By Gerry Breislin, Communications Director, ABT

Management’s three biggest lies: “We’re reorganising to better serve our customers”, “I have an open door policy” and “Our people are our most valuable asset.” 

The last mantra is so over used that Mark Cutifani, CEO of global mining company AngloGold Ashanti, finds it downright annoying.   

“Buildings are assets; chairs are assets; resources in the ground are assets. How can you include people with buildings and chairs? Everything we do is about people. People are the business; our business is people”

If that’ the attitude of a mining company boss what value do you place on employees in a service industry?  It’s people who answer phones, interact with customers, develop relationships and generally deliver the reliability and delight that leads to trust.  

So if People are so important, why are they often so low on the agenda?  There’s a famous Dilbert cartoon that HR managers should have pinned on their office wall.  In it a manager announces to a stunned meeting, “You know how I said that employees are our most valuable asset? Well, it turns out I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset; employees are ninth just after photocopiers”.

An exaggeration perhaps but Michael Henderson, Corporate Anthropologist, has identified that over 90% of organisations have a business plan or strategy.  But less than 5% have a culture plan.  This makes most organisations vulnerable to strategic sabotage from their own organisational culture!  

”Employee engagement” has been the buzz phrase capturing the attention of HR managers and executives for several years now, but how many can articulate what it  actually means, let alone implement solutions to address the issue?   And isn’t it an indictment on management that we actually need the results of the latest Employee Engagement Survey (EES) or culture survey to tell us something’s not right.

An AAP report dated 1 April 2005 estimated that “Disengaged workers are costing Australia’s economy about $31.5 billion a year.  A new Gallup Australia study found nearly 20 per cent of employees were ‘actively disengaged’ at work, costing the country billions of dollars…..Employees who are actively disengaged are less productive, profitable, loyal, less likely to provide excellent customer service and are often disruptive.”

To say that effective communication is a mandatory for employee engagement is a no-brainer.  What needs more consideration is the differentiation between communication and information. 

Using traditional channels like e.mail, newsletters and the Intranet can be an effective way to create awareness.  But if your communication is around a major change issue these channels are unlikely to result in actual changes in attitudes and behaviour.

That’s because most of these formal communication channels are a one way street.  Sure there’s the Q&A session with the leadership team but when did that last get a 100%  ‘Excellent’ rating on the post conference evaluation sheet.   

Let’s face it, nobody really likes ‘formal’ communication.  Executives aren’t usually very good at it, and most people are more likely to change their attitude and behaviours once they’ve talked things through with people who they’ve developed a long and trusting relationship, like family, colleagues and their immediate manager.

A 2006 report into employee engagement research, published by The Conference Board in New York (conference-board.org), concluded that in all studies, in all locations and within all age groups, it was agreed that the strongest driver (for employee engagement) was “the direct relationship with ones’ manager”. 

So if the key to effective communication is to establish meaningful conversations between leaders and managers, between managers and their direct reports and between groups of individuals, shouldn’t we be looking at how and where lots of conversations are taking place right now?

Example 1: My kids (13 & 15) have grown up talking to ‘friends’ on line.  My son wants to buy a new spear gun but so far he hasn’t been to any shops.  He has however spent hours on chat lines asking questions and watching videos up loaded by other users.  

Example 2: I’ve just got a new iphone (my daughter says it’s wasted on me!).  I’ve discovered there are thousands of applications I can download straight on to my phone from the Apps Store. (Over 3,000 at last count, 600 of which are free). Some are really useful business tools and some are just cute ways of showing how cool your iphone is.  The interesting thing is that on the App Store, along with developer’s blurb, there’s a list of reviews (good and bad) from people who’ve already used the applications. 

Imagine this sort of feedback in a corporate context.  Imagine getting staff to share their thoughts on the latest corporate strategy or initiative!  Or better still get them to collaborate and share ideas that would drive the business forward.  It may surprise you to hear that most of the senior leadership of IBM are frequent users of Social Networking software and they’ve had a VP of Social Computing Software for two years.

The world of Web 2.0 and the Social Networking phenomena is certainly an area worth exploring and those traditional channels will still be part of the mix, but perhaps the best way to sum up is in the words of Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric.  

“It’s not a speech … or a videotape.  It’s not a newsletter. Real communication is an attitude, an environment. It requires countless hours of eyeball-to-eyeball back and forth. It’s a constant, interactive process aimed at creating consensus.” 

 

We all know employee engagement is a key to unlock profitability of an organisation.  But with a myriad of personalities, motivations and core values, a one size fits all policy to employee engagement is not going to work.  You need to ask yourself; is your goal to get the most out of people or the best out of people?  You typically can’t get both.

Tags: employees, engagement, management