by Barry Nelson, for Ragan Communications’ Journal of Employee Communication Management, May 2008

A few months ago on the National Public Radio show Science Friday, a caller made a comment that set my mind racing. Not just for what he said, but for the enthusiasm it drew from the show’s panel of scientists.

The subject was health care policy. And the panelists—doctors, an economist, a medical administrator—had been trading ideas on why the United States continues to pay the world’s highest costs, for uneven care and so-so outcomes. Citing a caring medical experience he’d had in France, the caller ventured that what’s holding our country back is its “corporate orientation,” by which we make decisions with a focus on what will help businesses and other big interest groups, ahead of what’s best for “the people.”

I thought at least one member of this expert panel might chide the man for naiveté or paranoia. Instead, they praised him for, in essence, nailing the issue.

A people-oriented system, said one, wouldn’t let its citizens be left without health coverage, hurt without recourse or lost in a bureaucratic maze. The others added specifics: examples of and explanations for America’s deference to institutions, often at the expense of individuals.

One-way flow
And I thought, “Wow, here’s a group of eminent professionals, confirming my impression that a shift in cultural values is now marginalizing advocates for ‘the little guy’—in many corners of society.”

From recent Supreme Court decisions to the way companies treat workers, it seems the question driving outcomes today is, “What will most directly advance the interests of our powerful organizations?” It’s not, in other words, “How can we make sure these institutions are serving the interests of the people who depend on them?”

Think of the one-way flow of expectations inside corporate America. Nothing in a typical company’s operating procedures requires managers to think like workers or care about the personal issues that complicate life in the trenches. Yet without a second thought, employers ask rank-and-file employees to know the company strategy, live the brand, embrace worrisome change and cheerfully do more with less. We ask them to think like managers and care about business issues.

The assumption is, the interests of corporations and their employees are entwined. Yet anyone who’s lived the corporate life knows there are times when those interests collide instead of blending—and when they do, there’s little doubt whose “good” will be served first.

Hard-nosed is in
In fact, these days there’s rarely a serious argument. Certainly today’s practitioners of human resources and employee communication aren’t putting up much of a fight. Think where our professions stand now on a few typical issues:

• Employees, asked to work cooperatively in teams, are typically paid and rated mainly for individual performance—in competition with colleagues.
• Employers tighten the screws on job performance by imposing ever more rigid measures of accountability, but few add programs to help people meet the new standards.
• We fill the communication stream with messages about the company’s need to be a financial winner, and drop employee-centered, “human interest” stories from the mix.

So what if these actions and words make workers feel pressured, unsupported and self-protective? We go along! Cloaked in this hard-business mantle, we support-staffers feel “strategic,” part of the power structure.

Time was, our professional heroes taught that we could help our companies best by reminding them of their duty to honor people. Now we seem to accept that those people for whom we once spoke had better honor the company if they know what’s good for them.

Current discussions about how to measure employee communications effectiveness reveal the flaw in this over-controlling mindset. The main theories hold that we must show a direct link between what we do and the company’s profitability—basically, “we press here, and money pops up there.” Some of us argue that the return must be so prompt and predictable that not a nickel should be allocated to a communication plan that hasn’t been cost-justified up front.

What’s the goal?
My issue here isn’t whether companies are entitled to expect their investments to do them some good. It’s that communicators’ singular focus on countable, quick returns has induced a near disregard of ways our work can help a business that, while slower to develop and harder to measure, can be worth more in the end. Pushing for an immediate response, we too often neglect our chance to shape the perceptions and beliefs on which sustained human behavior is based.

A hypothetical case: Suppose a big company has one plant, office or unit that lags the others in profitability. Say it’s been discovered that this unit takes longer than the rest to process new orders. And it’s found that the order-fulfillment staff there are still taking time to do a quality check and file a report, that recent automation—not accepted well at this location—was supposed to make unnecessary.

How can communication professionals help? Again, the popular theories:

• Traditional, top-down communicators might simply fill the internal media with articles on the new technology’s benefits, the competitive urgency of quick turnaround and the fine examples being set by more successful teams, and hope employees come around.
• Those who believe supervisors should do the heavy lifting might say the communicator’s job is to help the unit’s leader, either conduct group problem-solving sessions or better sell employees on the need for change.
• So-called “performance-based” communicators would say a hands-on intervention to help the staff get used to the new technology would probably solve this “through-put” problem—at a lopsided ratio of low cost to big financial benefit.

What if?
What if the employees at this underperforming unit are smarting from a series of management decisions they’ve been asked to implement, without consultation, enough time, proper equipment or training? What if the real problem is not a one-time misunderstanding, but the well-studied, vitality-sapping effect of what researchers call low “perceived organizational support”—the sense that your company doesn’t understand your problems, or care?

Would any of the three communication approaches above treat this larger issue? I think not. Because all three are products of that corporate orientation that’s ailing our health care system: They focus first on what the organization needs, take a one-way view of whose behavior needs changing, and are apt to miss what’s really bugging the people.

I believe there’s a better strategy. Communicators can’t fully execute it alone—we have to build alliances, make a case and fight for it. But we can start the ball rolling, and do considerable good, even without much help.

Evidence of caring
This strategy begins with the research-backed premise that what makes employees feel valued and supported has independent worth, equal to and inseparable from what’s good for the company. It holds that to form these perceptions of support, employees need credible evidence that senior managers know and remember their concerns when making decisions.

That insight tells communicators to stay in touch with employee perceptions on those issues. And it reminds us that whether we’re out to fix a problem like the case above, or to keep it from ever happening, part of our job is to continuously find and present evidence of the organizational support employees need. This means we must:

• bring workplace issues into our content mix;
• counsel leaders to take those issues seriously;
• advocate, with our HR partners, company actions to help employees cope; and
• make sure employees know what resources and help are available.

How about the isolation many workers feel on the job? Most of us know of Gallup’s research showing that highly engaged employees are apt to have a “best friend” at work. And we may know (per Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone”) that the number of Americans who actually have such relationships is dropping. But how many of us have addressed this trend with communications to clarify the issue and show that company leaders care? (How many, instead, have stopped covering employee social or charitable events where such friendships might bloom, thinking them too trivial?)

What about the toxic effect of personal conflicts in the workplace: peer-to-peer, boss-to-subordinate? Oprah draws huge TV and magazine audiences with self-help advice for people in dysfunctional relationships. Can’t communicators demonstrate organizational support for employees in comparable turmoil by airing the issue in company-sponsored media, and presenting similar advice—from experts, company leaders, even fellow workers?

People first
I believe every workplace concern that keeps people from doing their best—the stress of overwork, the two-way tug of work-life conflicts, the clash of cultural styles in global teams—can be eased by this sort of communication therapy. By fostering dialogue and showing support, we help workers find their own constructive responses. The likely result is employees who are not only sustainably more productive, but happier.

The challenge for communicators is to remember, in the face of short-term economic pressure, that these two goals are actually the same: that to be people-oriented is to be corporate-oriented.

And for us, the people should always come first.

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