Posts Tagged “corporate communication”

It is safe to say that companies are constantly changing their ways of working to find better ways of going to market. Strategies are changing, processes and technology are being upgraded, functions are being reorganized all while quality improvement and cost reduction programs abound. Change has become the status quo.

It also is safe to say relatively few employees are actively engaged in their work. Recent surveys from Gallup place the level of active engagement at 26% and Blessing & White place the figure at 29%.

The disconnect between strategic actions and employee engagement, particularly at the middle management level, is of significant worry to CEOs. In PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ 2008 CEO Survey, 50% of CEOs stated a lack of engagement or motivation of middle managers to drive change represented a critical barrier to effective change. It isn’t too hard to imagine the CEO turning the helm of a battleship wondering, “When is this thing going to move?”

So what can be done to move the battleship? In our work, we have found five strategies to be helpful:

1. Awareness – Put simply, communicate, communicate, communicate. Nobody has ever over-communicated during periods of change.
2. Understanding – One-way communication can generate understanding on simple topics. “Submit your forms by Tuesday,” doesn’t need a conversation to ensure understanding. More substantive change – such as changing a job’s responsibilities – does. Unfortunately, change sends most managers in the opposite direction of conversation. They do not want to confront change’s unpleasant aspects, and wind up having less dialogue with their teams than they would during “normal” times. Working around this tendency comes in strategies 3-5.
3. Participation – Employees who shape their own future will have a vested interest in the success of that future. Draw people into the could-be vision, enable project teams to design their own future state, provide education and training. Do anything and everything to get people involved. What they build will usually far exceed what the leader would design. Sometimes, however, what they build will fall short of the leader’s potential design. Shortcomings in design will be more than made up for in execution. They own it, and they will make it work.
4. Measurement – There is a concept in quantum mechanics saying it is impossible to measure something without affecting its attributes. (Explaining quantum mechanics is for another blog, however!) Measurement calls out performance – both the good and the bad. How measurements should be used depends on the organization’s culture.
5. Leverage – When in doubt, use a lever. Why spend three hours explaining a concept to five managers? Spend two hours explaining the concept to one director. Let the director drive the concept with the managers. People want to hear about change from their supervisors – not a project team. Invest heavily in the top of the organization chart and the battleship will move much faster.

Stefan Stern has written a great piece in Financial Times on transformational change and uses two examples to buttress his claims. The success story is the opening of a new terminal for the cross-Channel Eurostar train service. The failure story is the opening of the new British Airways terminal at Heathrow airport. The highlights of the Heathrow story are provided below:

“consider the horrors of the launch of Heathrow’s T5 in March. Sure, as far as the construction of the site was concerned, it was a triumph, a £4.3bn project completed on budget, on time and in full. But in spite of BA running a three-year change programme, called “Fit for 5″, we all know what happened come opening day.

Baggage handlers tried to warn their bosses about the problems they could foresee. The site is huge. Employees, who had not had enough training, simply did not know where they were supposed to go. More time had to be allowed to get staff from their locker rooms to the arrival and departure gates. And, as for the lockers – the new ones were not big enough to hold all the baggage-handlers’ clothing and belongings, including bulky wet-weather gear. Parking space, also far from the terminal building, was inadequate.

Managers were told about all these things. And BA chief executive Willie Walsh did not appear to know how grave the problems were. (He later told MPs that he had taken a “calculated risk” pressing ahead with the launch date.) But the clock ticking down to the March 27 opening had kept ticking, and apparently it could on no account be stopped.

Managers sometimes complain that their people “hate change”. That is just not true. People hate stupid change, change that they have no influence over, change that is simply imposed on them.
To err is human. We all do it, even – you will just have to believe me here – journalists. But looking back at the T5 fiasco, it seems clear that a bit of honest, straight talk (and action) at the right time could have helped avoid much of the subsequent aggro.

How hard is it really for managers to recognise these basic truths: that staff (including managers) need to be trained properly to do their jobs well, that employees on the ground may have useful things to tell you about the reality of the work they are doing, and that large-scale, difficult changes need to be prepared for thoroughly?

So much in the world of management seems ultimately to be a matter of common sense, of basic human decency, in fact. You could almost believe that most management foul-ups would be avoided if only people did a bit of serious thinking first. Employees could then get on with their work calmly and productively. Life would go serenely on. And, in this blissful world of efficiency and success, there would certainly be no need for management columnists.”

There would be a whole lot less need for management consultants as well!

The view of communication as information transfer was furthered by the application of Claude Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” as posited in his 1948 paper of the same name.

In his paper, Shannon posited the reproduction of messages as an engineering problem and looked at the process of communication in terms of accurately conveying the symbols of communication through technological sources, such as the telegraph. The main issue at stake for Shannon was the proper encoding of information, which he felt would allow for a time savings by encoding the message sequences into proper signal sequences that eliminated some of the redundancy found in language, and which, in turn, would lead to better encryption forms.

Shannon’s one-way communication model helped to set off the academic field of modern communication theory and research by providing an understanding of the main components to communication: source, message, channel, receiver.

The ability of a theory from one academic discipline to provide intellectual points of leverage for investigation in another discipline shouldn’t be discounted. Applying theories in new ways enhances our ability to think more broadly about the worls. However, not carefully exploring new paradigms can intellectually trap us in unfounded assumptions.

That said, the No. 1 reason Shannon’s theory shouldn’t have been applied to human communication rests in its origins. Shannon’s major goal was to determine how an information source could be described mathematically to ensure proper information encoding to save time and protect the message. It was not to influence or cause someone to take some action.

Shannon’s theory grew from the desire to prevent effective communication, by introducing noise to the message, making the encrypted message more secure. Thus noise was a positive aspect of his information theory. The more noise, the more secure the encrypted message.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the transmission model is based on the work of John Locke. It also has ties to the transport model from the 19^th century when writing (communication) had to be transported from writer to reader in some physical form like books, letters, newspapers (Chandler, 1994, para. 15). Applying the transmission model to modern communication is problematic because it focuses on the transmission of information and not of meaning.

First, the transmission model fixes the roles of sender and receiver – with the sender having the primary role and the receiver a secondary, passive role – in a linear, one-way model that relies on the receiver to absorb information (Chandler, 1994, para. 22). But, a linear communication model can’t accurately explain or account for proper communication in a multi-vocal world consisting of multiple societies, languages and belief systems.

We also have the processing of information – in this case in terms of absorption, as if through the skin – of content or information in the form of words and a not their meaning. But we don’t just absorb information. Rather we frame the information we receive based on many factors – our gender, age, social class and education in a nonlinear world- and on the relationships we have with the “senders.” So, there’s no possible way any one message could have just one fixed meaning for all “recipients.”

Likewise, a third issue revolves around the purpose of language, which is to express ourselves to one another through recognizable symbols. Given that the 500 most common words have more than 13,000 different meanings, language is a tricky and elusive thing. Thus we can’t assume that two people will use or understand the same language we use in the same way. And we can’t take an Orwellian approach and create our own Newspeak to purge the shades of gray and redundancy in our language.

This leads to a fourth issue with the transmission model: the model equates content with meaning even though the intended and generated meanings might diverge. But books, letters and such only contain words; meaning is constructed when a listener or reader makes sense of those letters and words. So inserting a meaning into a message isn’t easily done.

Finally, the transmission model doesn’t account for context. Context is often based on our perception, and perception is not single-sided. We see things in their completeness – like a complete table, and not just its top – in the context of our kitchen.