In my last post, I mentioned that in some ways, every act is an act of communication and as such, there is a real need for a communications viewpoint at the very top management table.
I also said I'm not sure how that should be implemented in reality, so I thought I'd begin by explaining the issue and justifying my statement a little.
Imagine a company which announces a renegotiated share options plan for the CEO at the same time as a pay and hiring freeze for ground-floor staff. There is a certain commercial logic to the action. The CEO is given greater incentive to improve the performance of the company and the pay and hiring freeze is part of a cost-cutting plan. Of course, anyone reading it laid out like this can immediately see what it says to ground-floor staff:
a) "Your contribution isn't valuable to the company."
b) "The CEO's contribution is."
c) "Despite this you will be expected to do increasing amounts of work for no extra reward."
d) "Any success this generates will help make the CEO rich beyond the dreams of avarice."
I'm not the first person to observe that this might explain why the many companies who have undertaken this kind of action have found employee performance reducing and problems getting worse, not better.
Still, it remains a popular course of action and whilst that is in part due to the powerful financial logic that drives it, it seems also to be in part because the fact of what the action is communicating is not recognised by decision makers.
Another example from an organisation I have worked with involved research scientists and managers who were payed roughly similar amounts. Seeing increasing competition for talented researchers, the company responded by increasing the pay of scientists. The predictable result was that over time, the best managers started leaving the company and without these managers the quality of research began to suffer.
Once again, this is not to suggest that financial and commercial logic should come below communication, just that a little more thought about what was communicated could have resulted in a different policy that didn't have as many side-effects.
My contention then is that while we assume that top managers have a grasp of the communications impact of their actions, the evidence is that in some organisations this is just not the case. As a result, all sorts of policies get handed down that communicate things which contradict the explicit communications statements made to employees.
It seems to me that within the typical hierarchy of many organisations, one way Internal Communications issues and the communications impact of various actions will be recognised is for IC to have a seat at the top table. But, that seems neither likely or even politically astute, so I'm definitely open to suggestions.
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