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Employee Communicators get Social
Monday August 10th 09
If you are to believe all of the conferences and seminars being organized right now, the top issue on the minds of employee communications people is social media. In fact, the hottest thing on everyone's mind is social media.
So, when we invited a bunch of such professionals to an informal lunch that’s what I expected to be the primary focus. It was hosted by Sophie Austin, head of Employee Communications at IBM UK&Ireland and a client of BroadView. In advance, we asked attendees to send us the top two issues or initiatives they were tackling.
Surprisingly, social media was way down this list. At the top were much more macro issues, and it was clear that almost everyone is predictably trying to engage employees at a time of rapid change but with a smaller budget, which sounds a bit like the title of all the other conferences which are around. Now, it could be that social media provides part of the answer to that, but my sense of the discussion was that people are still working out how best to introduce these platforms in a way which actually has some purpose, rather than simply creating more internal noise.
And there are more urgent fires to put out. Big changes at some organisations, and a widespread focus on the need to provide a solid platform for the leadership team to communicate and engage. Indeed, a lot of the conversation focused on the differences between organisations who have great communicators as CEOs – and the rest.
There is a danger in this. There is one company who was there which has such a fantastically prominent and engaging CEO that he could be seen to overshadow the leadership team. Indeed, one anecdote I heard was that external partners felt they were not properly dealing with the company unless they met him. An interesting challenge – to facilitate prominence among The Rest. Be careful for what you wish…
And, of course, there was the age old issue of the information cascade. Still an issue, still incredibly frustrating for employee communicators who know the importance of hearing from your manager.
Now, if anyone read my comments in a recent edition of Communicate magazine you would believe that I don’t believe in face to face communication. This was a light hearted debate in which I was forced into a corner in which I advocated that technology was now more powerful than face the face.
Of course I don’t believe that – not entirely. Everything is a hybrid and anyone that is relying wholly on one or the other needs to look for a new job. However, it strikes me (as a not disinterested party) that if we are all still talking about this issue maybe it’s not entirely fixable? There has to be engagement activity directly from the top and it has to sometimes be broadcast. One of the very interesting anecdotes from our lunch was from a global organisation which sends out a weekly e-zine to staff. The top articles every time are the ones from the top, setting out views and plans of the senior leadership team.
Similarly, since we all believe in dialogue and conversation (and, yes, social media platforms to make this happen), there is now an imperative in large, dispersed organisations to use multimedia and web-based tools to capture and share the views and stories of a wider range of employees.
But back to our lunch. One company made the others most jealous. I asked, tongue in cheek, for anyone to put up their hands if they have a growing budget. To everyone’s surprise one hand shot up: a growing budget, thriving business and a culture in which fun is the key component. And it was in the travel business. But it is an e-business which has a real penchant for parties, so maybe technology and face-to-face can co-exist happily….
Stuart Maister, Managing Director, BroadView
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