Employee Communication

Dealing with the Employee Public

 Employee Relations involves the body of work concerned with maintaining employer-employee relationships that contribute to satisfactory productivity, motivation, and morale.   Essentially, Employee Relations is concerned with preventing and resolving problems involving individuals which arise out of or affect work situations.

Just as there is no such thing as the “general public”, there is also no single “employee public.”

            The employee public is made up of numerous subgroups: senior managers, first-line supervisor, staff and line employees, union laborers, per diem employees, contract workers, and others. Each group has different interests and concerns. A smart organization will try to differentiate messages and communications to reach these segments.

            Indeed, in a general sense, today the staff is younger, increasingly female, more ambitious and career orientated, less complacent, and less loyal to the company than in the past. Today’s more hard-nosed employee demands candor in communications. Internal communications, like external messages, must be targeted to reach specific subgroups of the employee public.

            Grounding in effective employee communications requires management to ask three hard questions about the way it conveys knowledge to the staff.

¨    Is management able to communicate effectively with employees?

¨    Is communication trusted, and does it relay appropriate information to employees?

¨    Has management communicate its commitment to its employees and to transferring a rewarding work environment?

In many instances, the biggest problem is that employees don’t know where they stand in the eyes of management. In addition, they often don’t understand how compensation programs work or what they need to do to move ahead. This lack of   understanding leads to discontent, frustration, miscommunication, problems, and eventually to the feeling that the grass is greener elsewhere.

Clearly, organizing effective, believable, and persuasive internal communications in the midst of organization change is a core critical public relations responsibility in the 21^st century.

Communicating Effectively in a Sea of Doubt

An organization truly concerned about “getting through” to its employees in an era of downsizing, displacement, and dubious communications must reinforce five specific principles:

Ø  Respect. Employees must be respected for their worth as individuals and their value as workers. They must be treated with respect and not as interchangeable commodities.

Ø  Honest feedback. By talking to workers about their strengths and weaknesses, employees help employees know where they stand. Some managers incorrectly assume that avoiding negative feedback will be helpful. Wrong. Employees need to know where they stand at any given time. Candid communications will help them in this pursuit.

Ø  Recognition. Employees feel successful when management recognizes their contributions. It is the duty of the public relations professional to suggest mechanisms by which deserving will be honored.

Ø  A voice. In the era of talk radio and television talk shows and blogs, almost everyone wants their ideas to be heard and to have a voice in decision making. This growing “activist communications” phenomenon must be considered by public relations professional seeking to win internal goodwill for management.

Ø  Encouragement. Study after study reveals that money and benefits motivate employees up to a point, but that “something else” is generally necessary. That something else is encouragement. Workers need to be encouraged. Communications programs that provide encouragement generally produce results. What distinguishes the communications effort at a “better place to work”?

According to Milton Moskowitz, coauthor of the 100 Best companies to Work For in America, six criteria, in particular, have stood the best of time:

1.              Willingness to express dissent. Employees, according to Moskowitz, want to be able to “feedback” to management their opinions and even dissent. They want access to management. They want critical letters to appear in internal publications. They want management to pay attention.

2.              Visibility and proximity of upper management. Enlightened companies try to level rank distinctions, eliminating such status reminders as executive cafeterias and executive gymnasiums. They act against hierarchical separation, says by walking around.”

3.              Priority of internal to external communication. The worst thing to happen to any organization is for employees to learn critical information about the company on the 10 o’clock news. Smart organizations always release pertinent information to employees first and consider internal communications primary.

4.              Attention to clarity. How many employees regularly need benefits booklets? The answer should be “many” because of the importance of benefit programs to the entire staff, but most employees never do so. Good companies write such booklets with clarity- to be readable for a general audience rather than for human resources specialists.

5.              Friendly tone. According to Moskowitz, the best companies “give a sense of family” in all that they communicate. One high-tech company makers everyone wear a name tag with the first name in big block letters. These little things are most important, declares Moskowitz.

6.              Sense of humor. People are worried principally about keeping their jobs. Corporate life for many is grim. Moskowitz says that is disastrous. “It puts people in straitjackets, so they can’t wait to get out at the end of the day.”

What internal communications comes down to- just like external communications- is, in a word, credibility. The task for management is to convince employees that it not only desires to communicate with them but also wishes to do so in a truthful, frank, and direct manner. That is the overriding challenge that confronts today’s internal communicator.

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