Why start at 100 years ago looking for relevant research on employee communications in the digital age? To remember that leading management scientists of that day saw employees as interchangeable parts, like tools they used.
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| Frank Ovaitt |
If that idea seems amusingly quaint today (or if, unfortunately, you work in an organization where it’s not quaint at all), things did get better. Eighty years ago, the famous Hawthorne Studies produced findings that were striking at the time: If the boss pays attention to you, if you work in a friendly team, if you feel some control over your work—you become more productive.
The Hawthorne Effect may be more relevant than ever in the time of social media. But here are a few more lessons that emerge from recent research about communications to engage today’s employees:
1. With social media going mainstream in employee communication, the longer you wait, the further behind you’ll be.
The IABC Research Foundation’ s Employee Engagement Survey, with almost 1,500 participants from around the world, tells a compelling story. “Companies are moving away from the one-way communication model where they would send out information hoping people would read it,” says IABC president Julie Freeman.
In terms of methods used to engage employees, 72 respondents wrote in “social media”—and 80% of those use it frequently. Established digital channels like e-mail and intranet are heavily used by more than 70% of respondents. But print vehicles are falling behind, with 28% using them frequently and 29% occasionally.
2. For many organizations, mak i ng good use of internal social media looks like an uphill battle as top management focuses more on the bad than the good.
Robert Half Technology surveyed 1,400 chief information officers from a sample of U.S. companies with at least 100 employees. More than half of these companies—54%—completely block access to outside social media. Only 10% permit employees to use social media without restriction.
Concerns about on-the-job social media include an unholy trinity of lost productivity, security and reputation risk. Granted, this involves a management view of external social media. But if these technologies are so thoroughly mistrusted, it seems unlikely that those same executives would embrace social media for vigorous two-way employee communications.
3. There is a hierarchy of trust in digital communications that applies internally as well as externally.
Mashable recently inquired into the science of building trust through social media. An interview with Judith Olson, Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California-Irvine, described a hierarchy of trust based on years of study.
Text alone leaves itself wide open to misinterpretation. Readers can assign motives that the author never intended (or even imagined). Emoticons may by cute but hardly enough to put trust issues to rest.
Thus, Olson puts audio ahead of the chat window, and video ahead of audio. Why? The additional information carried by tone of voice, posture, eye contact, etc.—essential elements of human communication that give the listener more data to judge trustworthiness.
A great example of video communication done well was Domino’s Pizza president Patrick Doyle’s on-camera YouTube apology. This followed a series of gross YouTube videos by two employees. Doyle’s credibility was measured by Mediacurves.com, based on 234 respondents using a “believability meter.” The meter would spike and dip not only with Doyle’s inflection, but even with his use of real human concepts versus corporate-speak.
4. Giving employees more say in communications channels and content increases their satisfaction.
A 2009 research project by Bethe Spurlock of North Hills Hospital near Ft. Worth, Texas, and Julie O’Neil of Texas Christian University described how the organization engaged employees in redesigning its intranet. This represented a new level of involvement in two-way communications for the hospital’s employees. Their paper features before and after studies showing big jumps in employee engagement: their perception of communications effectiveness, having a voice in decisions and readiness to recommend the hospital as a great place to work.
Yes, there is a Hawthorne Effect. If we need repeated research to remind us, it’s better than forgetting. PRN
CONTACT:
Frank Ovaitt is EVP at Makovsky + Company, and CEO Emeritus of the Institute for Public Relations. He can be reached at [email protected].