Frozen hot chocolate.
That’s on a sign at my favorite ice cream place. It’s cute and funny there. Frozen hot chocolate.
But it’s not funny when we send conflicting HR messages to employees.
How about this? You talk teamwork all year, but your annual performance review is all about what you did as an individual.
Or this? You talk about the need for cutbacks and austerity while your execs ride around in private planes and limos.
Or this? You say you value creativity, but you have a time reporting policy that says it can happen only between the hours of 9 and 5.
There are a thousand instances of conflicting messages being sent out. Human capital, or warm bodies? People are your most important asset, or they’re disposable? Employees have unlimited career potential, or they can only expect a “3″ performance rating this year?
If you want business success, be consistent with your messages and your actions. Employees are watching. And they can see through the malarkey every time.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
One way to avoid conflicting messages is to be accurate when you communicate. Too often, employee communications is just rearranging the axioms. The “message” is what someone thinks they should be saying versus what, if they thought about it, they would know to be true. “Employees are our most important competitive advantage” comes out more easily than, “our most important asset is the patent protection that creates a legally enforceable monoply”. If the first one isn’t really true, it’s best to not say it, even if it sounds great.
Bill, it’s a good point…and I’m laughing about that “real” message. I’m reading Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World right now, and it’s about total world domination. Do you know we eat only one variety of banana, the Cavendish, when there are over 1,000 varieties available? Or that the legally enforced monopoly is what gives us bananas that came in the hold of a ship, were stored in ethylene-blanketed warehouses, and touched by 10 different hands and only cost 99 cents/lb? People aren’t their most important asset…domination is. (I’m not sure I’d be up to the challenge of framing that HR message for them, I must admit.)