The U.S. Postal Service's $9.1 million project that will bring TV monitors to 380 USPS locations is more than a venture into progressive employee communications. It's proof that if you don't become the lead messenger for your workforce, it's likely someone else - like the press or your competition - will.
"We kept hearing from employees that they were hearing news about the postal service from the media before they were hearing it from us," said Margot Myers, USPS manager of employee communications and creative services. Myers is directing the TVI undertaking - the first ever such foray into push technology for USPS, which has one of the country's largest civilian work forces.
"We have been working on this project for three years, which began around the time we were undergoing some significant changes in how we would handle our employee communications in the future," Myers added. "These were changes that would put us in the driver's seat and help us deliver [to employees] more accurate and timely information."
In PR, it's easy to forget that getting news to your employees is just as important as reaching your other key constituents - investors, the media and your customers. Despite that, good employee relations has often been a genre of PR that's played second fiddle to other kinds of communication strategies.
The postal service project should sound some alarms for businesses in te private sector who are going to be - if they aren't already - challenged to improve their employee communications efforts. Other companies, such as Ford, Chrysler, Hewlett-Packard and Eastman Chemical Co., are also using Target technology, which is seemingly cost-prohibitive for companies with limited budgets.
USPS contracted the project to Target Vision Inc., a Pittsford, N.Y.-based company that designs and installs closed-circuit TVs and intranet-based systems for Fortune 500 companies.
For USPS, the culmination of its new employee relations philosophy comes to a head Sept. 30 when 350,000 USPS workers will be able to view TVI-installed monitors to access, 24 hours a day, time-sensitive and general USPS information as well as packaged national headline news transmitted by TVI over phone lines. One PR staffer among 12 at Myers' office will be assigned to handle editing the USPS content, which will be funneled through Myers.
"Our most immediate route used to be a broadcast fax, but that could take up to six hours to reach key personnel [since destination points have to be stipulated for each announcement]." Myers added, "Now, we'll be able to reach employees in 15 minutes."
Installing the monitors, which will be placed in areas like break rooms and cafeterias at processing and distribution centers, large post offices and administrative offices, was a move prompted by a $99,000 pilot study at six USPS sites.
Ironically, during that pilot phase, Myers said the organization got a taste of how the system could be used during a crisis. During the Oklahoma City bombing, USPS used the service to deliver news that two of its carriers were among the survivors as well as to report how one of its area offices became a supply center for paramedics.
"Our employees never would have known the postal angle," Myers recalled. "But this was also a way of giving our employees access to breaking national news. That's the kind of thing that helps make your employee communications credible - when you don't pull any punches."
"What we've found through the years is that as corporations downsized and integrated more of their services, people weren't using technology advances to communicate more effectively with their work force," said Tim Detota, director of sales for TVI. "And the biggest problem was when they were communicating, they weren't communicating in a timely way."
Because of that, TVI's system, which generally costs between $15,000 and $25,000 per site (equipment included) has become one in a line of communication tools - intranets, e-mail and bulletin boards - being used by major corporations to reach staffers.
For employee communications, USPS has relied on its intranet, its twice-a-week electronic Postalink newsletter (sent only to managers), its bi-monthly Postal Life magazine and broadcast faxes to reach employees who are limited by "top-down" communications.
What companies are discovering today is that a variety of communication channels are needed to have top-notch employee relations programs.
According to Myers and Detota, the Postal Vision system, as it's been coined, includes several features:
- A tie-in to the Postal Satellite Training Network, allowing for monthly video news features and other programs to be played back;
- A program, TVI NewsBreak, a nationally distributed news service produced by Target; and
- The ability for each location to create site-specific news and provide critical regional information.
"By hanging TV monitors in high-traffic areas where they're highly visible, we help companies take the guesswork out of whether they've reached an employee or not," said Detota. "Wha we've experienced with the companies we've done this for is that they usually learned through surveys of their employees that their staffs weren't satisfied with their employee-relations."
But for some big businesses like Eastman Chemical Co. (which became an independent publicly traded company during a January 1994 spin off from Eastman Kodak), it's been a wave PR execs have been riding for a while.
Eastman was one of the first large companies to use Target's technology, according to Detota and Gary Quillen, an Eastman employee communications staffer and editor of company-generated publications. Eastman Chemical has been using the Target system for nine years.
"An example of how we've used the system was during the Persian Gulf War when we had about 200 [National Guard] employees who were gone. We got permission from a local TV station to cut in live with a feed," Quillen recalled. "Since then, we've been able to pay for digital feeds from many systems, CNN for example. During the Waco crisis, we cut into the system for 10 minutes to let people know on the job what was going on off the job." (Margot Myers, 202/268-2191; Tim Detota, 716/248-0550; Gary Quillen, 423/229-2196)