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August 30, 2005
Gossip as an employee communications strategy
As communicators, our job is to ensure information is flowing around an organization (up, down and laterally) so the business can run effectively. Basically, this means making sure the right employees get the right information, in the desired format, in the right quantity and at the right time. It also means creating opportunities for employees to voice opinion, be involved in problem solving and in general improve working relationships between a person and their direct supervisor. Yet we often ignore one of the most powerful dynamics that occurs in organizations: gossip and those who spread it.
Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal: people devote anywhere from a fifth to two-thirds or more of their daily conversation to gossip. Men are just as likely to do is as women. There are good reasons why people find gossip irresistible: it not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputation, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safey net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.
It's disheartening for me to see communicators spend so much time on carefully crafting messages of all-employee emails or CEO voicemail scripts when what really matters is what employees say to each other after the "official" communications act is concluded. In other words, what's the real buzz about the CEO who was just let go, the division that was just sold, the layoffs that just happened? Communicators need to focus more on influencing the organizational conversation, rather than just putting out corporate messages.
There are many ways to do this, including building direct information lines to your front-line supervisors. They hold the key to shaping the conversations occuring on the shop floor or front lines of your organization. Another critical factor is identification of those people who are the chief spreaders of gossip. Identify them, start feeding genuine "insider" information to them to reinforce "official" information, and see how different the result is. I have long maintained that if companies focused solely on communicating with their administrative assistants (who, in my experience, are the real people who make companies function), morale and communications issues would be addressed overnight.
Posted by Christopher at 8:46 AM
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Try this journal article - more than 10 years old, but relevant to what you write about:
Noon, M. and Delbridge, R. (1993) News from behind my hand: Gossip in organizations, Organization Studies, 14, 1, 23-36.
Posted by: Jame at September 9, 2005 8:27 AM
Try this journal article - more than 10 years old, but relevant to what you write about:
Noon, M. and Delbridge, R. (1993) News from behind my hand: Gossip in organizations, Organization Studies, 14, 1, 23-36.
Posted by: James at September 9, 2005 8:28 AM
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| TrackBackAugust 26, 2005
Could it be? A CFO recognized the importance of employees?
OK, I will admit the title of this posting might be a little harsh, but I have encountered many chief financial officers in my career who had no understanding of the need to engage employees. So imagine my delight when I read this quote from a CFO of a major company undergoing significant growth and prosperity: "We've gone from being a big small company to a small big company...my biggest worry is that we screw something up with our people."
Here's a CFO worrying not about EBITDA, market cap, debt refinancing or the like. Instead, he's focused on the things that will help ensure he DOESN'T have to worry as much about those other important things; he's focused on his company's employees.
So who is the company? It's JetBlue, the U.S.'s 10th largest airline and one that has been profitable for 18 consecutive quarters in an industry environment where other U.S. airlines have lost nearly $20 billion in the last five years.
Posted by Christopher at 7:22 AM
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| TrackBackAugust 14, 2005
BA woes reinforce need to handle terminations thoughtfully
One cannot help but feel a bit bad for British Airways and their 100,000 passengers stranded around the globe during the carrier's labor problems this week. The direct source of the problems was not the unions representing BA's workers, but rather workers at the caterer Gate Gourmet, who struck when 670 of their colleagues were fired last Wednesday. In a show of support, most other Gate Gourmet employees walked out, as did another 1,000 airport workers employed by other companies, BA among them. The strikes resulted in BA grounding its global fleet the next day.
Much of the media attention has been focused on BA and the plights of stranded passeners. The part of the story that has been largely overlooked is what started the whole chain of events: Gate Gourmet apparently doing a poor job in terminating its 670 employees. A spokeman for the Transport and General Workers' Union, which represents much of Heathrow airport's ground workers, said people were fired with three minutes notice over a public address system, and some where fired while out on maternity leave. Gate Gourmet has been relatively quiet on their side of the story, except for a posting on their website, in which they explain the 670 employees were "...regrettably dismissed on Wednesday due to an un-balloted work stoppage at the Heathrow South catering facility. This action was taken reluctantly and only after repeated requests for the employees to return to work and a number of warnings that continued disruption would lead to dismissals."
As with most labor disputes, each side has a different interpretation of what occured, but the situation is a good reminder to communicators of two points:
1) Terminations for any reason must be carefully planned out with the utmost respect for the affected employees. Managers themselves should deliver the news in person and should get whatever support is needed beforehand to handle those difficult discussions with compassion, candor and clarity.
2) Companies must have a solid internal communications infrastructure in place to reach front-line employees immediately -- and a crisis is no time to uncover deficiencies in this area. BA's growing public relations problem has been fueled by stories of customer service agents giving wrong information to frustrated passengers, or more often, having absolutely no information to convey at all. It will be interesting to see what they learn from this experience -- unfortunately, that learning has come at the expense of its customers.
Posted by Christopher at 11:58 AM
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| TrackBackAugust 9, 2005
Podcasting to reach employee audiences
I am doing some research on companies using podcasting as part of their employee communications mix -- if anyone has any thoughts on this topic or examples, I'd love to hear them. Seems like this would be a perfect way to reach younger workers if a company could hit on the right mix of a genuine, credible and somewhat hip presentation of the information they were trying to convey.
Posted by Christopher at 7:08 PM
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I think it is a really great idea. Initial big investment potentially if you supply ee's with the tools (ipod, etc.) Just like all media has to be the right content and ee's still have choice whether or not to listen, read, engage, etc. But definitely a good comm channel to investigate - analyst meetings, technical content, especially for post learning programs, etc.
Posted by: regina at August 10, 2005 2:53 PM
Regina, thanks for your comment. My feeling is that podcasting makes the most sense for companies with large portions of younger (say, under 30) workers who might be more likely to embrace employee communications delivered in ways that they consume other media. We're doing some research on this right now and I'll be blogging about what we found in the very near future.
Posted by: Christopher Hannegan at August 14, 2005 11:52 AM
I would be interested in hearing about any of your research into employees and podcasting.
I'm in the process of (slowly!) trying to get a research project together that looks at new forms of web-based communication technology - i.e. Weblogs, RSS, Atom, Messenger, VoIP, Podcasting, etc.
For your information LabourStart have a Podcast capability. If you visit my blog and browse the pages you'll find some useful podcast directories that will almost certainly lead you in the right direction.
Posted by: James at September 9, 2005 8:33 AM
Can someone give me more detail on podcasting please?
Posted by: Emma Stephens at October 11, 2005 7:20 AM