This is our fourth and final post on the topic of improving corporate communications and discussion of the effectiveness of communications channels.  Again, we have pulled excerpts from a whitepaper entitled “New Frontiers in Employee Communications.”

Training – This is the area in which organizations appear to rely most heavily on traditional communications methods such as in-person, intranet and print communications (print communications received its highest favorability rating for training). This is not unexpected, as training is likely to be a more prescriptive, top-down form of communications that might not benefit from the collaborative nature of many new media tools. The form of new media scoring highest for training is podcasting, which offers an engaging way to communicate information and largely lacks the two-way aspect of other new media channels. Several leading organizations including Capital One, Xerox and National Semiconductor have begun distributing MP3 players to employees to facilitate training programs and information sharing through podcasts.

Identifying Employee Issues – In-person communications is the preferred way to identify what’s on workers’ minds. Among new media tools, blogs were considered the most favorable. Monitoring blog posts and comments by employees can be a useful way for communicators to gauge employee opinions.

Lastly, please refer to the “World Business Forum Sept 23-24, 2008 – John Chambers” for a case study on the use of new media for internal communications, especially video conferencing and video blogging.

As always, we welcome your comments!

To follow up our last two posts, we want to continue our discussion of improving corporate communications and discuss the effectiveness of communications channels.  Again, we have pulled excerpts from a whitepaper entitled “New Frontiers in Employee Communications.”  

Print Versus Electronic
The low rating of print publications versus electronic mediums, both in terms of usage and effectiveness, suggests that communicators at leading organizations have embraced electronic communication as the primary approach to reach employees. Given the size of industry-leading organizations and the diversity of their operations, electronic tools pose several advantages over print communications:

• Connects a global workplace – Online tools provide platforms for corporate communicators to reach diverse sections of employees and allow workers in different countries, sites and locations to communicate and collaborate.
• Audience segmentation/moderation – Online tools allow for targeted one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many and many-to-one forms of communications, depending on the context and goals of the efforts.
• Real-time – Constant connectivity means communications can be received the moment they are distributed and automatically updated as new information develops.
• Inexpensive – Decreasing broadband and bandwidth costs, combined with savings in printing and shipping costs, mean that online tools can provide organizations with significant savings for communications.
• More context – By providing an expanded space for information, a linked environment and improved search tools, employees can have access to specific information sent, as well as to related information that’s communicated on an ongoing basis.
• More dynamic – Corporate communicators can use online video and audio capabilities to make communications more engaging for stakeholders.
• Document trail – By storing and tracking communications, as well as by providing the ability to follow changes in information, new media channels can document the evolution of communications in organizations.
• Greater feedback – Electronic communications provide an easy and intuitive outlet for individuals to collaborate on business operations and strategy, allowing for immediate and personalized feedback directly to the communicator or user.
• More conversational – Often more free-flowing and informal, online communications often seem less “corporate” and provide a forum for candid discussions.
• Measurement – Online tools let corporate communicators track the use and comprehension of material more accurately, allowing for segmentation analysis and documentation of behavior change.

Look for our fourth and final blog post that will wrap up this topic next week. We welcome your thoughts and questions on the topic.

To follow up our earlier post, we want to continue our discussion of improving corporate communications and discuss the effectiveness of communications channels. Again, we have pulled excerpts from a whitepaper entitled “New Frontiers in Employee Communications.”

Effectiveness of communications channels

• For the third year in a row, in-person communications was rated as the most effective channel to communicate to employees.
• Among organizations that use multiple new media channels, wikis are viewed as the most effective.
• Blogs are considered a useful tool to impact culture change and identify employee issues within organizations.
• Respondents rate podcasts as a useful tool for employee training.
• Wikis are seen as a useful tool for collaboration and knowledge management.

Maximizing the intranet

Perhaps no internal communications tool is more versatile than the intranet, due to its ability to serve as a portal, displaying and providing access to a variety of different channels. While use of intranets is nearly universal among leading organizations (99 percent report usage), and portal technology is commonplace (72 percent), few companies seem to take full advantage of these sites by integrating communications channels and interactive features. Only slightly more than a third (34 percent) of companies reported using a message board, group or forum on the intranet, and nearly one in five companies (18 percent) are not able to stream video.

We will follow up with additional blog posts on the topic of corporate communications that discusses print versus electronic communications. We welcome your thoughts and questions on the topic.

I was recently working with a client on the subject of communication, and thought I would share some thoughts on that topic with you. Our project was about improving the quality of communications amongst three internal teams. We recommended beginning the process with a questionnaire and interview process and then sharing that feedback and challenging the client HR team to assist the other internal teams with improving their communication strategies. 

Our discussions included excerpts from a whitepaper entitled “New Frontiers in Employee Communications.”  Here’s a summary:

 Our examination of employee communications at industry-leading organizations reveals three things:

1. Despite increased awareness of new media technologies, companies are hesitant to adopt them for internal communications.
2. Organizations should consider a mix of channels depending on their communications goals.
3. Communicators misunderstand the obstacles to implementation of new media technologies in organizations.

Use of employee communications channels

• For the third year in a row, e-mail was listed as the most frequently used communications vehicle within companies.
• More than three-fourths of organizations use some online tool to share information and promote best practices, with intranets being the most commonly used channel.
• Nearly one-third of respondents report their organizations host, author or support a blog.
• More than one-third of corporate communicators report their organizations use podcasts.
• Slightly more than 10 percent of leading organizations report the use of wikis.
• Nearly all organizations use an intranet and nearly three-fourths use portal technology.
• Leading organizations are more inclined to use new media channels to communicate with internal audiences as opposed to external stakeholders.

We will follow up with additional blog posts on the topic of corporate communications in the coming weeks. We welcome your thoughts and questions on the topic.

On Thursday, May 27, Howard Cox of Somerset and Dave Swider of Bose McKinney & Evans are teaming up to present hiring and firing best practices. Howard and Dave will discuss how to increase the probability of attracting the right talent and what to do when, in spite of your best efforts, you make a hiring mistake. Please join us: http://bit.ly/aREF0j

Number 5 in our list of Human Resource Sins is the Burnout Sin.  It is caused by the cumulative effect of all of the other HR sins.  If you hire poorly, keep underperformers employed, promote people to positions where they do not have the skills to succeed and spend minimal time developing your human capital, you will end up with very few people in your organization you can truly count on. You will then be very tempted to over-rely on them until you run them out of your organization.

My hope is that by coming to terms with these 5 basic HR mistakes, you can create an organization where you and everyone else in it can prosper and reach their full potential.

The Mentoring Sin is that many of us spend far too little time mentoring in our organizations. Evaluations are performed on a periodic basis, and many of us are not very good about that either. Mentoring on the other hand is to be a constant in your organization.

The best role models for mentoring are successful college basketball coaches like Mike Krzyzewski and John Wooden. Coach K never misses an opportunity to coach and mentor his players on each and every possession in the real time of the game. Likewise, our internal meetings should be used for more structured mentoring, but are rarely utilized for same. Coach John Wooden believed that he should spend as much time preparing for his team’s practices as the time allotted for each practice itself. If you are going to have a one hour staff meeting, do you spend one hour preparing for it so that you maximize the opportunity to mentor your team?

Today, we are at #3 in our countdown of HR Deadly Sins–the Promotion Sin. This HR sin may be the most damaging of all because of what we call the Peter Principle double whammy. When you commit the Promotion Sin, you end up with an ineffective manager in your organization and you have lost one of your most or in many cases your single most productive front line teammate.

The good news is that the Promotion Sin is easily avoided if you understand the underlying root cause. The Peter Principle is caused by the fallacy that you should evaluate a person’s preparedness for a promotion based on their performance in their current job. The reality is that you need to evaluate their skill sets against those required for the new job instead.

We would love to hear your comments and discuss any questions you have.

The second Human Resource Sin we want to discuss is the Firing Sin. In this case, we have the exact opposite tendency from the Hiring Sin.  We fire too slowly for a variety of reasons, including fear, because we do not know how to protect ourselves from liability in the firing process.  However, I think the biggest reason we don’t pull the trigger quick enough is because we miscalculate the cost of underachievers in our organizations. 

We estimate the cost of someone who gets half the output that we expect from the position as costing us fifty percent of their salary.  The actual cost of tolerating underperformers is estimated at one-third of your total payroll cost including fringe benefits and payroll taxes.

The reason for this is the dramatic effect that the workforce equity balancing act has on overall productivity.  If you allow underperformers to exist, many of your other employees will dumb their performance down so they arrive at an equitable result in comparison to your underperformers’ output and compensation.

Have you committed the Firing Sin? We would love to hear your stories, comments and solutions.

Most entrepreneurs and executives agree that the hardest thing to get right in business is the human equation.  From my 27 years of experience in the business world as a business owner, a business executive, a board member and advisor, I have organized the most common HR mistakes into the following categories:

1. Hiring Sin
2. Firing Sin
3. Promoting Sin
4. Mentoring Sin
5. Burnout Sin

I’ll talk about #1, the Hiring Sin, in this post and will follow up with each of the rest in the coming weeks.

Hiring Sin
Generally, we are too quick to hire.  Some of our favorite hiring criteria are the 98.6 degree test & the fog the mirror test.  Why are we in such a hurry?  We assume that SOMEBODY is better than NOBODY; most of the time this is simply not true. 

We are really better off to work short handed with a committed team of proven performers for a period of time than to gamble on making a rush decision.  Further, we have to live with our hiring mistakes for some period of time and they almost always end badly.  They are also very expensive lessons, but more about that later when we discuss the firing sin in detail.

So how do we get this basic building block of business so wrong?  We hire from the wrong pool of candidates.  We don’t conduct the right pre-employment testing, and then we compound all of the above when we don’t ask the right interview questions.

So, what is the solution?  The good news is that it is very simple.  For most of us, hiring is not a core organizational competency.  Yes, we may have pockets of competency, but that hardly makes it a core competency. 

Therefore, to avoid this sin we must get serious about engaging the right outside professionals to acquire the necessary systems, tools and expertise.  I recommend hiring a recruitment process outsourcing professional or executive search firm.  Yes, these advisors cost money, but they are much less expensive than the cost of a bad hire for which estimates range from one to three times the annual salary of the position.

Have you committed the Hiring Sin? We would love to hear your stories and comments.