A company’s employees are more than just a means to a profitable year. They mean more to an company than just a computer-generated page full of personnel expenses that can be juggled to meet quarterly goals as management sees fit.
A business organization can be described in many ways; let’s look at it in terms of human physiology. The following list is a little incomplete, but you get the idea:
- Management serves as an organization’s central nervous system. It creates the intelligence, the strategy and the tactics, and communicates it throughout the organization.
- Financial capital is the company’s lifeblood. It keeps things moving smoothly. It creates products that bring in nourishment to the organization and its various component parts.
- Employees are its vital organs. If there is nothing or no one to produce products and services, then the best ideas, the best strategies will wither and die in the organization.
Management, capital and employees. Which is the most important? Management? No organization can survive without sound business strategy. Capital? No business can survive without positive cash flow. Employees? No company can survive unless someone does the work. So which is most important?
My cop-out answer: All three are equally important. All three present unique challenges to an organization’s success. Why then, are employees generally given short shrift when it comes time to downsize, to re-engineer? I have no answer, I merely post the question.
Employees represent the largest and most important investment a company can make. Look at an company’s list of expenses. Wages and salaries are right up there at the top. Therefore, doesn’t it make sense that responsible management should do everything it can to nurture and protect its investment?
By virtue of their function, employees are a company’s most important public. They are stakeholders in every sense of the word. The quality of their work, the depth of their commitment, the pride they hold for the company -- these all earn them the right to know, and help determine, the destiny assigned to them by management. When a company needs to communicate, it should communicate first with its employees.
The public relations profession should participate in this two-way communication, this inter-relationship between management and employees. We have a responsibility to do so, because we have consciously -- and with considerable forethought -- accepted the roles of counselor, facilitator and mediator. We have laid claim to this turf, so we’d better put our money where our mouth is.
I’m going to say something here about employee relations that’s going to make some public relations practitioners very angry: I don’t think that the public relations profession should actually produce (i.e., research, write, design, and lay out) the communication. That’s technician work.
Public relations professionals lament about how human resources (HR) departments are stealing the work we have traditionally owned -- they’re in charge of training, they put out the employee newsletter, they arrange for orientation tours, they . . . why, they do stuff that we should be doing.
My advice? Let them. Anybody can put out a newsletter, anybody can give a tour, anybody can arrange training. That’s technician work. Technicians are a dime a dozen. You can build a stable of free-lance technicians as easily as you can hire competent young, entry-level public relations associates. Outsource the work if you have to. There’s nothing wrong with technician work -- we’ve all done it. It’s just that each public relations professional should make it a personal goal to move beyond the technician level as soon as possible.
The profession should concern itself with the deeper questions: Why do we need to communicate? What is the ultimate behavior we expect our audiences to exhibit when we communicate with them? How can we tailor our delivery to ensure that the message is presented at a time when it will be most optimally accepted? We need to prove our value in employee relations strategy. The stakes are higher there. And I honestly think we owe it to the employees.
Here’s an example of how to think strategically so employees benefit:
- Observation: Employee turnover is horrendous. We’re losing all of our young talent too early in their careers. What are we doing wrong?
- Supposition: The young people are being lured away by competitors, with promises of a more prestigious title, increased responsibility and more money.
- Validation: How do we know this? They’re telling us in their exit interviews.
- Conscious Decision: We need to find a way to intercept their thought process before they decide to leave.
- Strategy: Talk to them continuously from the moment they join the organization. Ask questions of ourselves, and of them. What are they looking for in a career? What will keep them with the company? How can we help them achieve their personal and career goals?
- Tactic: Create a mentor-protégé program. Assign a seasoned professional to serve as guidance counselor, sounding board, a shoulder to lean on, confidant, and someone on whom the young employee can vent his or her frustrations.
- Result: Over time, we will learn what the problems are. Only when we know what they are, can we fix them.
Responsible employee relations goes beyond the traditional suggestion boxes, newsletters, memoranda, exit interviews, work stoppages, and rewards and recognition.
To be sure, these aspects of employee relations are vital and should not be discarded. It’s just that someone else can do some of this work -- HR departments, freelancers -- especially in these difficult times of downsizing and re-engineering. Companies cannot continue their traditional paternal existence. Maybe sometime in the future, but for now, times are tough.
Earn a place in the management huddle. You can do more for your employees there than you can by writing about them in the employee newsletter or publicizing their promotions in the local newspaper. You owe that much to them . . . and to yourself.
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