Communication Starts With Getting Attention

Want to communicate with your employees? Get their attention first.

I saw this picture and post on The Cool Hunter under the title Do You Know First Aid? Billy describes the scene:

To raise awareness around World First Aid Day, DDB Canada placed life size realistic decals of a person at the bottom stairwells in Toronto. At first, the decal generates the impression that someone is lying down unconscious and needs help, but as you get closer, you’ll realize it’s just a picture on the floor with a call to action to visit www.redcross.ca for a first aid training course. Let’s hope it doesn’t freak someone out and give them a heart attack first.

People think in pictures in their heads is how Walter Lippman put it. Great HR and organizational communication takes advantage of that idea. How many people will remember this First Aid campaign versus if everyone had just gotten a memo? Beaucoup. Big ideas break through the clutter, make ideas memorable, and drive the behaviors you want. When in doubt, go with visuals.

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Want Real Teamwork? How About a Little Dutch Total Football

I was thinking about soccer this morning. Dutch Total Football, actually. I’ll get to that in a minute.

I worked in big companies a large part of my life. And in those big companies, everyone had a specialized role. So much specialization, in fact, that when Freddy Prinz said “It’s not my job, man” on Chico and the Man, everyone got the joke. It’s not my job was out in the open as a punchline. Sadly, it’s still prevalent in business no matter how much discussion we have about teamwork and cooperation.

Now I work in a relatively small company. We have consultants, designers, programmers, and administrators. Each of us has an expertise, a specialty, and the academic credentials to back it up. But we don’t have so many people that we can say “It’s not my job” and still get things done. We run our business a little like Dutch Total Football:

In soccer, Total Football is a system where a player who moves out of his or her position is replaced by another from his or her team, thus retaining their intended organizational structure. In this fluid system no footballer is fixed in his or her intended outfield role; anyone can be successively an attacker, a midfielder and a defender.

Total Football depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team to succeed. It consists of footballers being extremely tactically aware, allowing them to change positions at high speed – in its simplest terms, every player is comfortable in any other position. It also puts high technical and physical demands on the players.

When I lived in Amsterdam I was lucky enough to see Ajax play, and they use Total Football to perfection. Players have key roles, but there’s no “It’s not my job” on the pitch. Isn’t an approximation of Total Football what we really mean when we want to promote teamwork in HR?

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Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: Ford’s Bold Moves Campaign

In a brillant (and risky) business move, Ford Motor Company recently launched their total transparency program, Bold Moves. Here’s what it’s about:

Ford Bold Moves is a video documentary series that takes you inside Ford Motor Company as it attempts one of the largest corporate turnarounds in history. With candid interviews from Ford executives, employees, industry experts and even Ford detractors, Bold Moves approaches each segment from every angle and keeps asking the question: Will Ford succeed?

Bold Moves also involves you in the actual corporate decision-making process—allowing you to engage, debate and discuss what you think is relevant. Register with the site and you’ll be able to join the Bold Moves community, post comments, rate content and even download videos to post on your blog. [Snip]

Bold Moves is interactive, so it relies on you and an enthusiastic community of users to fuel the discussion and shape future episodes. Venture into the site and become a part of Bold Moves today.

Ford’s future depends on it.

If Bold Moves is indicative of where Ford is going, I’m going long on “F”. Unflinching truth. Unvarnished transparency. Unwavering fearlessness. “We’re at a turning point in this company. And we’re here to rip out the BS, to rip out the political postuing, get the issues on the table and stop the conflict. We’re going to pull back the curtain,” is the theme of the BoldMoves Intro. It looks like the real thing.

It takes guts to “pull back the curtain.” All too often we see companies hold back information until “all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed.” But waiting doesn’t work. Hesitiating is for the timid. What works is treating people like adults. Telling the truth. Being optimistic and realisitic at the same time. Listening. Ford’s doing that with Bold Moves. And I’m rooting for them.

My little morning fantasy is doing an HR-related “BoldMoves” campaign. Now that would be fun. The future belongs to the bold.

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A Simple Look at Diversity Statistics

The Miniature Earth intro says, “If the world’s population were reduced to 100, it would look something like this.” It’s a compelling look at the world that we live in with statistics that are easy to grasp. This “reduction to 100″ approach would be a killer way to show company diversity information.

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Some Great Gmail Advice

If you don’t have a Gmail address, you should. ‘Nuf said. If you do, there’s a cool hack revealed by Modern Day Alchemist that allows you to use Gmail to its fullest:

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it’ll still get to your inbox. It’s called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here’s how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work). More real world examples:

Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.

Example: You could use pinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.com and pinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.com Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.

I’m a pretty decent power user of Gmail, but this is a new way to organize information. Time is money.

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