Who Cares?
28th March 2007 by Patricia Valdata
In a recent article in the San Antonio Express-News, Dave Beck (president of Frost Bank) writes:
“While compensation and benefits are important elements in making an employee feel valued, an attitude of genuine concern and caring can be even more important.”
My knee-jerk reaction was to think, “Yeah, right!” but then I remembered an incident a few years back, when I was only six weeks into a new job, yet I had to ask for several weeks of leave because my husband needed very scary, very urgent surgery. My boss–and her boss–were very generous in granting me the leave I needed to focus on my husband’s health. His surgery had a happy outcome, but an unexpected outcome for me was the warm fuzzy feeling I had from believing that my boss and her boss really cared. When I went back to work, I cared very much about doing a good job for them.
So maybe there’s something to the touchy-feely idea about employers needing to care about their people, and if there is, what should we as communicators be doing about it?
April 12th, 2007 at 3:11 am
I think that in this day and age most people working for large corporations are surrounded by policies designed to take much of the emotional and empathic practices out of day to day activity. We have become a careful and calculated series of “best practices”, and a lot of them are around protecting fair and consistent practices as well as protecting employees. It’s not hard to care, but it can be impractical to show it.
I often hear communicators within business described as the “Conscience” of the organisation. Perhaps an easy step for us within this role is to continue to bring the names and faces of our people to our execs. Let’s remember that communication can go in many directions and help provide channels and forums that keep the human element alive. I certainly agree that consideration and a feeling that your company knows who you are - and cares - helps motivate an individual and often people surrounding someone who has been on the receiving end of a show of kindness.
If you think about it, employees of large corporations are often customers as well. We should think of caring for our people as being every bit as important as our customer engagement/service strategy.
Ensuring a good employee survey and regular upward feedback system are in place can also be a healthy first step. I’ve always found that which gets measured, gets done!
April 23rd, 2007 at 9:56 am
I totally agree with Megan’s comment. We can build closer communication channels like portals to have direct communication with CEO, organizing teleconferences with him and those employees working outside headquarters, as well as quarterly town hall meetings (that is what we do in my company so far).
Conducting an engagement survey is always useful to have the whole picture of what is going on in the company, but it is very important to share the results with employees, and there is our job.
For example, this year we will take advantage of an annual corporate event where all employees are together and will work by teams in brainstorming ideas of how to improve our opportunity areas according to the results of the last engagement survey. Of course we are providing them a methodology and guidelines for the brainstorming in an organized way. Amongs the ideas generated by the teams, there was one related to recognition, where the proposal is to have some special training for managers to sensitize them on how to give recognition to their people in a very human way.
This way it is not the company that is deciding what to do, but we all participate in addressing our problems.
Recognition is the food we all humans constantly need, and it does not have to be necessarily in a monetary way. Making people being part of the problems and successes of the company is a way to give recognition and increase belonging sense.