How good is the workplace communication in your company or
organization? Do you get the information you need to do
your job, and does management listen to you? Workplace
communication refers to the (mostly formal) channels and
procedures for getting and giving information, and as I'll
explain here, is management's responsibility.
A few years ago the British Broadcasting Commission aired a
series of unique business documentaries titled Back to the
Floor. If you're not familiar with the series, it featured
real-life Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) who leave their
comfortable offices and go work on the front lines of their
organizations for a week. Cameras followed the CEOs and
recorded their interactions with staff, and their responses
to those interactions.
In one episode, the managing director of London's Heathrow
Airport took the plunge and worked in customer service for
five days. That meant facing customers and dealing with
their problems, including problems created by the airport's
own management team. Again in this episode, workplace
communication turned out to be a key issue, as it so often
does in business stories.
At Heathrow, we saw a CEO taken by surprise, over and over
again, as he learned about work life at the front lines.
The CEO was rebuked by employees on the front lines, as
well as customers. Employees tried to convey to him the
difficulties they experienced because no one at head office
was listening to them.
And, that gap in workplace communication was a fairly
constant refrain in all episodes, as one CEO after another
found out he or she doesn't know much about what happens
when the organization comes face-to-face with real
customers and their needs.
Heathrow is hardly an exception. When I published a
communication newsletter, the most frequent reader feedback
involved management's failure to listen. Many readers felt
management doesn't know what's going on in the real world,
and perhaps what's worse, feel that management doesn't care.
There was also a feeling that individual managers were to
blame. However, in my research and experience, it's not a
'moral' failure on the part of individual managers, but
rather an institutional failure. In other words, the
mechanisms that allow or facilitate workplace communication
simply don't exist.
The first step in establishing and maintaining those
mechanisms is for management to accept responsibility for
them. Unless management takes the initiative, there can be
no channels for workplace communication, whether up or down
the hierarchy, to flow.
After all, employees can -- and often do -- express their
ideas and emotions. But nothing can happen unless someone
in management allows it to happen.
For example, in the Heathrow program, the managing director
spots some trash in an out-of-the-way spot and calls in a
cleanup crew. The customer service manager, who supervised
the managing director for the week, chastised him for
incurring an expense that wasn't in the budget (an
appropriate response because the customer service manager
would be chastised by his immediate superior if he had done
that). The CEO responded by making an important policy
change on the spot (another no-no for management); yet what
he really needed were mechanisms to get and give
information about such problems, and a then policy that
stipulated when exceptions could be made.
By creating a mechanism that allowed workers at the front
lines to communicate about that kind of problem (trash), he
would get both better results and greater employee loyalty.
In summary, effective workplace communication is only
possible when mechanisms exist to move information both up
and down within the organization, and only management can
establish and maintain those mechanisms.
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Robert F. Abbott writes extensively about business
communication, and his work includes the book, A Manager's
Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results. You can
more free workplace communication articles at:
http://www.communicate-with-confidence.com/workplace-communi
cation.html .
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