When less is simply less: The case for ‘workplace journalism’

The past 30-or-so years have witnessed a sort of Revenge of the Nerds in corporate life, with bean-counters replacing swashbucklers in the top jobs at most modern companies. Staff functions like employee communication have had to adjust – as hostages often do, coming to emulate their captors’ behavior.

Just look at the ideas that increasingly dominate our professional conference agendas and online discussions: Impact assessment. Key performance indicators. Strategic accountability. Dashboards. We’ve become fixated on the need to prove our worth. The no-frills mentality of those who decide which corporate functions to fund and which to curtail has pushed aside the instincts that many of us – as empathetic story tellers and employee advocates – used to bring to work.

Less impact
In the process, I suggest, we’ve compromised our product. For one thing, we’ve become all business – dutifully focused on supporting the business plan and being otherwise “strategic.” For another, stung by accusations of “information overload,” we’ve become minimalistic, acting like goal keepers, turning away content not clearly seen as critical to help employees to do their jobs.

Granted, our profession was due a jolt of tough-minded, results-oriented discipline, to offset a trend toward art-for-art’s-sake self indulgence that had set in, roughly in the ’70s. What disturbs me is that we’ve let it go too far – that our less-is-more mindset and almost desperate embrace of strategic accountability have, ironically, lessened our ability to make a strategic difference.

Consider the complex quest for employee engagement that now preoccupies so many employers. Most of us agree that employee communication must rise to this cause. The question is, how? Our erstwhile, employee-advocate mentality would suggest one set of tactics. The bean-counter world view, wherein accountability is all, urges another. Today’s goalkeeper mindset forces us to choose just one (lest we burden our audiences with the dreaded “TMI” – too much information). And the hostage syndrome prompts us to make the choice we’re sure management will endorse.

Let’s be specific
Obviously, to engage employees in support of our companies’ business plans, we need to explain what those plans are, why they’re important, and why employees should accept a personal role. Communications that buttress these understandings are deemed “strategic” and almost sure to be approved. And from the minimalist viewpoint, that may look like communication enough.

The result, though, is that employees looking at their internal media see a monotonous parade of stories with the same underlying message: what it takes to make the company a financial winner.

Okay, businesses have a right, and a need, to get this point across. But just think what’s going on, meanwhile, in the lives of most employees – what’s dominating their conversations, at work and at home. Concern for the company’s well-being? Not exactly.

It’s concern for their own well-being. It’s how comfortable – or stressed – they feel in the social interactions and decision-moments their jobs present. It’s the eternally open question of whether they’re liked, accepted, cared about. It’s whether “the bosses” understand their point of view, or even acknowledge it.

Let’s keep it real: “Owning” the company strategy just isn’t a priority for most employees – at least not while concerns on these more personal issues go unsatisfied.

What’s the lesson?
For communicators, it ought to be to keep helpful information on these issues flowing, as a lubricant, to help our more strategic messages get through. It should be to balance our coverage with empathetic workplace journalism – dialing down, just a little, the volume of our call to battle stations, and giving at least some prominence to our employees’ human concerns (e.g., how and why to get along with the boss, make friends on the job, cope with stress, live the brand, be a good teammate, and other aspects of a satisfactory work life).

But a review of employee publications from dozens of companies provides scant evidence that this considerate category of content is on their editors’ radar.

One bright exception is Ink, the fine magapaper from JPMorgan Chase, in which editor Lawrence Houck runs a regular feature called “Working Through It.” In easy, consumer-journalism style, Houck and his team present stories that tee up a common workplace challenge (meshing with international colleagues, cutting waste, resolving conflicts), then provide coping advice from employees who’ve handled it well and reasons why it’s in everyone’s self interest to try.

These aren’t exhortations from management, to behave better for the sake of the bottom line. They're “on-your-side” looks at problems workers may find vexing, backed by information that empowers them to find solutions, and meaningful, personal incentives to act. More important, they’re evidence of a company that cares how the work world feels to its employees and wants to help them make the experience positive.

Why is that important?
Because copious research tells us one of the most powerful known triggers for employee dedication and loyalty is what’s called “Perceived Organizational Support.”

An excellent review of decades of studies on this point appeared in the August, 2002, issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Its conclusion: Employees tend to see their organizations in human terms, so they interpret evidence of more-than-minimal support for their well-being as a sign that the organization cares. And they respond in kind.

Employers they perceive as strongly caring earn strong commitment, including support for company success, and a desire to stay, even when the money looks better elsewhere. By contrast, companies that seem obsessed with their own financial security mostly inspire workers to be likewise, about theirs. Loyalty fragments, and trust is lost.

It’s a profound revelation, but one seemingly lost on employee communicators. Why don’t more of us share Larry Houck’s response?

A strategy of caring
“I won’t kid you,” Houck says, “our program is all about helping our business succeed. We just believe the way to do that is to report both the big, strategic picture and the view from the trenches. Because if employees don’t find anything in our communications that sounds like the world they inhabit every day, we become irrelevant. And then nothing gets through.”

Strategists and minimalists, take note. The surest route to a goal isn’t always the direct or most obvious one. And in communication, less isn’t necessarily more. As Houck reminds us, it can even turn out to be nothing at all.

‘Doing’  workplace journalism:  a DIY primer

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