Several years ago, employee relations took a media slap upside the head. It was the summer of Enron. The signature image was of people stumbling out of office buildings, clutching boxes filled with personal coffee mugs, Dilbert desk calendars, and framed grip-and-grin photos.
They had the dazed and hollow look of ambush victims. They never saw it coming. “Sorry about all that ‘happy news’ we’ve been giving you,” their bosses told them. “We’re actually going down the tubes. You have to leave—now.”
Yet one more unfortunate step was taken in destroying the retro notion of credibility between employer and employee. The previous decade’s cynicism about employer loyalty and job security—learning it was history—was one-upped by an even sadder reality: Employers are even losing their sense of personal integrity and common courtesy.
It becomes personal because there isn’t an employer that doesn’t claim to be seeking a loyal bond of “family” among its staff. Happy brothers and sisters, who not coincidentally offer higher productivity and lower turnover. No company says it hopes to earn the disloyalty of employees. All employers want the same thing, the same “family.” But the Enron nightmare was a perfect example of how not to treat your brethren.
The youngest of corporate pledges learn the rules quickly: Paper managers with memos and “heads-up” e-mails, because, they’re told, “nobody likes to be blindsided—nobody likes surprises.” But too often, the wisdom doesn’t seem to go from the top down. Who decided front-line employees, unlike their supervisors, like to be blindsided?
An employee poll by the Society for Human Resource Management found that the single most important factor in promoting the credibility of management is “communications—good news and bad.” So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when another poll, post-Enron, by Aon Consulting’s Loyalty Institute found that employee commitment was at the lowest level since the survey began in 1997. Yet another employee poll, from the Employment Law Alliance, revealed that the majority of employees have “little trust” in the abilities of management.
Common courtesy says we put on the turn signal when our lane is ending—it’s a visual request to join the other lane. Just moving over without it is a demand to be let in. Common courtesy says we hold the elevator door while someone rushes toward it. And yet the courtesy of giving the full truth to people who are our companies’ “greatest assets” is becoming alarmingly uncommon.
As the summer intern would say, something’s whack.
This is an issue where black hats can be found in several corners. You see, back in the day, bad guys in westerns always wore black hats, and Roy Rogers and other good guys wore white. It’s a generational thing. But I digress.
Paranoid poobahs in the executive suite are partially to blame. They trust no one, and figure employees are lucky to have a job, let alone information. But they’re also victims—of a culture driven both by Wall Street and business media. If a company lets slip one hint of weakness, it gets hammered. Shares plummet, stockholders revolt, and retiree nest eggs fall from the tree. Whereas the reward for silence and happy talk is usually just…silence.
As the employee surveys show, even today, things have to change. Common sense and courtesy must prevail, or this cubicle is going to be a pretty miserable place to work, pretend-family or no family. Truth and integrity have to become competitive advantages in hiring and staff retention, no less important than P&E ratios and market share.
Companies have to appreciate—as they once did—that being a good place to work is good for business. Sears saw that years ago, when they discovered it could use employee satisfaction scores as predictors for in-store sales performance.
Fortunately, broader change for the better has been coming. Rising from the embarrassing ashes of accounting scandals and corporate governance failures are companies with a newly juiced sensibility about the basics. After all, this isn’t rocket surgery: Tell employees the truth. Tell them often. And tell them what they want to know, not just what the executive suite feels is important.
New CEOs—replacements for the dirty and deposed—are pledging to talk with employees as much as they do with the board. A couple of years ago, when the new head of a troubled telecommunications giant said nothing was more important than communication with employees, the staff stood and cheered. The same company’s new communications chief said she believed in “radical transparency,” both with employees and analysts, and the street bumped the company’s stock price 20 percent.
Straight talk may yet replace happy talk, that fantasy children’s world where clouds never turn gray and profits never quiver. Employees may get to see the game plan, be treated as trusted teammates, and be taken into as much confidence as the SEC allows. If so, the market collapse ignited by Enron may be remembered for how it reawakened executives to collegial responsibilities within their home walls.
And maybe there will be happy families living in those re-polished office towers, after all.
Posted by daveattap 
