Developing Employee Communications
Many companies have found that the key to a good employee relations program is a communication channel that gives employees access to important information and an opportunity to express their ideas and feelings. When supervisors are familiar with employment policies and employees are aware of their rights, there is less opportunity for misunderstandings to arise and productivity to drop.
Because corporations are very complex, they must develop numerous communication channels to move information up, down, and across the organizational structure. For instance, Intel provides many communication channels that allow employees and managers to speak with one another and share information. Managers communicate with their employees by walking around and talking to them informally, sponsoring newsletters, and providing a Web site with key employment policies. Employees give feedback to managers through e-mail, memos, meetings, and other forms of face-to-face communication. As today’s organizations have delegated more responsibilities and decision-making authority to employees, the importance of making more information available to employees has increased substantially.3
Types of Information
Two forms of information are sent and received in communications: facts and feelings. Facts are pieces of information that can be objectively measured or described. Examples are the cost of a computer, the daily defect rate in a manufacturing plant, and the size of the deductible payment in the company-sponsored health insurance policy. Recent technological advances have made factual information more accessible to more employees than ever before. Facts can be stored in databases and widely distributed to employees by networks of personal computers.
Feelings are employees’ emotional responses to the decisions made or actions taken by managers or other employees. Managers who implement decisions must be able to anticipate or respond to the feelings of the employees who are affected by those decisions. If they cannot or do not, the plan may fail. For example, a public university changed its health insurance coverage without consulting the employees affected by the change. When these employees learned of their diminished coverage, they responded so negatively that the manager of employee benefits resigned. (The health insurance policy was subsequently changed to be more favorable to the employees.)
A company must be especially careful of employees’ feelings when it is restructuring or downsizing and laying off a considerable portion of its workforce. A production employee at a large East Coast manufacturing firm remembers how top management kept issuing memos that said, in effect, “we’re doing fine, we’re doing fine,” and then suddenly announced layoffs. Survivors of the layoff were shocked and hurt and became highly distrustful of management.4
Organizations need to design communication channels that allow employees to communicate facts and feelings. In many cases, these channels must provide for face-to-face communication because many feelings are conveyed nonverbally.5 Employees cannot write on a piece of paper or record on a computer database their complex emotional reactions to a decision that they fear will cost them their jobs.
How Communication Works
Figure 13.1 is a simple representation of the communications process within an organization. Communication starts with a sender, who has a message to send to the receiver. The sender must encode the message and select a communication channel that will deliver it to the receiver. In communicating facts, the message may be encoded with words, numbers, or digital symbols; in communicating feelings, it may be encoded as body language or tone of voice.
FIGURE 13.1
The Communications Process Within an Organization
Some communication channels are more appropriate than others for sending certain messages. For example, memos are usually not very effective for sending information that has a lot of feeling in it. A more effective channel for conveying strong emotions is a meeting or other form of face-to-face communication.
Communication is not effective unless the receiver is able to decode the message and understand its true meaning. The receiver may misinterpret a message for many reasons. For example, the message may be filled with technical jargon that makes it difficult to decode, the receiver may misinterpret the sender’s motives for sending the message, or the sender may send a message that lends itself to multiple interpretations.
Because of the strong possibility of miscommunication, important communications should include opportunities for feedback from the receiver. This way the sender can clarify the message if its true meaning is not received. In addition, noise in the sender’s or receiver’s environment may block or distort the message. Noise is anything that disrupts the message: inaccurate communication by the sender, fatigue or distraction on the part of the receiver, or actual noise that distorts the message (other people talking, traffic, telephone ringing). Very often noise takes the form of information overload. For example, if the receiver gets 100 e-mail messages in one day, she may not read the most important one carefully enough because she is overwhelmed by the barrage of information.
Communications that provide for feedback are called two-way communications because they allow the sender and receiver to interact with each other. Communications that provide no opportunity for feedback are one-way communications. Although ideally all communications should be interactive, this is not always possible in large organizations, where large amounts of information must be distributed to many employees. For example, top executives at large companies do not usually have the time to speak to all the employees they need to inform about a new product about to be released. Instead, they may communicate with the employees via a memo, report, or e-mail. In contrast, top executives at small businesses have much less difficulty communicating with their employees. The Manager’s Notebook, “How to Communicate Useful Feedback to Employees,” offers tips for managers who want to improve the communication process of giving and receiving feedback. (Note additional information in Chapter 7 on giving feedback during performance appraisals.)
MANAGER’S NOTEBOOK How to Communicate Useful Feedback to Employees
Customer-Driven HR
Here are some ways to communicate useful feedback to subordinates and other employees.
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▪ Focus on specific behaviors Provide feedback that lets employees know what specific behaviors are effective or need improvement. That way, they are able to sustain and intensify the desired behaviors and are motivated to change those that may be inappropriate. Avoid vague statements such as “you have a bad attitude.” It is better to give more specific feedback such as “you ignored the customer when she tried to get your attention.”
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▪ Keep the feedback impersonal Try to keep the feedback descriptive rather than judgmental or evaluative. To do this, focus on job-related behaviors rather than make value judgments about the employee’s motivations. Rather than telling an employee “you are incompetent,” it would be preferable to say, “I noticed some gaps in your product knowledge when you gave a presentation to the marketing group.”
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▪ Give the feedback at the appropriate time and place The best time to give feedback is right after the person who should receive the feedback engages in the behavior at issue. A manager who waits months until the formal performance appraisal to give the feedback has lost an opportunity to coach and motivate an employee to improve at the time the behavior was observed. Similarly, the appropriate place to provide critical feedback is in private. Giving negative feedback publicly can humiliate the person being critiqued and is likely to provoke anger rather than the intended result of the message. Conversely, giving positive feedback in front of others can be motivational not only to the person who is being praised, but also to others who may learn from the good example set by the employee whose behaviors are positively recognized.
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▪ Focus negative feedback on behaviors that can be controlled by the employee When giving negative feedback to another employee, focus on behaviors that the employee can control. For example, it may be appropriate for a manager to criticize an employee who is late arriving at a team meeting. However, if the manager asked the employee to handle a customer service problem that took longer to solve than originally anticipated, the criticism about tardiness may be unfair.
Downward and Upward Communication
Employee relations specialists help to maintain both downward communication and upward communication in an organization. Downward communication allows managers to implement their decisions and to influence employees lower in the organizational hierarchy. It can also be used to disperse information controlled by top managers. Upward communication allows employees at lower levels to communicate their ideas or feelings to higher-level decision makers. Unfortunately, many organizations erect serious barriers in their upward communication channels. For example, in many companies it is considered disloyal for an employee to go “over the head” of an immediate supervisor and communicate with a higher-level executive about a problem.
One final but very important note concerning communication in general: The U.S. economy is shifting from an industrial base to an information base. This revolution is as significant as the move from an agrarian to an industrial economy over a century ago. In an industrial economy, production processes are the focus of concern. In an information economy, communication (the production and transmission of information) is the focus. How information is communicated, both internally and externally, is becoming more and more important to organizational success.