I’ve long been a fan of integration and collaboration across the engagement disciplines of internal and external communication in the interests of developing healthier, sustainable brands. So I’m pleased to see what the PR industry has been up to in Stockholm recently and the publication of the Stockholm Accords.

Notable PR professionals have recently gathered at the World Public Relations Forum where they have been produced a “call to action” for what they call Public Relations Professionals.

The Accords are a rallying call for the global PR community to commit to work to some code of practice.  The aim is to “administer its principles on a sustained basis and to affirm them throughout the profession, as well as to management and other relevant stakeholder groups”.

In short, those who have gathered have created a model suggesting that if we coordinate all communication, then we have a sound basis for management, the basis for communicating internally, which gives us the basis for communicating externally which then provides the basis for governance and social responsibility. All sweet music to my ears.

They also suggest that by doing all of these things correctly, we will achieve organizational sustainability. In short, public relations, through holistic stakeholder management, can ensure that organizations adapt and endure, largely through listening and responding.

Interestingly, the Accords give prominence to internal communication and communication from the inside out and outside in. Surprisingly perhaps, 2 of the 7 Accords are about Internal Communication.

Now I’ve been a longstanding critic of what I have referred to as a plague of short termism within organizations.

I have also pointed to lack of authenticity as a largely unrecognized catalyst behind the recent global recession, creating flawed notions of performance culture development and a boom and bust approach to management:

 As a result, I’m likely to support anything which has the vision of sustainability at its core and the song of authenticity in its heart. I applaud initiatives that look to bring the communication and engagement disciplines closer together to reverse the negative perceptions associating PR with the 90s phenomenon of spin and lack of authenticity. I’ll certainly celebrate anything that raises the profile of the power of joined up communication in the interests of developing organizations fit for the medium to long term purpose.

But the words need to be accompanied by actions. Apparently around 1,000 international communications professionals contributed to the Accords. The fact that they have devoted so much time and effort at such trying times speaks volumes. There really aren’t any excuses left for failing to take an integrated approach to managing brands.

Never in everyday pursuit of corporate endeavour have so many been force fed by so few.

The proliferation of communication channels given the rise of social and technological media means your average employee claims to be nearing communication saturation point. But are they? I would suggest that the appetite for effective communication has never been more keen, yet effective communication is still in very short supply.

Lest we forget, communication is essentially an outcome, not an input. As I had to make a point of reminding a group of senior civil servants while running Team Briefing workshops recently, “success isn’t measured by volume, pace or quantity. Good communication is a product of whether the message has been received, understood and has resulted in the necessary action”.

For a number of years now, when I’ve conducted communication audits for clients, employees across sectors have complained about being bombarded. Despite the rather trendy discussions about the difference between internal communication and employee engagement, message management and push communication appears to be increasing.The biggest culprit is the dreaded email.

The Evils of email Management

Having just carried out an audit of internal communication channels for another public sector client currently undergoing major change, I’ve been struck, once again, by a bizarre, and frequently seen contradiction.

In answer to the question “How would you prefer to be informed of changes”, a whopping 76% of respondents voted for face to face communication.  Of those 76%, some 68% wanted that communication to come from their immediate line managers.

The second preference was for some form of internal social media allowing them the opportunity to provide feedback and debate in an interactive, real time environment.

However, when we looked into the Communication Department’s communication method of choice, they prioritised:

1. Lunch Meetings with the CEO and senior team
2. email bulletins
3. voicemail
4. publications

In fact, as the change programme gathered pace and brought with it “right sizing” and major structure changes, the top two methods fast became the only “official” channels.  Sadly team briefings led by line managers, once a norm, had faded to sporadic bursts.

It’s perhaps understandable that a number of line managers and supervisors had taken a backward step when faced with extremely difficult message management.  But in this case, it was soon very clear that abdication on this scale reflected deep-seated leadership issues.  Their CEO, in Hero Leader guise, although well intended, was clearly undermining his leaders. They had also lost faith in their communication function which, disempowered, was simply stepping aside by pressing the forward and cc buttons. 

But what’s the problem with push communication?

There clearly isn’t a single answer to this question but a glance at this famous learning effectiveness pyramid illustrates the power of face to face interaction with warm-blooded peers. 

The simple fact is that top down, cascade bombardments, usually delivered by email these days, are synonymous with lecturing.  They allow the originator to tick an activity box but are largely ineffective and simply reinforce one-way messaging. Cascades create a wider push communication culture as the approach is seen to be sanctioned from the very top.

As employee engagement requires:

-         interaction

-         involvement

-         feedback

-         opportunities to check understanding

-         emotional connection

by cascading swarms of messages the organisation promises one thing yet delivers another. It’s disingenuous and creates deep seated resentment.

Most of us learn much more effectively in interpersonal environments, when we’re involved and can interact with others. This is one of the reasons why line managers and immediate supervisors are increasingly important communicators. When they have the opportunity and take the time to commit to Facetime rather than Facebook, employees are enlightened and reassured by the example being set as well as the opportunity for face-to-face discussion, debate and reflection.

We all appreciate the merits of electronic communication. But despite the simple temptation of “compose, click and send” and the sophisticated charms of new-wave social media tools and techniques there really is no replacement for good, old fashioned, face to face, eyeball- to- eyeball communication. This is especially true during testing times when people lose what appetite they may have had for Foie Gras and deeply resent the fact that there’s no comfort food on the menu.

Ian Buckingham (ian@by2w.co.uk) is the founder of the Bring Yourself 2 Work Engagement Fellowship www.by2w.co.uk.  He is the author of Brand Engagement – How Employees Make or Break Brands  http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=281268. and Brand Champions (due Oct 2010)

I was at a dinner party thrown by a former HR director friend recently and as I arrived at his house was struck by the number of high performance cars on the driveway and then, once I was introduced to his guests, was equally surprised by the fact that most were from the HR community.

Now, I’m not deriding folk for their success. It just took a little getting used to, especially as most of the conversation revolved around the financial benefits associated with acquiring a reputation as a downsizing expert and “being the last one to turn out the lights” before moving on.

It’s clearly wrong to claim that re-sizing has become the raison d’etre of the modern HRD. But this perception wasn’t helped by the dinner party conversation about what it really means to trust and whether trust has any place at work?  

One premise was that the last two years has seen employees’ trust in their organisations fall dramatically and that organisations need to work at ways of re-engaging and re-establishing the psychological contract. The opposite - and prevailing view - was that there are certain things in business that have to remain secret, that being open and honest is often impossible and people should be mature enough to accept that.

The concensus was that trust has no real place at work any longer and that a healthy scepticism should prevail recognising that the employer/employee relationship is “a marriage of convenience”. Neutrality was seen as preferable but is it possible or even desirable to remain neutral in a vocational environment you devote the largest portion of your life to?

I appreciate that many of the HRDs I seem to meet these days are vassels for the process re-engineers and have become de-sensitised to emotions in a similar way to soldiers on the frontline. But is this a reflection of behaviour born of survival or how they really believe things should be?

Trust is a fairly fundamental emotion. If there’s no trust there’s no psychological contract between employees and the employer. Without that there’s no “extra mile” and no relationship development.

I guess you can have a relationship or marriage of convenience based on neutrality, without passion; empathy and drive. But then you can also join Victorian role playing societies to escape from reality.

There’s been much written about employee engagement in recent years as this relatively modern phenomenon continues to evolve from its internal communication roots.

Although often over complicated, the general premise of employee engagement is simple. Individual contributions of employees in the workplace is influenced by the strength of their emotional connection to their employer. The stronger and more positive that connection, the more likely it is that the employee will contribute their best effort for the sake of their organization or brand.

At its core, EE is based upon reciprocity. The employer works to create a work environment that is satisfying and rewarding for employees and stimulates their emotions and higher order needs. It literally invites them to bring themselves to work and become similarly invested (engaged) in their organisations long-term success. The concept is fairly simple to grasp, but not necessarily easy to implement.

One of the challenges is that emotional connections can be difficult to define and measure and are prone to shift in response to changes in the work environment. More confounding is that these relations are influenced by multiple variables (line management relationships, organizational mission and values, workload, peer relationships, etc.).

Add to this the cost/resource challenges created by the worst recession since the Great Depression and the fact that EE is reliant on discretionary budgets and EE as a business strategy can quickly become a “nice to have” in the good times.

These challenges aside, engagement as a strategy is not only important, but vital, especially in a climate of economic uncertainty, to the long-term viability of most business enterprises. According to a proprietary report just completed by the University of Akron’s Centre for Organizational Research, engaged employees tend to:

• Be more satisfied with their jobs
• Be more likely to stay with their employer even when other opportunities emerge
• Be more tolerant of (perceived) temporary economic hardships due to the economy
• Bring a consistently higher level of commitment, creativity and energy to their jobs
• Demonstrate higher levels of “good citizenship” behaviours both at and away from work

As a general rule, it’s safe to say that most employees are not engaged with their employers right now. In fact, the most recent Conference Board survey in the US found that only 45% of employees currently report being satisfied with their jobs (the lowest since the survey was started in 1987). As many as 60% indicate that they plan to actively seek new employment sometime in 2010.

Can Employee engagement really be reserved as “nice to do” strategy for when times are good? Employees are smart and quickly spot insincerity. In tough times, resorting to push communication cloaked in the trappings of engagement is like washing the car and then parking it under a tree full of pigeons.

 Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is an organisation development process or philosophy that engages individuals within an organisation in its turnaround, renewal, change and focused performance.

It’s a particular way of asking questions and envisioning the future that fosters positive relationships and builds on the basic goodness in a person, a situation, or an organization. Put another way, it’s an approach that believes in the power of positive thinking and seeks to draw out the superhero in every employee rather than a self-fulfilling belief that all employees are scheming super villains.

Used effectively, it enhances an organisation’s capacity for collaboration and change.  It’s a fantastic way of signaling an energising alternative to the depressing and draining, downsizing mentality of a recession.

Appreciative Inquiry utilizes a cycle of 4 processes focusing on:

1. DISCOVER: The identification of organizational processes that work well.
2. DREAM: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.
3. DESIGN: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.
4. DESTINY (or DELIVER): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.

Even the headings are inspirational.

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than just trying to fix what doesn’t. It is the opposite of problem solving. Instead of focusing on gaps and inadequacies to find blame and remediate skills or practices, AI focuses on how to create more of the occasional exceptional performance that is occurring (and there will be examples), regardless of conditions, because a core of strengths is aligned.

The approach acknowledges the contribution of individuals, in order to increase trust and inspire best practice. The method aims to create meaning by drawing from stories of concrete successes with the potential of becoming best practices and lends itself to cross-functional social activities. It can be enjoyable and natural to many managers, who, let’s face it, are often sociable people when they come out from behind the badge.

There are a variety of approaches to implementing Appreciative Inquiry, including mass-mobilized interviews and a large, diverse gathering called an Appreciative Inquiry Summit Both approaches involve bringing very large, diverse groups of people together to study and build upon the best in an organization or community.

The basic philosophy of AI is also found in other positively oriented approaches to individual change as well as organizational change. AI fosters positive relationships and builds on the basic goodness in a person, or a situation. The idea of building on strength, rather than just focusing on faults and weakness is a powerful idea in use in mentoring programs, and excellent performance evaluations – where superheroes come into their own.

So if you’re wondering what to do with your employee survey in the face of an increasingly cynical workforce and are a little nervous about how any internal benchmarking activity will be received; if you’ve had enough of the pessimism and would like to know more about the power of Appreciative Inquiry or just need a hand spotting those brand champions quietly battling the economic doom and gloom, find out more. In the current climate, a change of tone may just make a difference.

Last week I was working at the HQ of a large corporate when one of the secretaries came up to me and asked me if I would help her interpret her benefits statement. She had worked for the organisation all her career and had prudently taken all bonuses in share options. She intended to gift the proceeds to her grand children as her legacy.

She was clearly puzzled by the latest figures and couldn’t understand the corporate “double speak” in the benefits package narrative which was supposed to be explaining them to her. It was left to me, someone she barely knew, to break the news to this loyal member of staff that her share portfolio, which was worth £35k according to the figures last financial year, was now worth £7.3k. You can imagine the look on her face when reality dawned.

The arguments about dealer’s bonuses in big banks may be making the front pages, but they are very much the side issue here! How many people are out there right now receiving the same sort of message delivered by a similarly dispassionate route I wonder?

Bullying in the workplace is defined as an abuse of power. Information, it is often said, is power. How is it being used where you work?  Bullying may not always be overt. It may not even be intentional at times. Failing to understand the importance of internal communication and the link between employee engagement and brand performance, however, is tantamount to bullying when it has such devastating results as in this simple cameo.

Employee engagement should be a fundamental focal point for anyone with responsibilities for people within any organisation. It can’t all be driven from the centre and face to face communication, especially in tough times, should be given top priority. So, how are line managers shaping up to the challenge where you work or is everything being left to faceless names at the centre to cascade the weekly news, whether it’s life changing or not?

 Brands are built from within.  Brands are not about promises made by marketing. They’re about promises met by employees.

When staff choose industrial action; walk out; strike it signals a fundamental disconnect between your employees and your brand. Employee engagement has broken down.  It’s rebuildable, but only if everyone involved remembers that communication is more about listening than it is about pushing and managing messages.

Strikes tend to be synonymous with the public sector – like the Winter of Discontent in the 70s or miner’s strikes a decade later.  They are usually simplified in the press as clashes of intransigent polar extremes; management vs workers; greed vs survival. But they’re a lot more complicated than the caricatures of greasy pinstripes vs blue collar table bashers suggest.

Consider the Royal Mail dispute. On the face of it this can be seen as the death throes of the once irresistible force of New Labour’s spin doctors meeting the formerly immovable object of trade unionism. But talk to the ordinary postie or even customer in the street (or behind the letterbox) and this dispute is about so much more. 

It’s about a fight for identity by employees who are emotionally connected with a brand which they, and their customers, see as a national institution (see Buckingham; Brand Engagement http://www.by2w.co.uk/new.html ).

It’s about culture, “the way things get done around here” and workers resisting the march of automation which experience tells us may slash cost off the bottom line but does not guarantee better customer service or an improved quality of life (anyone remember the days of second post and trustworthy postal staff?).  In short, it’s a brand battleground that reflects a range of hot social issues topics including culture, values and identity.

As someone who specialises in helping organisations manage brands from within I’ve been called upon to help avert three high profile strikes in the last five years. Two were in the retail sector during the run up to Christmas and the most recent was a college where the staff were actively dissuading students from enrolling.

In each case the core issue wasn’t about pay and rations but fundamental communication issues like listening; consultation and disengaged staff who felt their managers were no longer connected with the values they believed their brand represented. In all three cases, catastrophe was averted through re-opening communication channels; fostering respect and active listening

People care more about the brands they work for than you may think.  Culture, the way people do things within the organisations that support those brands, is probably the most important determinant of brand performance.

It’s worth spending some time understanding the true dna of your brand. If you don’t know what brand engagement is worth, especially in these lean times, can you risk your employees deserting their posts? Or even worse, disengaged staff continuing to represent your brand?

WASP males don’t tend to get too many invitations to be involved in the promotion of diversity management; which is a shame really.  I’m a firm believer in the notion that the promotion of diversity should embrace the full range of stakeholders; it should truly practice inclusiveness in the way stakeholders are engaged with the philosophy or it runs the risk of being seen as a marginal activity aimed at an exclusive audience.  A “push” communication approach may be one of the reasons why the diversity flag bearers within organisations sometimes find themselves struggling for real influence at the top table.

But this thought piece isn’t to critique the notion of diversity or challenge its increasing relevance to the organisation development and employee engagement agenda. I would like to share a rare moment of Belgian enlightenment.

Picture the scene.  The wonderful and irrepressibly inspirational Myrtha Casanova of the The European Institute for Managing Diversity had enlisted my help to co-facilitate a workshop she was running with the senior executives of a global producer of cereal crops and foodstuffs.  They had been embroiled in a PR war with NGOs and pressure groups worldwide because of controversial growing techniques and what was perceived as an arrogant communication stance.

The workshops were intended to develop diversity strategies across their global businesses.  Most of their senior executives were gathered in Belgium to that end – and they weren’t very pleased about it.

It was soon clear that their beleaguered HR Director had been forced into developing a diversity strategy by the board who were in turn responding to US legislation.  The executive cadre encamped in Belgium were 90% male, mostly of Anglo Saxon origin and frankly, felt they had much more pressing priorities.  In short, the workshops quickly regressed into trench warfare.

The turning point came, however, shortly after lunch on day one when, rather than push more and more statistics, facts and process at the group, we adopted a less evangelical approach and asked them to explore their brand from the customer’s perspective. 

They had traditionally seen themselves as a business to business organisation but it took one of the more junior managers, who also happened to have the largest team and who also happened to be a woman, to point out that housewives could make or break their company.  By drawing a simple supply chain model she was able to quickly illustrate the route their product ultimately followed to market and how it was immaterial that they weren’t putting the bread on the shelves themselves. Women still make the vast majority of purchasing decisions per household and the retailers were reliant upon their suppliers to provide raw materials in tune with the ethics and values of the consumer.  An epiphany!

This simple, jaw-dropping moment proves to be a revelation for her cynical peers who had clearly spent years developing competencies and promoting values appropriate for managing their equally macho purchasing managers in the businesses they were selling to.  Suddenly the link between organisational culture and their PR problems was put into stark relief. More importantly, they realised that, without a more representative management structure they would make similar mistakes.  The business case for diversity had become clear and the rest of the session was put to productive use developing a central and local diversity policy, strategy and engagement approach which owed much to a loaf of bread!

If you want to find out more about the EIMD (a not for profit organisation founded in 1996, with headquarters in Barcelona and which operates across the European Union), take a look at their website http://www.iegd.org/englishok/who.htm

Or feel free to drop me a line and I’ll tell you more about this and similar stories.

Ian@by2w.co.uk

Legacy is a loaded term. If you’re the glass half empty type it smacks of “ old fashioned, out of date, redundant”. If you favour the glass half full approach you’ll make associations like “firm foundations; proven track record and relationship equity” when you hear this term.

As a brand and engagement specialist, I’m acutely aware that one of the strongest but often most underappreciated assets many Old World brands have is their legacy. In times of crisis and change it can be comforting to employees to know that this organisation has withstood worse in the past.

As individuals, we seem to be increasingly interested in notions of legacy, family heritage – where we come from. The Haka, the famous tribal dance of the feared New Zealand rugby team literally attempts to summon up the spirits of the ancestors of the combatants to provide strength and courage as they face a new challenge. Perhaps this was what organisations like Walmart have tried to replicate with their company songs or may explain the communal song and dance rituals at employee conferences?

Now this overt attempt to conjure up corporate spirit isn’t to everyone’s taste. It illustrates the point that employee engagement has to be fit for purpose within local employee markets. But by mentioning what some may consider to be “naff” engagement initiatives that are puzzlingly powerful mutu for others does beg the question “what are you doing to engage your employees during the downturn”?

It comes as little surprise to me that I’ve seen a rise in the number of complaints from employees across sectors about the availability of their line managers.  There has also been a decline in face to face communication like Team Briefings and a rise in what I term e-mail management. When they can’t come up with answers to tricky issues many line managers are choosing to lie low.

In these dark days, leaders need to call upon all of their resources to speed up the recovery process. If your brand has a legacy, what initiatives are you undertaking to make the most of that heritage to provide confidence, assurance and a sense of stability?  Most importantly, how are your most important communicators, your line managers, being recognised and utilised as the eyes, ears and voice of the business?