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May 1, 2010

The Challenges of Employee Communications

By Kennedy Maize

Once upon a time, many years ago, I was in charge of employee communications at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. My job was to try to ensure that NIH management and its rank-and-file workers understood each other, in an environment where there was, and historically had been, great tension and antipathy.
 
Part of the tension was racial. This was the early 1970s, when black employees were asserting themselves as they had never done prior to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. The NIH had a large number of black workers, but very few in professional jobs. The African-Americans most often were animal caretakers, grounds keepers, security guards, laundry workers, and the like. They had good, steady jobs, but advancement was severely limited. There was no path to management jobs.
 
Part of the tension was class-based. There was, and may still be, a class barrier that prevented NIH professional workers who supported PhD researchers from advancing to higher levels at the agency. The lab technicians, no matter how skilled and inventive, could not move to the jobs occupied by the most credentialed scientists, even incompetents. This was a problem because much of the research work was done by the technicians; many were smarter and more creative than their bosses. This problem also had racial and gender overtones. The docs were mostly white men. The technicians were more often women and black.
 
Being chief of the employee communications branch was the most difficult and most frustrating job I have ever had in more than 40 years of employment. My experience in the job—which I lobbied internally at NIH to create—drove me away from government management and back to my first love and my greatest skill: journalism.
 
One of my cynical friends at the NIH, who died last year, taunted me that my NIH job really amounted to “explaining to employees why they aren’t being screwed, when they are.” There was much truth to that. On the other hand, it was clear that some employees and their advocates were using racial and class politics in seeking sinecures that put them into jobs beyond their abilities.
 
I took a few lessons about employee communications away from that experience. I share some of them below for those of you involved in communicating management issues and policies to employees.