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May 1, 2010

The Challenges of Employee Communications

By Kennedy Maize

First, Make Sure Top Management Understands that Communication Is a Two-Way Process

Communicating with employees does not mean telling employees, however clearly, what constitutes corporate or agency policy and how they must implement it. It’s not top down. In this regard, employee unions can be useful as a brake on one-sided management fiats, a rough BS detector.
 
Bolts-out-of-the-policy-blue from above, particularly when they upset long-standing practices and work cultures, serve more to alienate employees than to empower them. The imposition of policy from above also undermines the front-line management folks who are on the ground and are making progress. Communication requires collaboration, not crushing authoritarianism. “Change” is not an effective mantra when it is unidirectional.
 
Management and workers must each buy off on major changes in jobs and the work environment. It’s up to the bosses to explain what they are proposing and why. It’s up to workers to give management ideas serious consideration and provide their serious input. Then they both have to agree on a common path. That’s not an easy task, but it is essential.
 

Second (and This Should Be Obvious to Everyone), Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

The hardest part may be to recognize the truth. At the NIH in the 1970s, the management style was benign and monarchical. Many employees perceptively referred to the large college-like campus in Bethesda as “the plantation.” Agency management consistently refused to level with its workers or explain why certain practices (such as the subjugation of laboratory technicians into dead-end jobs) existed. Instead, the agency lied to its employees (and itself), insisting that there was no barrier to advancement for folks who had masters’ but not PhD degrees, despite the creative and seminal work on the part the putatively less-credentialed.
 
The employees knew when agency management was shuckin’ and jivin’ over personnel policies. Shortsighted management didn’t understand that it was deluding itself and not befuddling its workers. The bosses, scientists all, had the attitude that they were intelligent, enlightened, progressive, and well-meaning folks. Therefore, nothing that they did could be in error. That delusional approach to human resources caused endless problems.