Engaging the English?

Four years after publication I've finally found the time to read Kate Fox's "Watching the English." It's a bit embarrassing that it's taken me that long, since it is all about "English culture" but I'm glad I finally did so. If you haven't read it, it is rich with insights into the "English character" and how these manifest in daily life. Kate Fox is a serious anthropologist and doesn't over-generalise too much, but at the same time has managed to write a witty and insightful book that is easy to read.

It's been widely reviewed, so I won't dwell much on the content, except to say that if you ever find yourself watching an English ritual (ordering at the pub, for instance) and wondering "what on earth is going on?" then this is a good book to read. The rules of "pub life" have also been put on the web at the SIRC site. (SIRC is the research centre where Fox works.)

However, the essential characteristics she laid out really got me thinking about the culture clash within a lot of "employee engagement" programs, especially within multinational firms.

A stereotypical example (to avoid identifying anyone!): a large US firm has an engagement program, with pieces implemented by HR and Internal Comms. Within the UK office, this is put in place by local workers.

Picking out three characteristics from Kate Fox's list, moderation/balance, humour, and finally a taboo against earnestness we can begin to see some problems. The program may well be sold locally with a good dose of humour by the local workers, despite the earnestness present in the original descriptions written in Michigan. However, the underlying aims of "employee engagement" as defined at the US HQ might well conflict with local cultural norms about "not being too earnest" or "moderation/balance in work and play."

Now in the case of a small division, this isn't fatal, because culture is a broad assessment and every country contains a range of personalities. You can fill out a single department with people who fit well with the originating culture (in this case the USA) but as your employment requirements grow it will become ever harder to find candidates who aren't typical of the culture.

In time then, we will need to develop different sets of philosophical ideas of employee engagement that can fit with the cultures of different employees. That requires not only an assessment of the culture but also a real sense of "engagement" beyond the stereotypical notion of a hypermotivated, hyperactive, workaholic team.

 

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,cultural translation,culture,engagement,English culture

Interacting with the world

David Ferrabee has a nice post on the way globalisation is affecting every business, not just those with branches out in "foreign places." He asks some important questions about the ethical basis of our interactions with other countries, for us all to consider:

1. Do our buying policies help serve countries that need the trade?
2. How can we support sustainable development (like drought resistant crops) is developing parts of the world?
3. Do we have any way of influencing fertility rates in countries where children are still being born at a rate of 5/6 per woman?
4. How can we help keep children in school...? Children who could be contributing more effectively to the economy is a matter of years...
5. What kind of investment brings people and communities along with us, rather than sitting in opposition?

I'd emphasise that these questions apply all the more strongly to those businesses who are already, or are in the planning stages of doing business abroad. If you do (or are going to do) business in far off places you should be looking at every avenue to develop engagement and understanding of the culture there.

Think carefully about acting on some of David's questions and you will not only improve your understanding of the local market and employees, but you can improve your CSR ratings and get some goodwill, good PR both at home and abroad.

 

Technorati Tags: alternative ways of thinking,cultural translation,culture,engagement

Strategy and the coalface in IC

So over at BBD, Liam asks "How very dare you?" leading specifically to a questioning of the concentration on all things strategy in a lot of the IC world these days.

Casey then says:

This is really just a place holder. It’s to remind me to carry on thinking about Liam’s question.

"Should you throw your hands up in horror and stalk out of the building crying “I can’t help you - you’re all doomed!”?

The answer to this, as Liam quite rightly points out, is very rarely going to be yes. But - what are the circumstances in which it might be yes?

All of which got me thinking...

In answer to Casey, the time when you walk out is where you can get a job at an equivalent salary in an organisation that actually has a strategy (preferably one that looks sound.)

Of course, that in itself tends to be fairly rare, all the more so as we appear to be hitting economically uncertain times.

I was going to suggest that if you really believe the organisation is doomed then you should walk out as well, but realistically in our society there's rarely any value to "walking out" unless you have a new job offer in hand. If you are going to move out of your job into unemployment because the company is going down, you may as well hold out for redundancy money.

The only other rationale for "walking out" is if you are genuinely a "high-flyer" with a "performance record" to maintain. Then it might be worth walking out to avoid having the stain of failure on your CV. However, as Liam is talking about "humble IC irchins" then this is not a factor.

So far, so good, I largely agree with Liam's premise.

I'd go even further in that the obsession with strategy in the glossy magazines and in the work and writing of various consultants is part of a wider trend to "worship the leaders of the organisation." This trend is driven by the commercial reality for consultants is that the people who sign the cheques to buy services are mostly those at the top. And we live in times where their role has been heavily mythologised and they have been surrounded by people and media telling them how important they are. As such, there's a lot of pressure to invest in the training, development and interests of top managers. And what is special about the managers at the top of the business? They set the strategy...

I suspect Liam, at heart, like me, wonders sometimes if this approach sets organisations up for failure, because it stunts investments in the skills and needs of the rest of the people in the organisation, who are, after all, vital to the execution of any strategy.

And when I step back to think about my time as an "umble IT manager" I have to agree all the more. Not only did some of the organisations I worked for not communicate their strategy down to my level, some didn't seem to have much strategy at all. And yes, what you do is roll up your sleeves and get on with the nuts and bolts of the job. There are things that need doing to keep things going smoothly. And when you have to take a decision that really should be guided by that nonexistent company strategy, you just make a guess as to what would be sensible and do it.

But of course, 4 months down the line, when the company elucidates a completely different strategy, it can be pretty hard to defend the spending decisions you took...

And to some degree I wonder if it's even harder for IC types. As an IT manager I could always say "well, I kept the email running and the internet access working and the accounts database online," nothing dramatic, but easily understood measures of competence.

For IC types Liam notes:

There's still a pretty good job to be done making sure people stick around, are happy to hand in great work or say nice things about you externally.

Which sounds a bit harder, because as good as you are in IC, if they are working to different priorities in HR or Operations (and remember, we're talking about a situation with a lack of overall strategy) then it might be pretty hard to do that "good job" as Liam defines it.

So, I'd like to ask Liam, if it's not commercially sensitive to blog about the parts of the Dojo where they teach people to deal with not having a strategy. That's not the skills to do "the pretty good job" that needs doing, but the skills to stay sane and cope with the ambiguity, uncertainty and negotiation of the situation.

 

 

Technorati Tags: business case,engagement,internal communications,strategy

Making Internal Comms a Profession?

I wrote a long post on this topic, but I realised that it still wasn't anywhere near complete. There's essays to be written on the discussions going on. What I'll do instead is just link a few observations/concepts and maybe it'll trigger some interesting thoughts out there.

- Over on CommsOffensive325, Mike Klein notes that Ragan has some commentary on Mike's discussion with Liam Fitzpatrick about the future of IC.

- Reading the Ragan piece, they naturally come down in the middle, after all "more competence" (Liam) is like "more motherhood and apple pie" and "more transformational thinking" (Mike) is like, well, "more motherhood and apple pie" too.

They quote Liam explicitly talking about "the credibility of the profession," but this comes through even more clearly in further comments from Mike, Liam and others underneath the article. They are arguing about the form of "the profession." What, if you like, would a future "CIIC" (Chartered Institute of Internal Communications) be defined as being about?

Throw in  the recent post by Ron Shewchuk about the lack of Masters level education programs in "employee comms", which reminds me that the majority of the things we all count as "IC competence" are skills that come out of PR, journalism, etc. I think there are few educational opportunities in IC because we've yet to create a truly distinctive notion of what it takes to be in IC and the truly distinctive skills that you won't learn in journalism or PR courses.

The Ragan writer (David Murray) notes that employee comms are more determined (in their opinion) by organisational structures than IC ideals.

However, it's at this point that it seems to me, Mike is maybe on to something.

Referencing my last post, I can see an argument that says in the long term, the technologies and practice of modern internal communications, as currently typified by social media, come into unavoidable conflict with the "structure of organisations." And, I don't think that "the structure" wins that battle. Structure is strongly static, but human nature is the irresistible force. And everyone knows I'm a structuralist at heart, so I don't say that lightly.

How does all this amount to a hill of beans for everyday practice? I can't deny the force of Liam's argument. Companies will want to communicate things with internal groups, that process is fairly well understood and will not disappear. Right now, if you want credibility in your organisation, your best bet is to invest in fulfilling this role with greater competence and success.

However, I think the number of people involved in a bunch of "traditional IC roles" is going to shrink and we are going to have to understand new roles that apply in more "community" situations. It also seems to me that this is the ground where you can plant seeds of a "distinctive profession" of IC.

Of course, whether IC should be a distinctive profession, or part of HR is a question to be considered.

Seth Godin's suggestion for rebranding HR as "Department of Talent" would appear to overlap with a lot of IC work. To be clear, I'm not advocating that IC should be part of HR, but I would be surprised to see it happen. There is a logic there. Likewise, there's a craft logic to the CIPR being the dominant association for IC people in the UK.

For myself, I think that there is room for IC as a strong, independent business function, but I think it will need to change if that is to happen. And that's a post for another day.

 

Technorati Tags: education,engagement,future of internal communications,professions,social media

Punching In

I've just started the book Punching In by Alex Frankel. It's subtitled "The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee" and it's a typical US-airport-business-book, lots of short chapters and personal anecdotes. However, the central premise is a very interesting one for internal communicators. It may not have the rigour of an academic book, but it is a rare example of someone taking the ethnographic approach to corporate culture. Frankel took front line jobs with some famous service companies (e.g. UPS, Starbucks) and lived the employee experience, attempting to understand the nature and power of the corporate culture and experience the employee engagement.

This is very important to internal communicators who often deal with the internal brand and justify communications programs in terms of employee engagement. We all talk about these things and there are measurements made and descriptions written for management, but I'm not aware of many descriptions of engagement from the point of view of the employee at the coalface.

As such, I would highly recommend this book, although I would point out a few caveats:

1) It's not just an ethnographic story, it's also about the author finding a deeper understanding of himself. He's quite a sympathetic character, but he does seem a bit spoiled in his life up to this point and his reactions to "life at the coalface" can feel a bit banal, especially for those of us who can remember working in such roles.

2) It is an American book about American companies and American people. Engagement isn't the same breed of bird in the UK, but I still think it's interesting.

3) If you read a lot about culture, you'll wish the author spent more time on details. This is a set of quick sketches more than a comprehensive expedition.

4) Frankel is relentlessly positive about culture and service work. It might be wise to balance the "boosterism" with a glance at Hochschild's book, The Managed Heart to remind yourself of the more difficult side to service work.

 

Technorati Tags: alex frankel,book,corporate culture,engagement,ethnography,internal communications,punching in,service industry

Melcrum Blog: Is I.C merely a cog in the propaganda wheel?

 

As usual, I'm late on reading my RSS feeds, so I'm a few days behind the zeitgeist in noticing this post over at The Melcrum Blog:

Is I.C merely a cog in the propaganda wheel?

 

Key quote:

“People will always see the internal communication function as an internal propaganda machine”. This was a comment made at the recent CIPR Inside event held at Hill & Knowlton in London.

...

This point alone could no doubt have stimulated enough discussion for a whole other event. It certainly prompted me to think about the role of the internal comms function and the struggle that practitioners often face in getting employees to fully understand and appreciate the point of their existence beyond the cliché of arranging parties and writing newsletters. But is there any truth in what Katharina’s ex-colleague said? Is the struggle for authenticity ultimately futile? And is the internal comms department the place where truth can be sought or is it better to listen to news as it materializes on the company grapevine? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

 

My reaction:

Obviously, it depends. Generalising about the perception of the IC function in "a company" is like generalising about the culture of "a company" - there's so much variation there will always be counter-examples.

However, it does dovetail with some of the questions I've been asking on this blog and I think the quote points at a kernel of truth which needs thinking about.

The kernel of truth is that many IC professionals have made it their "business case" to "deliver employee engagement"; interpreted to be moving employees to a finer appreciation of the strategies, tactics and requirements of top management.

If you analyse such an undertaking from the point of view of an employee whose interests do not match perfectly with those of top management, it's hard not to see those aims as having some element of propaganda attached. Throw in the way that many corporate exercises seem to be much better at sending information out to employees than gathering it in and it should be easy to see how employees can feel harangued. Add the way that the legal department gets the last word over what may be revealed about an awful lot of important issues affecting people on the ground and you can see how IC starts to look like the "Ministry of Truth."

So, is authenticity doomed?

I'd say there is still hope on the horizon:

1) Talented communicators manage to bridge these and many other gaps, wherever they work. There may be contradictions inside corporate life, but personal integrity and honesty about the times when you're in a difficult position can help people's view of IC a lot.

2) In some organisations, company culture is better than this and where it isn't IC can be a hugely positive influence in working towards a better state of affairs. Trust might be in short supply at times in the transition period, but if communicators set out to be reliable, honest and committed to improving communication in both directions within the organisation, success will bring trust.

3) As I've been posting here, I do think that there are spaces for the IC function to position themselves in which do not rest so closely on "engagement" which to my mind is where the "propaganda feeling" starts to creep in. One possibility is to explore a focus on more process related communication questions, along with coaching people to communicate better, rather than being a "motivation unit." If your role in communication is to "do it better" rather than "do it with the aim of improving X Y Z" you've more chance of being trusted and are less likely to be asked to spin.

Of course, in all of these outlined situations, if company culture is not by nature transparent, then it has to be admitted that the grapevine will probably let employees know about "secrets" long before IC is allowed to do. If IC in turn bows to pressure from management to "massage" the news, then the battle is truly lost. However, where truthfulness is maintained, then accuracy at least will put you one step over the grapevine.

Is all this dilemma filled? Unfortunately yes, which is why I'm seeking to create a case for IC that doesn't make performance rest on the kind of metrics that propaganda was designed to address. It's the only sustainable way forward...

 

Technorati Tags: alternative ways of thinking , business case , commad and control , communication , corporate communicators , culture , engagement , internal communications , lateral communications , trust

Engagement and Culture

Over at Talking IC, back in June, Lee Smith commented on Sue Dewhurst's post about engagement.

Sue says:

OK, I admit it, I hate the 'e' word. It's joined 'strategic' and 'culture' as one of those wibbly terms that gets bandied about constantly whilst half the time people don't really know what it means... but they manage to have an earnest-sounding conversation about it anyway.

Lee agrees that engagement is most often used as a buzzword and too often people mean different things by it anyway. I suspect we'd all say the same about "culture" too, but as he recommends a new book (CEO - the Chief Engagement Officer by John Smythe) that is a useful application of the "engagement" concept he also highlights an important facet of what "culture" is:

If you, like me, are getting irritated by the 'e' word, then I recommend John's book as an antidote. It'll convince you that engagement - as a management philosophy - is a no-brainer and that many of our current approaches to internal communication remain essentially about coercion, command and control.

Culture is, in part, those assumptions that are so deep rooted we do not usually notice them. And possible the part of "internal communication" culture I most want to help change is the cancer of "coercion, command and control."

Why do I want to change it? Not just because I don't believe that the centre of the organisation "always knows best" but because the evidence is that internal communication that relies on coercion, command and control just doesn't work.

It is worth saying that it's a few steps of logic from that statement to the philosophy I'm building Enoptron around, but I'll talk about that more in my next post.

Technorati Tags: engagement, culture, buzzwords, internal communication

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