Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Leaders of reorgs typically fall into one of two traps when communicating with their employees. We’ll call the first one wait and see and the second ivory-tower idealism. Perhaps you have seen one, or both, in your own reorgs.

In the first trap, wait and see, the leader of the reorg thinks everything should be kept secret until the last moment, when he or she has all the answers. The leader makes the reorg team and leadership swear to secrecy and then is surprised when the news leaks to the wider organization (it always does, we’re afraid). As the reorg team starts to engage with the rest of the organization, the rumors round the water cooler increase: “They were asking what my team does”; “I had to fill in an activity analysis form”; “I hear that 20 percent of jobs are going to go.” Everyone thinks the real reason for the reorg is job losses (whether it is or not). The leader, desperate to get in control of the situation, pushes the team to develop “the answer” so that he or she can tell the organization. Without an “answer,” the leader feels that any communication would come across as defensive. At most, the executive approves some question-and-answer sessions on the reorg. But a full-scale communication needs to wait. Eventually, the leader has the answer: the reorg team produces a high-level org chart. The leader then announces the new organization: here are the new leaders, here is the structure, some job losses are necessary, but this is going to help us deliver fantastic results. Employees, hearing this, hear only that their boss’s boss’s boss is going to change and that some of them are going to lose their jobs. Nothing their leader has said counters the impressions they formed at the water cooler.

Ivory-tower idealism fares little better. In this version, the leader of the reorg is finally getting a long-achieved objective: all the issues of the old organization will finally get fixed; everything the leader wanted to do, but was held back from, can now be achieved. The leader can barely contain the excitement. So psyched up by the possibilities that the reorganization offers, the leader decides to start the process with a webcast to all staff, telling them about the exciting business opportunities it will open up. The leader follows this up with a series of walk-arounds in the major plants and offices, discussing the opportunities and getting input on some of the challenges that people face in the organization today. The leader puts a personal blog on the company intranet....

The idea is to simply turn your employees into brand advocates on social and leverage their social connections to crank up your social reach exponentially.

Running an employee advocacy program isn’t a textbook strategy. There’s no set method that will work for everyone, and you’ll have to build your program to fit your own business from scratch.

So what’s the most effective way to do that?

Let’s first break down the definition of social employee advocacy and then study the essential elements of most successful advocacy programs.

Snapchat has become one of the most popular and talked about platforms for 2016. Even during the Super Bowl, we saw brands such as Marriott, Amazon, and even Gatorade jump on board, with ads just on Snapchat. In addition, there areother brands that advertised during football’s biggest night that you may want to check out.

While Snapchat has been used for brands and other public relations campaigns, it can be used for collaborative and teamwork efforts as well. In fact, I used Snapchat for the first time this semester to not only showcase what I am doing in my classes, but also to document, share, and collaborate with my students and fellow PR professors on projects and assignments.

Here are some ideas to consider for how to use Snapchat for collaboration and teamwork feedback:...

The workforce shift from baby boomers to millennials is creating a sense of urgency for small and large company leaders to focus on culture, as talented, creative employees search for a place where they fit in, feel valued, and enjoy what they are doing.

To figure out how to identify the right interactions to promote, CultureIQ measures 10 different operational and strategic company qualities. Shanklin said that three are most important: support, work environment, and mission and value alignment.

“It’s really about a company’s response to employee input,” he said. “And resources — people feeling that they’re equipped to do their jobs. When it comes to the mission and value, it doesn’t matter so much what those are, just that they exist, are clear, and the leadership models them.”...

Days after taking over as Twitter’s permanent CEO, Jack Dorsey has laid off 336 people. You could learn a lot from the straightforward, honest, and sensitive way he tells his company about it.

The corporate layoff is a communications trap for leaders. It makes them insecure, so they they adopt HR bullshit and talk about “reduction in force”, “rightsizing”, “eliminating positions.” But they don’t have to. Here’s how Jack Dorsey told Twitter he was letting a big chunk of the company go....

When it comes to engaging employees on the journey to enterprise social, getting 75,000 employees or 50% of your staff to actively use one network is about as ambitious as it gets.

Veyronique Vallieres, Internal Communications and Community Manager at ABB, worked a long time on adoption as part of the company's vision to break down internal silos and enable greater collaboration across 100 countries.

"We are one of the global leaders in power and automation technologies providing literally thousands of products and solutions to reduce environmental impact around the world. Being aligned internally as an organisation is not only crucial, it is essential."...

Joel Gascoigne, CEO of social media tool startup Buffer, shared a 3500-word post in which he explains why he’s laying off 10 of his 94 employees. In contrast to bloodless posts from the likes of Inteland Microsoft, it indulges a different sin: oversharing.

A lot of my correspondents forwarded Gascoigne’s post to me, hoping I’d praise it because it is so different from the other CEO communications  I’ve shared. And there is a lot to like here: it’s extremely open, fair, and honest. Gascoigne is living his sincere promise to be transparent.

But a CEO should be communicating the realities of his or her business regularly, not dropping it all at once in a 3500-word lump along with a layoff. What a team wants from their CEO is to share what’s relevant, not to share everything. This is a good example of how it’s possible to overdo transparency....

It’s the age-old conundrum for leaders and managers—we want to have motivated employees and we want their engagement, but do we have enough resources, the right people? Are we treating them right? How can we know?

Here’s how one tech support manager handles this challenge.

She just asks.Instead of worrying, guessing, and engaging in trial and error, Katie Douthwaite asks her teams the following four questions....

If you’re the kind of boss who fails to make genuine connections with your direct reports, take heed: 91% of employees say communication issues can drag executives down, according to results from our new Interact/Harris Poll, which was conducted online with roughly 1,000 U.S. workers.

In the survey, employees called out the kind of management offenses that point to a striking lack of emotional intelligence ;among business leaders, including micromanaging, bullying, narcissism, indecisiveness, and more. In rank order, the following were the top communication issues people said were preventing business leaders from being effective....

The internet and cell phones have infiltrated every cranny of American workplaces, and digital technology has transformed vast numbers of American jobs. Work done in the most sophisticated scientific enterprises, entirely new technology businesses, the extensive array of knowledge and media endeavors, the places where crops are grown, the factory floor, and even mom-and-pop stores has been reshaped by new pathways to information and new avenues of selling goods and services. For most office workers now, life on the job means life online.