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I have a love/hate relationship with company values. On the one hand, I see the potential in articulating what an organization truly prizes and aspires to live by. On the other, too often values become mindless, passive words that have no impact on an organization’s every day.

To be worthwhile, values must be actionable, unique and open to interpretation.

Actionable
Values must be introduced and reinforced in such a way that they become easy to immediately put into action. Your company’s policies and procedures should be in lock-step with your values. And if employees don’t follow the values, they should know it. On the Globoforce blog, Derek Irvine puts it this way:

“How can you expect consequences for employees not living the values if they don’t understand how to ‘live the values’ in their work in the first place? By creating an understanding of company values in their own, personal work through recognition and appreciation, you give your employees a positive context for understanding and repeating those values on an ongoing basis.”

Unique
Values should form the foundation for everything that happens in your workplace. That means your strategies, your employees’ behaviors and your competitive brand should be grounded in your values.

The next time I see another company with “customer satisfaction” as one of their core values, I think I will lose consciousness from indifference. But when I hear the value “create fun and a little weirdness,” I take notice and quickly get a sense for what makes that company different and special. (That company, by the way, is Zappos.) Make your values unique and true to who you are.

Open to interpretation
Values are not a moment in time – they are about an ongoing journey, one that should inspire discussion and interpretation. Rosabeth Moss Kanter from the Harvard Business Review says this:

“The entire work force can enter the conversation; employees are invited to discuss or interpret values and principles in conjunction with their peers, who help ensure alignment. . . The words become a basis for on-going dialogue that guides debate when there is controversy or initial disagreement.”

Good values are more than words. They jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of employees. So let’s stop with the stale statements and make values valuable.

If you haven’t picked up the July 2010 issue of PRWeek yet, now’s the time. Not only does Insidedge have an attractive ad (is that biased?) on page 22, but the issue features a thought-provoking op-ed piece by our president, Keith Burton, about the accelerated rate of employee turnover in American companies. If you have a subscription to PRWeek, you can read the article online at www.prweekus.com in the Editorial section. Otherwise, here’s the full piece for your reading pleasure:

The Unnecessary War for Talent

The year was 1835. Charles Darwin, aboard the S.S. Beagle, witnessed an 8.5-magnitude temblor that struck the coast of Chile. When Darwin went ashore, he noticed how the region had been forced up, leading the evolutionist to speculate that the Andes Mountains could have been created by a series of quakes. His observation became one of the most important geologic insights in our history.

The signs are always there. The trick is observing them and learning what they mean.

In the spring of 2008, reengineering guru Michael Hammer told us how a major food company was running a global unit with fewer managers – one for every 56 front-line workers. Everything we learned about organizational effectiveness this past decade told us that a front-line manager should optimally oversee no more than 12 employees to facilitate strong engagement and communications. Yet these food industry workers, once they were briefed on the company’s plans and processes, would be expected to act as self-directed teams.

When our economy collapsed in 2008, companies did what they invariably do when times are tough – slashing jobs, freezing pay and eliminating training and development programs. They cranked up the overtime rather than hiring new workers to bolster the sagging energies and morale of those who had wrenched their way through the downturn. And they asked those beleaguered managers who had taken on ever-larger numbers of direct reports to press on.

If ever there was a recipe for disaster, you’ve just tasted it.

Fast forward to February 2010, when the number of employees voluntarily quitting surpassed the number being fired for the first time since 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Right Management reported that 60 percent of the workers they polled in 2009 said they would quit their jobs when the economy improved – an alarming number.

With the economy improving, our leaders are troubled. They tell us they’ve been hunkered down, worried about profits and operations, without time for mingling with their employees. Only now have they resumed the long march among staff, asking how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking and how conditions can be made better. What they’re hearing is, “You’re too late,” and, “Pay me significantly more if you expect me to stay.” We should expect attrition to grow dramatically in the days ahead.

Why do we always return to fight the unnecessary war for talent? Because employees speak but leaders don’t listen. Because we take up management models that force front-line leaders to choose between certain failure or a new employer that values employee engagement. Because companies slash and burn what employees value most — programs designed to manage, retain, develop and advance high performers.

The signs are always there.

One of the most important roles a corporate communicator can play in their organization is that of the Chief Simplicity Officer. By championing the cause to simplify business processes, abbreviate policies and procedures, eliminate bureaucracy and encourage a culture of colloquialism and candor, you can help free your executives and employees up to get real work done.

I love this quote from a recent BusinessWeek article in which the author argues against overdone policy manuals:

You know who’s making money for your employer right now? Workers who are selling, building, or inventing stuff. You know who’s spending the business’s money right now? Other employees (most easily found in HR, IT, and Finance) who’ve been commanded to write, administer, and enforce the 10,000 policies that make up your company’s employee handbook. Overblown policy efforts squelch creativity, bake fear into your culture, and make busywork for countless office admins, on top of wasting paper, time, and brain cells. What to do instead? Nuke one unnecessary or outdated policy every week and require the CEO’s signature to add any new ones.

Though communication may not have direct control over your company’s policies and procedures, you can have a strong influence in setting the tone for simplicity. Recently, a Fortune 500 client of ours reworked their employee code of conduct manual under the editing eye of the employee communications team. The result? The hundreds-of-pages-long “snooze fest” that was became a 12-sheet page turner, filled with relatable anecdotes and plain ole’ English.

Long live the CSO.

Working smart versus working hard. 

Work time versus family time. 

Work as an end versus work as a means.
 
Work-life balance continues to be a hot topic, but it’s hardly a novel one.  After all, perhaps the most famous of all of Aristotle’s ideas is the “Golden Mean” – the idea that virtue is found in balancing two opposite vices. 

But if we’ve been talking about it for so long, why does it remain so elusive?  Is there really magic to be found in this idea that balance makes us not only happier, but smarter, more creative and more efficient?  And if that’s true, does it benefit employers and not just employees? 

I’ll confess that I’m part of Generation Y, a segment of the workforce that has been a bit scorned for being high-maintenance and maybe a bit entitled.  This generation has challenged this notion of work-life balance far more than those before, because they actually value things like flexible work schedules and creativity over salaries and titles. 

So, what does this mean for employers?  In the last month, I’ve read three separate articles that argued why time off and working “smart” is something that employers should actually encourage and not just grudgingly accept. 

Citing a four-year study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, an article in the Wall Street Journal shares some surprising findings.   When members of twelve different teams at a consulting company were forced to take a block of “predictable” time off each week, productivity actually improved.  Beyond that, teams became better communicators, were viewed more favorably by their clients and streamlined their work processes. 

In an article titled “Hard Work’s Overrated, Maybe Detrimental,” Fast Company  asserted that if you’re a company that wants your employees to be creative and innovative, then time off is not only nice, it’s necessary.  As the author says, “Have you ever had a great idea at your desk?  But how often does that bulb go off in the shower, or in bed?”  Using neuroscience to back up the claims, the argument suggests that allowing time for employees minds to wander and encouraging them to engage in unstructured conversations actually leads to better solutions and ideas than they’d come up with just sitting at their desks. 

Now, it all sounds great in theory, but more difficult in practice, right?  There won’t be any one-size-fits-all solution, but there are a variety of ways that company’s can incorporate this idea. 

1. Encourage your employees to take their vacation days – and for them to actually be on vacation.  How many of us go on vacation but spend a good portion on our Blackberries?   There’s value in really unplugging from the grid. 
2. Schedule “unscheduled” time – sure, it’s a bit of a contradiction, but set aside some time when teams are encouraged to get together and just free-flow ideas.  From the outside, the topics of the discussion may seem unfocused and unproductive, but that’s the point. 
3. Create an office atmosphere where people can work in places other than at their desks – often a change in scenery sparks new ideas and encourages better creativity.  Be flexible. 
4. Consider instituting a sabbatical program – the topic of another Fast Company article, many argue that longer periods of time off not only make employees happy, but they also allow them to step away, see the bigger picture and come back with a new perspective.  There can certainly be structure to the sabbatical, however.  Maybe the employee wants to go teach in another country, for example. 

There are a multitude of ways that employers can create an atmosphere that fosters creativity and helps employees achieve the “Golden Mean.” What are your company’s policies for encouraging work-life balance and helping keep employees engaged and innovative?

I once worked for a top-level executive who really understood the concept of employee involvement. He didn’t approach it like a swim lane in a presentation; it wasn’t a phase in a project timeline. He naturally and sometimes spontaneously would ask employees from the front-line to be a part of a new project, initiative or change program. He would personally call to solicit their thoughts, what were they hearing, what was working, what wasn’t. He would pop into a cube and ask someone to attend a project meeting and share insight or feedback. Often, these ground-level participants were young, fresh-minded upstarts who would naturally infuse new ideas or known influencers who would race back to their cubes to share what they learned in the work sessions or brainstorming meetings. Other times they were people he knew were going to resist change and needed to be brought along. His department became known as progressive, dynamic, and quick to adopt change. Employee involvement. He just got it.

It doesn’t always have to be strategically planned out. It doesn’t necessarily have to come before or after certain milestones. Yes, focus groups are a level of involvement and yield valuable insight and information. Yes, formal ambassador training programs work, and bring employees to a certain level of understanding. And of course, C-suite support up front is a given for success of any new program or change initiative. But true employee buy-in (support, motivation, engagement, trust, ambassadorship) comes from involvement, which is more organic than a class or a session. It’s being a part of the movement. Being part of the forming, rejecting and accepting of ideas. Involvement is when employees have an impact on the decisions being made, whereby they choose to share with other employees, and choose to be motivated and engaged. Employee involvement – just do it.

In The New Human Capital Strategy, Bradley Hall, a consultant and instructor to Duke Corporate Education, advances a view we’ve long known about the importance of managers in driving corporate culture and in ensuring great performance. Hall says that for the world’s leading quick service restaurant chain, every restaurant is essentially the same except for location — same menu, same prices, store layout, etc. I can’t agree with his assertion of “sameness” because we know that this organization is among the leaders globally in understanding how to customize its store locations, menu offerings and more to meet the tastes and expectations of customers. Hall does, however, assert a critical point about what differentiates a low- from a high-performing store unit: the manager. He says the company can take a failing store, import a winning manager, and with basically the same crew of associates as before, the restaurant will begin to recover in a month. Great managers, he believes, deliver great results.

Hall’s view is one I’ve heard before from other intuitive leaders. One in particular, Mary Alice Taylor, who served as senior vide president at FedEx in the ‘90s, even went so far as to test her theory by relocating successful station managers into more than two-dozen underperforming stations in a drive to recapture more than $134 million in annualized costs related to profitability, reduction of turnover among customers and staff, and a critical push to achieve and exceed operating objectives while maintaining a non-union status. As with Hall’s point, what we learned in this experiment is when you move good managers into failing operations, they deliver. “In FedEx,” an executive told us when we interviewed him to understand the forces that drove the internal brand, “the local manager is the corporate brand. They live the brand and define it.”

Winning managers understand the critical role they play in connecting senior executives to front-line employees. They know they are the most trusted channel for communication in companies everywhere; in fact, I like to say that when a manager and her report meet to discuss a change or pivotal event, “the rubber meets the road” when they engage together in this hallowed moment in time.

Great managers know they must “translate” what they’re told so that it makes sense to the people who work for them. Great managers truly listen for feedback and channel it to their supervisors and leaders so that the company can react and adjust its plans, actions and communications. Great managers are the best communicators, without exception.

It begs the question: What are companies thinking today when they eliminate managerial ranks – the men and women who play such a critical role at the front line? Who will take their place? When covenants are broken with managers and their reports during periods of downsizing, rightsizing, offshoring, restructuring, the stripping of compensation and benefits, should we be surprised when great managers decide they no longer want to act as “connective tissue” in welding together a culture wracked by change? In so many ways, they want to stand on their own — not relying on others for HR field support or local marketing, for example. And when it comes to their integrity, trust and reputation, you can expect they may ultimately decide to stand alone here, too.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published “Economists Call for Bernanke to Stay, Say Recession Is Over.”  To accurately portray the article, let’s be clear that what they are really saying is that the worst is over, but I suspect this is still welcome news to anyone who owns a home/stock/business, has a job, wants a job or just has grown weary of the dismal news we’ve been hearing since last year. 

As an internal communications consultancy, this has been an interesting time for our business and our clients.  Pick up any paper and you’d find stories about companies in “bet the farm” situations, organizations making the tough decision to layoff employees and corporations overhauling their HR structures to try to conserve as many resources as possible.  Certainly, our clients haven’t been immune to the challenges created by the financial crisis. 

Various articles (including this one) have been written about the value and importance of employee engagement and internal communications during a time as unsettling as many had ever seen.  For many companies, talking to their employees and trying to help them navigate through difficult periods became the #1 communications priority.  Sadly, others continued with communications-as-usual or, worse, buried their head in the sand and left it up to employees to connect the dots.

Now that we’re starting to think about returning to “normal” and working in an economy that’s starting to stabilize, what happens next?  A survey released by Watson Wyatt indicates that many companies plan to curtail spending in employee communications in areas like pay, benefits and business strategy. 

While I understand that everyone wants to relax a little and return to normal, I have to argue that this is absolutely the wrong approach.  Have companies made it through the worst of the recession?  Maybe.  But not without consequences to employees, who likely have worked more for less, seen colleagues leave and tried hard to understand sudden changes in their company’s strategic direction or priorities. 

Employees still (always!) need to hear from supervisors and corporate leaders about the company’s near- and long-term direction, especially how they can contribute to making it a reality.  And, as we all take a deep breath and things normalize, employees will wonder how their company will go about reversing any policies that have been put in place.  Will you start 401k matching again?  When will the hiring freeze end?  Are you going to reinstate reward/recognition programs?

One of the lessons of this turbulent economy was that many companies learned how to be better communicators – they finally seemed to understand that if their employees weren’t engaged, the game was over.  So, the recession may be receding (and my fingers are tightly crossed on this one) but communications shouldn’t. 

Lee Iacocca, the auto legend known for his leadership tours with Ford and then Chrysler during the ‘80s when he secured more than $1 billion in Federal loans to rescue the company, has told the Associated Press that the successful merger of Chrysler and Fiat is not assured because there may well be “a cultural clash of some kind in different languages. But they’ll bring people together and hopefully it will work.”

How soon we forget the merger of Daimler and Chrysler in 1998, when legions of American and German managers battled the same issue — aligning cultural differences — unsuccessfully. There were stories of employees shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic weekly in an effort to make the $37-billion acquisition successful. But it never happened. In 2007, the Chrysler unit was sold for about $7.4 billion to Cerberus Capital Management, with Daimler citing high labor costs and the more-nimble Japanese car companies as factors leading to the failed merger.

Michelle Krebs, writing for Edmunds Auto Observer has said that the DaimlerChrysler merger was doomed from the beginning because it was presented as a “merger of equals.” In truth, it was never that. Daimler was the acquiring partner, and Krebs says employees felt like they were “treated as a stepchild, not like a partner.” Krebs further writes that the egos of men who were made rich off the deal drove it, rather than compatibility. And she says the relationship lacked commitment, vision and the leadership to make it work. “Employees didn’t know what the relationship was supposed to look like in the end,” Krebs wrote. “Leadership didn’t draw the picture, nor did they encourage the two companies to mesh.”

What lessons do we learn when worlds collide? That those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and how we go about translating, aligning and building commitment for a compelling mission, vision, goals and the values of the organizations involved, is critical to the success of a merger.

For many in business, nothing strikes more fear into the hearts of leaders than two little words: change management. Leading successful change efforts can seem daunting at best, impossible in the least. There’s an overabundance of philosophies, models, strategies, mechanisms and theories that too often contradict each other, making it hard to know what to do or where to start.

Turns out the good folks at TIME magazine have made it easy for us: In a recent article about how Barack Obama used behavioral scientists in his campaign to get the vote out, author Michael Grunwald shares the four best strategies for managing change. Now I don’t truly believe that change management can be that simple. But I do think these steps represent a great, practical summary of the best change management strategies out there. 

Though written from more of a macro, social change perspective, these stategies are still just as applicable inside our own organizations.

Make It Clear – Studies suggest that better information – about energy use, our diets, our mortgages, our credit cards – can help us make better choices. Public outreach and celebrity spokespeople can help; strict rules requiring disclosure and clarity can help more.

Make It Easy – We are an inertial species. We are much likelier to save for retirement or be organ donors if we are automatically signed up to do so as a default and have to take action to opt out. We’ll do almost anything – even things that are good for us – to avoid extra paperwork.

Make It Popular – Nothing drives behavior more than the power of conformity. Research shows that homeowners are most likely to save energy, weatherize or recycle when they think everyone else is doing it. Now we need healthy living and financial responsibility to become social norms too.

Make It Mandatory – Sometimes nudges aren’t enough. When government really wants people to behave in a certain way, it can make it the law – through mandates for efficient appliances or health insurance, or limits on carbon emissions or financial leverage, or outright bans on drugs or exotic mortgages.

Think you know modern management theory? Think again. According to Marina Gorbis, president of the Institute for the Future, all of the major business principles we’ve learned and applied over the years – from maximizing shareholder profits, to hierarchal organization charts, to “carrot-and-stick” behavior incentives – are on their way out. So what does the future hold? Epidemiological views of systems, “amplified individuals” and neuroscience (I know . . . deep). Her take on employee engagement is especially interesting:

“How do you get thousands of people to do things for free simply because the task is so absorbing, so satisfying, that they can’t stop? We see examples of this every day — people sharing links and ideas on Twitter, contributing Wikipedia entries and edits, offering reviews on Yelp, and spending hours playing online video games. My colleague Jane McGonigal, renowned game researcher and designer, calls this retreat from reality. But rather than blaming people for spending time on useless pursuits, ask yourself what is it that these platforms and worlds offer people that you don’t? And how can you harness this kind of engagement for the benefit of your project?”

Read more in Marina’s article from Roll Call – fascinating stuff.

(Found via Boing Boing)