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 If you’re the glass half empty type it smacks of “ old fashioned, out of date, redundant”.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?

 

 

 

A client, let’s call him David, works for a formerly blue chip multi-national.  Their core HR or people processes, post SAP, were re-designed by teams of Big Four consultants to maximise efficiencies and drive out non-conformances arising from human error.  In short, HR has, in effect, been replaced by systems, standards, Helplines and KPI’s. Managerial learning and development has been re-focused on technical rather than soft skills.

 

David, by his own admission, is a relatively old school, line and customer service focused manager. He’s a believer in sustaining relationships and in resolving interpersonal differences before they become formal issues (often over a coffee or a beer). He has worked for his company for two decades and has received awards for his work on a number of occasions.

 

Recently David encountered issues in his personal life which compromised his 8am - 9pm working routine.  As pressure built he started to struggle and turned to his recently appointed executive line managers for support. They responded by citing due process, changed his reporting line from 1:1 to 2:1 and offered him the option of submitting formal Grievances and visiting Occupational Health if he had a problem. They also placed this loyal middle manager on a series of Performance Contracts when they believed his standards (loosely defined) started to slip. Unlike David, they documented every conversation.

 

Sleepless nights led to longer hours; stress led to Psoriasis and eventually to depression and medication and now to extended absence on health grounds. He eventually submitted a grievance but the 2 and sometimes 3:1 micro management has seen the organisation close ranks and he faces the invidious choice of turning on his own company via tribunal or falling on his own sword. 

 

David is passionate about the organisation and his job. He has the experience and people skills which customer and staff surveys suggest are needed to help turn the organisation around. Yet David, and it turns out, many of his contemporaries, have become the victims of “due process”.

 

The growing number of Davids remain voiceless despite the CEO Town Halls and surveys. Yet the organisation flounders in a short-termist backlash, woeful line management skills and mismanagement freefall.

 

The CEO may understand the need for culture change but what’s to become of these invisible FTEs in the meantime when the HR offices are empty and the day to day processes don’t have ears?

I was in the City, London’s financial district, for a meeting the other day and found myself in Pudding Lane.  For those who don’t know, this modest little street is infamous for being the source of the great fire of London, heralded by historians as the most tragic event to have befallen London as well as its saviour.

 

But “how can this contradiction hold true?” I hear you cry.  Well London had been in the grip of another epic threat at the time of the fire, namely the plague or black death. Many believe this cataclysmic malaise to have been caused by rats. In truth it wasn’t the rats, but the fleas that lived on the rats that caused the spread of the infection.

 

Ironically it was the catastrophic great fire that finally purged the City of the disease.

 

Now what has this trip through London’s history books got to do with matters in CEO land?

 

As we all know, the corridors of CEO land are populated by a nodding, bowing and scraping populace doffing their caps to the demi gods. Yet it’s increasingly the ceos or chief engagement officers i.e. the line managers, who do the real work.

 

It also can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the financial districts are being targeted by the worldwide press as the source of the current economic disease that is infecting world markets.  Indeed the high profile figureheads, the CEOs of a select number of those organisations within those financial districts are being demonised for seemingly single handedly bringing about the collapse of those institutions and indeed, spreading this economic plague to related markets and economies.

 

This is where history and imagination collide.  But if we allow ourselves to believe tabloid caricatures of “Fred the shred” and his peer group we undermine the core philosophy on which this column is based.  While I do subscribe to the notion that the CEO can wield exceptional power, he doesn’t do it alone. The iniquity of the CEOs themselves and problems the City faces are just the symptoms of a much, much more insidious infection.  The disease of selfishness, short termism and winning at all costs has become a plague which has arguably spread throughout Western commerce. Simply getting rid of the CEOs isn’t going to cure the problem.

 

Would anyone reading this column deny that they feel uncomfortable about the way many of their customer service interactions, regardless of industry, are handled these days? From the volumes of unsolicited cold calls we receive, the cost cutting off-shoring of our intimate data, the proliferation of mistakes or the relentless emails can anyone claim that customer service has improved in the last decade? Can you picture the last time you received excellent service which exuded empathy, humility and pride?  I bet you can think of several examples when a frontline employee called you “mate” instead of by your name, was clearly following a pre-determined script or appeared to have had an authenticity bi-pass, however.

 

The risk we currently face is that in a desperate attempt to fight the current economic disease, the focus is going to be exclusively on the high profile figures, forgetting that the disease has already spread and infected the culture of the organisations they headed up. 

 

Unless we can whip up a firestorm of people centred change that will:

-         reinvent HR

-         proactively manage employer brand

-         professionalize communications

-         respect and prioritise organisation development

-         focus on the development of line managers as a priority

-         forge more effective relationships between the external manifestation of brand and the link to the organisation’s values and the employees who keep the promises

this disease is going to spread and spread.

 

Food for thought, but lean times are quite possibly causing you to consider postponing that employee survey; to cut back on your training budget; to force through more “push communication” or prioritise that pile of  impressive looking resumes of former “big hitters” who seem to hop from company to company every two years above appraisals of existing employees. 

 

If you’re considering “re-sizing”, pause for a second before you reach for the axe, and consider your existing employees once again.  What more can you do to re-connect them with the brand they’ve been loyal to for so long? How can you re-focus them on the next phase in the evolution of the company, to re-energise them?

 

Now look again at those cvs. 

You may think you know who the rats are…. but remember the humble flea!

Still struggling to make the business case for employer branding? 

Ian@by2w.co.uk

Available now: Brand Engagement - How Employees Make or Break Brands (Buckingham, Palgrave/Macmillan 2007)