p l a i n t a l k

GM Out of Detroit?

With the whole auto industry restructuring to meet governmental mandates concerning operating costs and profits, GM is scrambling to meet those obligations. And it's coming up with some fairly creative ways to meet those terms.

One that's on the table is moving its headquarters out of Detroit. That would be a HUGE blow to the Detroit economy, not to mention the disruption of tens of thousands of employees and suppliers who rely on GM for their incomes.

As this story unfolds, it'll be interesting to see how GM treats its employees. Yes, layoffs and plant closures are definitely going to happen. But it's how they're handled that will determine GM's health once it emerges from this troublesome period. People don't forget how a company acts in good times and bad.

So it'll do GM some good to meet their employees' obligations while it tries to meet those of the government. Because it's the ones who are left who will determine whether GM is successful or not, no matter how fancy the restructuring effort is.

Station M: I'm Lovin' It

McDonald's has an external approach to an internal blog called Station M. It's for McDonald's employees worldwide and is available outside their firewall. Password protected, this makes it easy for non-wired employees (those who don't have access to a computer at work) to participate in the conversations going on at the site from their own computers or mobile devices on their own time.

Davey Rosenberg, a student blogger from James Madison University, has a great review of it over at his blog. Check it out.

Many companies struggle with blogs and other social media because of this very issue: allowing access outside the firewall. This McDonald's example is a good blueprint for how to do it without IT necessarily giving up control of the security of the corporate network.

What about you? Do you have other examples of good corporate uses for blogs and social media? Comments welcome, as always.

How to Make Employee Communication "Automatic"

Nestled at the bottom of a hill on the outskirts of downtown of Athens, Ga., is a tiny, unassuming restaurant called Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods. For years, the owner, Dexter Weaver, has cooked up quality soul food fast for his legion of loyal customers. His success as a business owner is built on a simple motto: he makes his food “automatic for the people.”

What exactly does that mean? From hungry college students dropping in between class to construction workers taking a lunch break, Weaver D provides every customer a quality product and quick service,  “automatic.”

Since Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods is mostly made up of Weaver D at the cash register and one cook in the kitchen, employer/employee relations go something like this: Weaver D takes the order and yells it back to the kitchen. When things get backed up, he’s been known to bellow in that sweet and low baritone voice, “Communication!”

If only all employer/employee communication was that easy. From large corporations to small businesses, communicating with employees is a challenge for any organization. As the business world grows and changes, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to communicate effectively with the lifeblood of their operation: the employee. Here are a few simple tips to get your employee communication vehicle moving in the right direction.

Whether it’s a quarterly printed newsletter, a weekly e-mail, or the latest social media implementation, “automatic” internal communication should be a clear, fast and easy read. Employees don’t want to spend a lot of time wading through useless information so give them a quality product that’s easy to digest.

Never assume that employees aren’t interested in the business aspects of your company (they are!) or that they don’t need more info about issues affecting the company (they do!). Employees want and need to know how their jobs fit into the big picture. This is especially true in these wanky economic times.

Employee communication tools should answer five questions: the standard who, what, why, where and how. Here’s an example:

Who:
• Who made the decision?
• Who does it impact?
• Who’s in charge?
What:
• What is the decision?
• What does it mean? And what’s in it for me?
• What is the context?
Why:
• Why is it important?
• Why is it the right decision or direction?
• Why is it being decided now?
Where:
• Where is it taking place?
• Where will it take us as a company and me as an employee?
How:
• How will it be implemented or introduced?
• How does it affect the individual employee?

Employee communication is, quite simply, all about aligning employee expectations and behaviors with the companies’ goals. Letting the employee know the goals of the company helps them work more effectively to achieve them. Now that’s automatic!

Monkey See, Monkey Do; Or, How to Avoid Throwing Cold Water on Innovation

Every day we hear stories passed around, without a clue where they originate or who started them. I guess it’s all part of our country’s rich storytelling heritage. It's certainly a by-product of the rush to social media and constant conversation. Many of these stories aren’t worth reading, much less repeating. But sometimes one of those stories makes a light go on in your head and you say, “A-ha! Now that makes sense!”

That’s how I felt after reading the following story sent to me on email. I have no idea where it originated or how it got started. My apologies if you’ve read it before or if you’re the original author! If you have a clue where it came from, let me know so I can give the proper credit.

Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb toward the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water.

After awhile, another ape makes an attempt with the same result -- all the apes are sprayed with cold water. This continues through several more attempts. Pretty soon, when another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will all try to prevent it.

Now, completely shut off the cold water and don’t use it anymore. Remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a brand new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other apes attack him. After another attempt and an attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be attacked.

Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer obediently takes part in the punishment, as well. Keep repeating this until all of the original apes have been removed and replaced with new apes.

After replacing the fifth original ape, all the apes originally sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs.

Why not? Because that's the way they've always done it, and that's the way it's always been around here.

How many times have you heard that refrain around your office? “I don’t know. That’s the way it’s always been around here.” Nothing can sap the life out of your business than the attitude that regardless of how things are done, you are powerless to change anything. It robs your company of the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to respond quickly to changing business conditions and contributes to an apathetic workforce.

Instead, what you want is an environment that is conducive to new ideas and innovation. An environment that is always thinking and coming up with ideas and suggestions for doing things in a new and different way. You want your employees – regardless of their position on the org chart – acting like owners of the company and constantly thinking about ways to improve the business and enhancing the long-term value of the company.

There’s no real mystery in how you get to this kind of innovative environment.

• Genuinely ask for and listen to employee feedback. Who better to tell you how to improve a process than the person who performs the job everyday?
• Constantly and consistently communicate company goals and objectives and your progress toward meeting them. You can’t win the game if your players don’t know the score and what they need to do to win.
• Reward innovation publicly. If someone makes a break-through process improvement or initiates something totally new and different, reward that employee in front of his or her coworkers and peers, whether or not the idea is a roaring success. It’s the innovative spirit you’re rewarding, not necessarily the results.

If you follow these three suggestions, you can create an innovative environment where new ideas are proposed with amazing frequency. Best of all, they come from your employees, a group that genuinely wants a more rewarding relationship with you and your company anyway.

Do everything you can to avoid throwing cold water on your best source of innovation – your employees. Keep it up, though, and pretty soon no one will approach the stairs, no matter how big the banana is.

Time Out! Regular Employee Meetings Keep Everyone on The Same Playing Field

I settled in on the sofa this weekend to watch some football games on television. As I was watching, I was struck by the number of timeouts called in critical play situations. The players would then come over to the sideline and together with the coaches discuss what to do next. It got me to thinking about how the same is true in the world of business. That is, there’s a lot going on at any given moment which needs attending to, better known as “work.” But we also need to call a few time-outs, check the score and discuss the next plan of action. And one of the best time-outs in business is regular employee meetings.

I know, I know. You're wondering, “OK, where do I find the time to have these meetings? I’m too busy working and so are my employees.” But, as with anything, you make the time for those things that are important to you and your business. And you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the majority of employees consider these meetings important and are willing to come in early or stay late to attend them, so long as you give them worthwhile information and allow them to participate.

A typical meeting schedule for your company could look something like this:

• Weekly – a very informal get-together to review current projects and deadlines and to discuss next steps on pending projects and other short-term issues. Use the last weekly meeting of the month to review that month’s company performance and to talk about next month. 15-30 minutes, tops.
• Quarterly – a somewhat more formal gathering to discuss company performance, projections for upcoming quarters, customer service issues, new clients or prospects and other longer-range type issues. 30 minutes to an hour, at most
• Annually – a yearly review of the company’s accomplishments and shortcomings, wins and losses and a time to celebrate and retool for the coming year. They’re usually more highly regarded in an off-site location, away from the phones and emails. An hour, plus a meal or other event.

Also, when scheduling these meetings, it’s important to schedule them on a regular schedule – well enough in advance for everyone to plan to attend – and stick to the schedule. Nothing frustrates employees more than managers who don’t follow-through.

Now that you know when to have these meetings, let’s discuss a few of the things you can talk about.

• Financials – The taboo subject! Many companies are afraid to share financial information with employees for two reasons: 1) they think employees won’t understand it and 2) they’re afraid that it will get into the wrong hands. Just like the football team that needs to know the score to know how to execute, your employees need to know the financial score of the company to be able to do something about it. The more you treat them like team-members with a stake in the company’s success, the more they’ll understand about how to make it more profitable. You have to trust that they, too, want the best for the company. As for the info leaking to competitors, again, you have to trust your employees to do the right thing. (And, if you don’t trust your employees, you have a bigger issue than just your financials leaking out.)
• Accomplishments – Begin an employee recognition program and highlight efforts they have made during the year. Cash awards are good; but the simple act of recognizing them for a job well-done in front of their peers goes a long way to cementing your relationship with them.
• New Business Ideas – You’d be surprised how many employees have great ideas about how to generate new business for your company. They’re just waiting for someone to ask them.
• Operations and Procedures – Henry Ford once said that no one knows better how to improve a job than the person who does it all day long. During your meetings, discuss ways to make operations more efficient or how to improve product or service quality. Most of your employees may not be “managers,” but a lot of them have “management” thoughts. Ask them what they think!

These are just a few of the topics you can cover. I’m sure you can come up with other items of interest that can be discussed, as well. And at the end of each meeting, ask for feedback so the next meeting can be even better.

Regular employee meetings are the best way to keep the issues most important to you and your business on the table and up for discussion. And having everyone focused on the same business issues could mean the difference in a mediocre season and a championship one for your business.

It’s up to you, coach.

Still a Freshman?

Is your internal communications department still a freshman when it comes to social media usage? Don't let it worry you: you're not alone.

See why in this guest post I wrote over at Danny Brown's blog. Many thanks to Danny, a new PR friend of mine with a great blog about social media, for the opportunity to pontificate on his site.

I'd be interested in your own experience with social media in your department. You can leave your comments there or here.

CEOs Not Immune to Economic Woes

As the jobless rate inches ever higher and the number of "regular Joes" who have been served pink slips increases every day, it's easy to put the blame on the higher ups. After all, the cold, heartless senior managers always stick it to the frontline employees whenever times get tough. It doesn't seem to matter that many of the senior leadership team's decisions got the company sideways in this recession to begin with. It's always the little guy who has to pay the price. Or at least that's how most of the stories go.

While senior leaders do, for the most part, seem to weather tough economic times better than their employees, they certainly aren't immune to the same kind of treatment from their own supervisors, in this case, boards of directors. In today's Wall Street Journal's online edition, there was an article about the increase in the numbers of CEOs losing their jobs as a result of the tough economic times we find ourselves mired in. The article names a few names of some of the high-profile CEOs who've been relieved of their duties because their companies have underperformed. No matter that everyone seems to be underperforming these days. If you're the CEO and things aren't going well at the company, then you're just as likely to see the axe fall as your employees.

The article also goes on to describe how the rest of the senior leadership team then becomes vulnerable as the new CEO comes in and hires his or her own team to lead the company to better fortunes. And as hard as it is to find another $25 an hour job that you've just lost due to a layoff, it's equally as hard finding a $500K a year job as a chief technology officer after there's been a shakeup at the senior leader level. Both losses are frustrating and hard to recover from. The only difference is in the numbers; the pain, frustration, anger, embarrassment and, in some cases, relief are the same.

After all of the job losses during this past year and the senior managers who helped to orchestrate them, there's likely to be little empathy for CEOs who are canned, especially those who are leaving with golden parachutes intact. But the fact remains that being shown the door is painful for anyone, no matter how high up that person is in the organization.

Direct Mail: Dead, Dying or Still Relevant?

Over the holidays, did you do most of your shopping from a printed catalog or over the web? Your activity has a lot to say about the state of direct mail as a marketing tool. Over at Hubspot, a recent post about the death of direct mail has generated a lot of interesting conversation.

Comments fall into three categories: yep, it's dead; nope, but it's dying; and not at all, it's still a useful part of the marketing mix. Those who tend to work for companies which have a chiefly online model primarily think direct mail is dead. The other end of the spectrum is comprised of those with non-online kinds of business models who think it's still relevant. The group in the middle is torn about how to feel, unsure whether it's dead or dying or relevant. It's kind of a loaded question, depending on where you are in your use of online and social media tools and how relevant these new media are to your company.

One thing they all agree on, though, is that it's the execution of direct mail (and any marketing tool) that makes it effective. A crappy brochure sent to a bad list with wrong messages and no call to action is a sure-fire way to miss your audience entirely, if not alienate them and relegate your piece to junk mail status. A well-done brochure sent to a qualified list with relevant information and a call-to-action that makes sense for the audience has an excellent chance to succeed.

What does direct mail have to do with your efforts in employee communication? Plenty. If you're like most of our clients, you still send home a lot of communication pieces, be they newsletters, HR notices or benefits information. Some things to consider:

• Have you stopped to analyze all of these pieces to see what's effective, what isn't and how you can close that gap?
• Do you have input into all of the things HR mails home in an effort to work together and provide your counsel on what they're doing?
• Are you tracking usage of these materials once they are received to determine if your employees think they are relevant and helpful?

From my perspective, direct mail will always be a useful tool in the marketing mix. Some stuff just needs to be printed and sent to employees' homes. We haven't evolved to the point where employees want work information emailed to their private email accounts for consumption at home. And many companies still keep their intranets behind firewalls that preclude access from home. So direct mail continues to be a way to reach employees and, almost as important, their families. But just like any other marketing tool, it needs to be done well to be effective. Even the sexiest social media tool (a blog, Yammer, WorkLight, discussion boards, texting, etc.) is worthless if not well executed.

I think the death of direct mail is being prematurely reported. Rather, it's the death of junk mail that seems to be happening. Most of would agree that that death can't come soon enough.

12 for 12K: Are You In?

Here's a simple and effective way you can make a difference in 2009. The 12 for 12K Challenge is the combination of social media and fundraising that aims to change the lives of millions worldwide.

Their aim is to change the lives of millions through this simple challenge:

• 12 months
• 12 charities
• 1200 people
• $12,000 per charity

It's simple to participate and to stay engaged throughout the year. Each person only needs to donate $10 per month for the duration of the challenge. If they reach their goal of 1200 people per month who participate, they'll be able to make the $12,000 per charity donation.

They are using social media and word-of-mouth marketing to spread the word. So if you have a blog or Twitter or are on Facebook, join their cause then spread the word. Even better, if you run a corporate blog within your organization, give them some space in one of your posts. But even if you don't blog or Twitter or aren't on Facebook or do any of that social media stuff, it's really easy to pledge $120 dollars for the year to make a difference in millions of lives.

Check out their website and join up today.

Happy Holidays!

A joyous and peaceful holiday season to all!