one circumstances carry very high credibility.
      I’d venture to say, however, that credibility is not as high in the context of external social media. Left unsaid in the report is the fact that, in public social media, positive external comments about one’s employer are often taken with a grain of salt. After all, why would someone bad-mouth the company that gives him or her a paycheck?
      That’s not to say it has no value, but employers who put too much weight in positive social media commentary by their people should take a broader view.
      It really comes down to developing and sustaining an engaging internal environment, one where employees feel their ideas and insights are sought and welcome, one where every employee feels valued, able to contribute to the company’s long-term success.
      In that context, no matter the venue, you can rest assured that your employees’ activism will support your company and its brands, while enhancing your reputation.

Making the Most of Teleconference Calls

For most of my career, I’ve worked remotely. That is to say, I have had a home office for the past 20-plus years and worked both for established companies and agencies, as well as operating as an independent consultant. When friends hear about my set-up, they often express envy about the short commute, but always add something along the lines of, “I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t have the discipline.”
      In fact, my greatest challenge consistently has been associated not with self-discipline but with telephone technology, in particular, teleconference calls: not the content of the calls, but the general lack of protocol in most teleconference calls.
      The Wall Street Journal reported last month in an article about this topic that time spent in conference calls in the U.S. is “expected to grow 9.6% a year through 2017, according to Wainhouse Research, a Boston market-research firm… about 65% of all conferencing is still done by audio calls.”
      In that the expanding global economy continues to ensure that employees and outside contractors will increasingly be operating off-site, often at considerable distance from headquarters, the need for better teleconference technology and, especially, protocols for its use are imperative.
      Assuming that we have to continue to contend with unintelligible voices, people in the conference room who speak too loudly or not loudly enough, and other sins of teleconference calls, etc., let’s establish some ground rules to minimize the challenges and make the best of a less-than-perfect technology.

• First of all, we shouldn’t think of teleconference calls as “just another meeting.” When there are several people in a conference room and one or more people tied in via the speakerphone, it should be treated as a different kind of meeting versus a purely face-to-face meeting.
• All participants should approach teleconference calls with good manners, exhibiting the utmost patience with and consideration of others, especially the people who dial in remotely. That means staying on topic, not engaging in side conversations, and not interrupting others.
• Establish an agenda ahead of the meeting, including a purpose and desired outcomes. Agendas and goals should be clearer and more explicit than for face-to-face meetings. Distribute the agenda before the meeting.
• Also before the meeting, provide a list of attendees and their roles, spelling out who will be in the conference room and who will be dialing in remotely.
• If possible, limit the number of participants to no more than eight or nine. More than that and it tends to get chaotic.
• Be sensitive when one or more of the remote participants don’t know all the people in the room. When we are all accustomed to working together in an office space, we are used to people’s voices and their unique vocal mannerisms. Outsiders and newbies dialing in aren’t. So it’s imperative that people identify themselves each time they speak.
• Start the meeting with introductions, including name, role, and reason for participating in the meeting (if it’s not obvious). Participants who don't know each other should introduce themselves, explain their roles in the project at hand and explain what they hope to get out of the meeting.
• When latecomers enter the room, they should similarly introduce themselves. Likewise, people dialing in late should announce themselves.
• Appoint a moderator. If the group leader is dialing in remotely, the moderator should be in the conference room, though deferential to the leader. The moderator is responsible for maintaining order and discouraging side conversations. The moderator should also make sure that remote participants get a chance to offer their two cents to the discussion.
• People in the conference room who wish to speak should be recognized, by name, by the moderator. They should move closer to and speak directly into the microphone.
• Remote participants should keep their phones on mute until they speak. Too often, ambient noises like a barking dog come blasting into the conference room speaker.
• If you are on a line that has elevator music for the hold function or you don’t know, then don’t put your phone on hold.
• The moderator should notice when remote participants are silent for too much of the meeting and actively seek their opinions and insights on the topic being discussed. Being remote, it is sometimes difficult to cut in because the switch on the speakerphone tends to favor the voices in the room over those that are remote. The moderator should assume that silent remote participants have been unable to cut in.
• If someone in the room cracks a joke and the room dissolves into laughter, the moderator should let the others know who said what and repeat the joke, if necessary.
• Meeting participants in the room should be sensitive to the absence of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions for remote participants. If necessary, the speaker or the moderator should help remote participants follow along by indicating that a comment was delivered with a grin or a frown, for instance, thereby helping them gain better contextual meaning, such as intended irony.
• If someone in the room has to leave early, they should excuse themselves aloud so that those on the phone know that that person is no longer in the room. Similarly, if you're on the phone and have to leave early, say so before hanging up.
• Like any meeting, there should be a note-taker.
• As the meeting wraps up, the moderator should restate the conclusions and go-forward actions, along with assigned responsibilities and deadlines. If a follow-up meeting is necessary, take advantage of participants’ presence and set up the next meeting then and there.
• Before closing, the moderator should invite any final comments from the remote participants.
• The note-taker should type up and distribute the notes as soon as possible after the meeting, inviting participants to amend them as deemed necessary.

Bottom line: teleconference calls, like all meetings, should be seen as significant investments of people’s time and energy. Treat them as such by ensuring the full participation of all attendees, including those dialing in remotely. Getting into the habit of following these simple rules will assure that teleconference calls are well worth the investment.

Employees are Key to a Superior Customer Experience

Back when AT&T was the monopolistic entity providing telephone service, Lily Tomlin played a recurring role as “Ernestine,” a telephone operator. After treating a caller rudely and hanging up, she would grin sourly, snort and say, “We’re the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."

      As they always say about comedy, it works best when there’s a grain of truth to it. And in those days, AT&T was The Phone Company – a.k.a., “Ma Bell” – and had virtually no competition.
      To those of us on the receiving end, it often felt like AT&T could and did operate any way it wished without fear of losing customers. Ernestine’s sneering uncaring attitude was emblematic of how people perceived Ma Bell.
      How far we’ve come in our choices. The end of the AT&T monopoly, and the advent and rapid growth of mobile telephony have marginalized conventional telephones. But more than just the landscape of the phone business has changed since the day of Ernestine. The drivers and predictors of business success also have changed.
      In a brilliant and insightful book titled Outside In, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research make the case that today, the chief avenue to business success is the customer experience, i.e., “How your customers perceive their interactions with your company.”
      Even monopolies like the old Ma Bell couldn’t get away with abusing customers and expect to stay in business today. All businesses must excel at the customer experience or risk the onset of a death spiral that will end in their demise.
      Assuring that people become loyal customers involves making it easy to find, buy and use your products/services. This is a complex exercise encompassing all components of and people within your organization.
      At its heart, the authors explain, the customer experience is what happens when your customers try to:

• Learn about your product/service offerings
• Evaluate them
• Buy them
• Use them
• And, if necessary, get help when they have a problem with them.

In the end, it’s about how customers feel about those many different encounters. Are they happy, excited and reassured, or disappointed and frustrated?
      Outside In first defines the customer experience and describes its value before delving into the disciplines of superior customer experience, and the paths that companies can take to assure that the customer experience becomes central to their business. 

Engaging employees in the mission 

Though the book touches on the subject throughout, from my perspective, the ability of a company to engage its employees in the company’s larger mission will shape its ongoing ability to deliver a superior experience for customers time and time again – thus assuring their continued loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. In other words, every employee must be engaged in delivering that superior experience.
      It’s not just the customer-facing people – those in the retail stores or the people who provide support and sales on the 800-number. It involves everyone. Even if you banished Ernestine and her kind from your company, that would not be enough to assure a superior experience for all customers.
      The CEO of a client company spoke at the quarterly town meeting for the employees last fall about the unacceptable level of customer defections they were experiencing. She said, “These are things that we can control. This isn’t just about customer service. This isn’t just about retail stores. This is everybody in the business understanding how each one of us impact this.” And she’s right.
      We once helped a financial services company as it made a radical change in the way it went to market. Instead of focusing on the financial products it created and sold as it always had, it shifted its focus to its largest customer segment – small business owners – and their unique needs. The change was obvious and a relatively easy shift for the customer-facing employees. Not so everyone else.
      The employees that developed, marketed and supported the new products and services had a tougher shift. So our communications strategy sought to engage the entire organization in the monumental change by helping them better sense the world in which customers bought and used its offerings.
      The resulting program required managers to engage their teams in detailed exercises – using actual video interviews with small business owners – to be better able to think like them and fully appreciate the challenges they faced. The goal of the program was to help them make the connection between the products the company provided and how they could help customers surmount their challenges.
      We knew the program was a success when we heard that the IT department – about as far removed from customer interactions as any department – figured out how they could contribute to improving the total customer experience. It made quite a difference.
      No one else in the organization outside of IT would ever have identified that opportunity for improvement. No one else would have imagined that an internally focused operation could have such an impact on the customer experience.
      The point is, the entire organization must think like a customer and appreciate the challenges and needs of customers. That way, they will do their job most effectively toward the company’s larger mission of delivering a superior customer experience.

Driving Effective Employee Communications

The “Sunday drive” is an old-fashioned concept. The family piled into the car and Dad would then drive around aimlessly. The idea was to see nearby sites with which the family was previously unfamiliar. It would start with a whimsical notion of a quiet country road, just seeing where it would take them, and the adventures, scenes, and surprises it might bring. 
      In these days of high gas prices and little free time, however, it is a rare if not altogether forgotten pastime for a quiet weekend. Just the same, imagine jumping in your car and backing out of the driveway without a destination. At the end of the driveway, do you go left or right? And once you’ve made that decision, then what?
      Yet some people in business today operate their employee communications function in much the same manner. Their “cars” are the tools and channels at their disposal to communicate with employees: newsletters, executive emails, and speeches delivered at town hall-type meetings. They create 12-month schedules for what they will write about when.
      Just because they have those tools and schedules, their default mode is to use them to deliver often-irrelevant information to employees.
      What is frequently missing, however, is a sense of the organization’s destination, like that meandering Sunday drive. So employee communications rambles around without a consistent set of relevant messages, without links to the direction in which the organization needs to go, without a sense of what employees need, ultimately toward no coherent end.

The Communications Plan is your GPS 

Effective employee communications requires a plan tied to the realities of the business and where its leadership is driving it. Unlike that Sunday drive without an end in mind, the business’ ultimate destination determines whether you figuratively go right or left.
      An employee communications plan is like a GPS, guiding decisions and ensuring that the right information gets to the right people at the right time through means that reach them effectively. With your destination programmed in, your GPS will guide you via the most direct route.
      There is a practical way to develop an appropriate communications plan for any given set of circumstances. But it requires some work, serious thought, and analysis. Nevertheless, the initial steps are always the same, regardless of the circumstances.

• What is your objective? A typical objective is to engage your internal audience in the challenges and opportunities the organization faces. This requires that they receive relevant and timely information that will help them see how what they do every day can help the organization surmount the challenges and take full advantage of the opportunities.
• Who is your audience? The people that work in your company are not a faceless monolith. Internal audiences are as diverse as external ones. Are you an international bank or are you in manufacturing? Are your employees unionized in multiple plants, or field salespeople working on commission spread across a continent selling medical devices? Define the audience both specifically and generally, in ways that mean something to you and your management team.
• What do you know about your audience? Learn as much as possible about your internal audience. Again, consider their position within the company, their relative sophistication and their responsibilities. What you communicate must be relevant and actionable. How you deliver information should take into account their preferred means of receiving information, be it email, videos, face-to-face meetings with their supervisors, or some combination. Don’t overlook whether employees can access online information readily. Factory floor workers or retail store salespeople, for example, can’t rely on a daily intranet update for the latest company news.
• What should they know, and what should they do with that knowledge? Perhaps the most critical series of questions cuts to core of employee communications. What is it that you want employees to know, and why? What do you want them to do as a result of getting your communication, and why? If your communications are of the “FYI” ilk, you’re probably wasting everyone’s time — while neutralizing the importance of future critical communications in a “boy who cries wolf” manner.
• How will the effort be measured? It’s one thing to make plans but still another to establish the means by which we measure the outcome to determine whether they achieved their objectives. So a core element of the plan must be measurement, which is more than just a return-on-investment exercise. It also helps guide future planning, enabling you to assess the ways that the plan fell short and where it worked best, thereby helping you learn important lessons for future such efforts.

Answering these questions will put you in a better position to develop an appropriate and effective communications plan consisting of what (content), when (timing), how (through what vehicles) and, specifically, to whom (target audiences).
      In short, the key to successful employee communications lies in fully understanding your audience, what they need to know and why, and what they should do with the information you give them.