Writing Boots

One more time: Why we are 'sharing Information with imployees'

In this final installment of our series on Sharing Information with Employees, the first and best book ever written on employee communication, we let author Alexander Heron speak for himself, first on how we know when we've created a successful program of employee communication, and second, on the result of such a program. —DM

Heron writes:

If our program of sharing information with employees, through all the channels and methods named above, is completely successful, the result—and the evidence of success—will be questions!

The supplement we must provide is an adequate plan for meeting these questions. Meeting them does not mean parrying them; it means answering them.

Some of the questions will be annoying or embarrassing. Some of these will drive us, the employers, into fields of thought which we have avoided. Some of them will test the completeness of our willingness to share information with employees; they will force us to ask ourselves if we have really meant it.

If there have been conscious or unconscious limitations in our willingness, we shall be in a most unfortunate position, much worse than if we had stayed with the narrow but consistent position that information about the business was none of the business of the employee. ...

The employer who supplies to his employees only those facts and figures which portray him as benefactor, or as an object of sympathy, is likely to get no good result from the beginning. The employer who enters a program of sharing information with employees and later admits that he meant it "within certain limits" has injured his relation with employees, probably seriously and permanently.

And the upside of embarking on a rigorous program of employee communication? A happy and meaningful return, for employees and for management of big, impersonal corporations, to the "understanding unit," the 19th-century furniture shop that Heron so vividly described near the outset of the book. This is the place where the workers understood the situation the boss was in and the boss knew where the workers were coming from and everyone appreciated the scope of the operation and intimately knew the customer they served:

The "understanding unit" must come back into industry. When it does, we shall have recaptured the soul of that old furniture shop. Without destroying the efficiency of modern big business, the pooling of capital, the productiveness of great industrial plants, we shall have restored the living, understanding relationship of the good old days. We shall have, among the thousands of workers of the great factory, hundreds of "the understanding units" into which our grandfathers put their strength and interest, because they knew, and understood!"

I'm at once moved and reassured to find such a sturdy foundation for my belief that employee communication is a discipline that theoretically can make American work life—and thus the life's work of more Americans—more meaningful.

I'm also discouraged by the lack of progress we've made since 1942 and daunted by the job that lies ahead and the cloudiness of my own view from here to 2042.

But you know and I know that there's nobody but us—the students and practitioners of employee communication—who share Heron's viewpoint.

And so it's up to us to figure out how to make this theory real—organization by organization, understanding unit by understanding unit.

Let us begin, together.

The vehicles of yesterday, today!

Alexander Heron seems kind of bored, discussing communication vehicles. Like a lot of internal communication big thinkers who have followed him, he has contempt for the reader who demands to know exactly how to get the messages across. "Do I have to do everything for you?!” he seems to demand.
        Nevertheless, his game effort to survey the hottest communication media of his moment affords us insights by comparison and contrast.
        In the next-to-last installment of my series on the first and best book ever written on employee communication, I’ll take them one by one. —DM

The Bulletin Board. Heron’s tips effective bulletin boards might as well be a seminar on Twitter (or the internal communication app, Yammer). He says messages on bulletin boards must be brief, current and relevant, and he issues a final warning about bulletin boards: “Too much matter of any kind will lead to a growing disregard of the bulletin board. Then we can no longer depend on it as a medium for telling and emphasizing those things which are important to our immediate operating plans.” Got that, Kawasaki?

The Pay Insert. Yes, kids, there was a time when “direct deposit” meant you didn’t cash your paycheck at the tavern, but took it straight home to your wife. And in those good old days, the paycheck stuffer was an important means of internal communication because, as Heron points out, “it reaches every employee more surely than any other medium. It occurs at a time of automatic attention; the employee is alert to the arrival of his check or envelope, ready to look at it and check its correctness in some cases, perhaps even see if it reflects a raise. Moreover, he cannot refuse to take it. And almost always in the case of family men the envelope or check will go home and be seen by the wife.”

As old-fashioned as the pay insert is, it occurs to me that reaching spouses is one dimension of employee communication that’s been sorely neglected in recent years (though it was frequently discussed as recently as the 1990s, when I was first studying this business). Is it no longer of any importance at all to give employees’ families a little corporate news and context—or is it just preposterous to imagine they might actually read your corporate horsehockey?

The House Organ. (Not a musical instrument, peeps; the old-fashioned name for an employee publication.)

Lots of modern consultants and practitioners have passed themselves off as bleeding-edge by dismissing “babies and bowling scores” as legitimate content for an employee publication. Well, Heron was making the same point in 1942, recommending a second, “radically different type of house organ”:

Instead of relying on names and news and pictures of employees, to get itself read … it features persons only when an action or achievement is an expression of company tradition or character: an act of heroism by a member of a safety committee which expresses a tradition of interest in safety; or the completion of fifty years of service, which reflects the stability of the enterprise and its practice of retaining its employees. It leans toward direct discussion of the various activities and functions of the company: the safety program, research, sales, plant expansions, new products. …

When it pictures the policy of continuity of employment, dramatized by Lars Olson’s fiftieth anniversary, that policy becomes a little clearer, a little firmer, in the mind of every company agent who deals with employment.

Despite all the technology, employee publications still exist, and Heron’s description above is pretty much what the best ones are still after.

The Line Supervisor. Heron dashes through various kinds of employee meetings, direct mail, the employee handbook and the annual report on his way to making a claim that will cause a bar fight among employee communicators even today:

No medium for carrying information can duplicate or displace the supervisor who lives with employees in their daily work. No program of using conventional media for conveying information to employees can be wisely planned without the benefit of his advice. No information can be completely and intelligently shared with employees without his effective supplementary and explanatory work. No question raised by an employee can safely be diverted around him without weakening him in his essential function.

In sharing information, in building understanding, as in managing the daily work, there is no substitute for the line supervisor.

I’ve never been terribly interested in the ongoing debate between who’s more effective as a communicator—top management or line supervisor—because I believe both are equally necessary. (Which would you rather know before going outside: The temperature or the chance of precipitation?)

What does interest me is how Heron measures the success of all communication vehicles. Going back to the example of the house organ article about Lars Olson and his 50 years of service, Heron asks and answers, “How are we to know whether or not the results are good, whether or not the story was read and its real meaning comprehended?”

Not by the number of letters received from employee readers; these will be few at best. Not by the number of comments which wives of employees make to the manager’s wife. Not by the pride and enthusiasm of Lars himself. The real measure will be the amount of curiosity stimulated in the minds of employees and revealed by them. If the job was well done, foremen and supervisors will be answering questions for weeks to come. Is Lars going to retire? Will he get a pension? Is he the oldest employee in years of age? How many employees have worked here forty-five years? Forty years? Who will be the next fifty-year man? What is the average age of all the employees? Were any of them over forty when they were hired? How come Lars hasn’t been promoted lots farther? Doesn’t seniority count much?

The best job of the best house organ of this type is to stir up interest in its subject, and induce employees to ask questions. If the basic relationship is right, those questions will come to foremen and supervisors. If our program of sharing information with employees has been wisely planned, the foreman or supervisor will know it.

More on those questions—and on how we know if internal communication is working—in the next, and last, installment in this series.

How might we start an effective employee communication program? And when?

In my series on Sharing Information with Employees, the first and best book ever written on employee communication, I've covered (and we've discussed): the purpose of employee communication for organizations, employees and society ... what attitudes executives ought to have about communicating with employees ... how to make sure what management has to say matches what employees want to hear.
    In this installment, we get down to brass tacks. "How?" asks Heron. In his answer, he describes the character of a solid employee communication program and discusses when and how one might be launched. —DM

Like communication consultants today, Heron distinguishes between communication vehicles and a communication program. Unlike communication consultants today, he does not talk glibly of "behavior change" as the end-all, be-all of employee communication.

"Our objective is a lasting and continuing attitude, not an early and conclusive action. We are not seeking to persuade employees to buy something or to do something specific. We are not even interested in causing them to know some particular fact or to think any specific thought."

Long before employees can be reached on that level, an understanding must be reached, Heron writes.

The first element in the understanding which we should be trying to create is the understanding by employees that facts about the enterprise are not being concealed from them. The knowledge that they can get the information they want is more important than any actual information that can be given to them. Incidentally, in too many enterprises, this knowledge that he can get such information would be just about the most startling information which could be given to the average employee!

Actually, it's not "incidental" at all when one is considering launching or dramatically retooling an employee communications operation. Heron goes on to ask and answer the question, "How can [management] avoid shocking employees and at the same lead them to recognize that they can know the facts about the enterprise which is a part of their lives?"

[Are you listening, Rueben?]

Answer: "There is no sudden way. There is no channel which can instantly make employees conscious of the new possibilities. Any pressing for sudden results, for sudden interest, greater confidence and general acceptance of information by employees is hopeless. The first rule must be that the process of sharing information with employees is a gradual one."

Heron goes on to describe the employee communication program in more detail:

The program must be a continuous one, a method of conduct rather than a campaign. It must be an expanding one, permitting the delivery of ever more information as employees ask for it. It must be forever incidental to the actual conduct and management of the enterprise; that is, it must not become an institution apart from the actual work or operation of the enterprise, nor separated from the management, nor important in any way which overshadows the daily task of getting the work done.

It almost sounds as if Heron is banning communication vehicles and employee communication practitioners. Not quite. "Fully recognizing the popularity of many of these methods, and the fact that tens of millions of dollars are being spent every year on their use, I confess a prejudice against any or all of them as a complete program. I recognize immense value in some of them, an undeniable need for most of them. [But] the proposition to which I hope to lead is that the best of them, selected to fit the exact conditions of a single company, will do the most that they can do when they have invited the flow of information through the natural, functional line organization, the supervisory personnel of that company."

All right, Heron—employee communication practitioners and our programs have to be broad-minded, patient and unobtrusive.

When can we start?

Not now.

"When our employees want to know whether the plant will run full after Christmas, it is almost certain that they will not 'receive' our bulletin-board 'propaganda' about the burden of our social security taxes for the year."

Employees are deeply suspicious of organizations that,

after years of silence, secretiveness, concealment of 'confidential' facts, and grudging release of information under pressure ... approached us with a sudden change of front .... If during the days of good business he had considered us incapable of understanding the facts of business life, he could hardly expect us to listen to the hard-luck stories when they prevail. ...

The mind of the average American is a naturally sensitive receiving instrument. Through the years of growth of mass employment, the instrument has not been invited to "tune in" on basic information from which understanding of the free-enterprise system can grow. It has not been invited to "tune in" on facts about industry and business, particularly about the business in which it is engaged.

So companies who have seen the light about the need to communicate aggressively with employees must wait for the current recession to recede the way Depression was doing by the beginning of U.S. involvement in WW II, in 1942. "While they are worried about curtailed and unstable earnings, employees are not willing to 'tune in' on messages about anything else."

But just afterward—that's when they will.

Minds which a year ago would 'tune in' only on subjects such as wages, rents, movies, baseball, and more wages are ready today for a whole new range of information. Military and industrial needs for men, chances for new jobs, increased living costs, taxes reaching lower incomes than ever, strikes in defense industries, curtailment of whole enterprises because of [wartime] priorities—these and a hundred new topics have caught these minds. It is a day when enlightened employers can share information with employees more acceptably than ever before. The employee will 'tune in' today.

Will we, in the next phase of U.S. economic history, be ready for the moment?

New-employee disorientation

Alexander Heron's 1942 book Sharing Information with Employees is the first ever written on employee communication, and I'm arguing it's also the best. But it's not perfect. As I tried to imagine this scene, I had to laugh. —DM

"One of the best jobs I ever knew of making 'company investment' take on a life meaning is done by a manager of a small plant employing about five hundred," Heron says. "This manager systematically plans to see each new employee soon after he joins the organization. He plans the conversation so that he can ask the new employee why he prefers to work for wages rather than to work for himself. Of course, the answer is almost always, 'I have no capital. You gotta have capital to work for yourself.'"

And here is where the trouble begins:

Wisely and slowly this manager leads to recognition of the fact that capital is no less necessary if the man is to work for wages. He points out that the visible, physical things which had to be provided before he, or anyone else, could work for wages in that plant—the purchase of the land, the buildings, spur tracks, the heavy equipment, machines, and tools. He casually jots down the figures as he goes along, mentions the total dollars, the number of workers; and he and the employee together discover that the physical plant represents $22,000 per worker!

We can see the new employee wiping the sweat off the back of his neck and trying to appear befuddled: "Gee, boss, I never thought of it that way!" And meanwhile wishing fondly to quickly get to work digging clinkers out of the furnace. But the boss isn't finished.

They follow through, together, the steps of deciding that this investment, this capital, must be paid some rent or wages; they agree that 6 percent is fair. They also agree that the part of the investment which wears out must be paid off or replaced; so they get acquainted with depreciation. They reach a point where they decide that each new employee must produce gross earnings of some $2,000 a year, just to pay for the investment he uses, before he can earn any wages for himself!

Do you think that figures on a company investment are going to be merely dry and factual to an employee who has been introduced to them in this way?

No, Heron: An employee who has been condescended to in this way—and at the very moment he is most powerless to argue with the chief, perhaps by pointing out that if he's to "pay for the investment he uses" maybe he ought to receive some of the fruits of that investment—will be forever hostile to everything management ever tries to get him to understand about company finances.

And readers,  you'll be even more gobsmacked at Heron's foolishness here when you read the next installment of this series, which explains with sensitivity and insight when and under what circumstances an organization can get employees to receive information about economic "reality."

How to match what you need to say with what employees want to hear

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, I’ll talk to them! says the executive who reads Alexander Heron’s serial moralizing about the importance of communicating with employees. But what, pray tell, am I supposed to say? Good news! That’s what Heron gets to next, in Chapter Five of Sharing Information with Employees. —DM

Heron’s list of proposed employee communication topics is remarkable only in that it’s pretty much the same stuff we talk to employees about today: company finances, company position in its own industry, company products in their uses, expansion plans, sales and order prospects, research activities, industry outlook. And the like. (The list does also prominently include “company history,” which companies these days cover in five minutes in employee orientation. But don’t get Studs Terkel and me started on the subject of cultural Alzheimer’s.)

Heron starts to get interesting—and simultaneously begins to address the fierce “upward communication” types who read Writing Boots—when he writes that leaders can’t simply decide to share that which they think employees ought to know.

“Our own experience is not a true guide as to what information will enable the employee to understand the business,” Heron writes. “The information which will do this is the information which answers his own questions. We must plan to share with him the information he wants to get.”

And how, asks the executive—or the VP of corporate communication—am I supposed to figure out what that is? Heron’s answer is comprehensive and more jarring to the modern ear, I suspect, than to that of his 1942 reader:

Items for this list will come from [the leader’s] memories of questions he tried to ask of the older employees when he himself was new and from questions the newer employees have asked him now that he is one of the veterans. Other items will be suggested by questions the working supervisors have brought to higher executives of the business—questions which workers have presented to their supervisors and which the supervisors were not fully prepared to answer.

Still others will relate to rumors which have blossomed on the “grapevine,” chance comments in casual conversations, and comments which reflect unfortunate misconceptions of many phases of the business. These chance expressions of mistaken ideas are priceless indications of the subject matter on which employees both need and want information. The fact that employees have heard, remembered, and repeated a wrong report is evidence that the subject involved is one in which they are interested.

Whatever the source of our ideas of what employees want to know, a careful listing of that supposedly desired information will produce something quiet different in form from our own list of classes of information which we hope to share with employees.

Did you get that, all you strategic communicators, who use mechanical terms like “message drivers,” who prattle on about “behavior change” and who treat employee communication as a tidy thing that more or less fits on a three-page strategic plan?

Think of the inherent talent and learned skill that Heron is demanding of the communication manager, who must sensitively and insightfully intuit what employees want to know about. And we’re not talking about doing a few focus groups or surveys here, because employees don’t know themselves what they’re really curious about.

We’re talking about someone who can move around the organization with intelligence, charm, intellectual curiosity and dogged ambition in order to understand this corporate community better than any other single person in it. (Hey, remember when the employee communication business was populated by ex-journalists? For good reason! So when and why did we decide reporters were no longer good candidates for employee communication? Well, hell, there sure are a lot of them with free schedules these days.)

And once he or she has come to understand the workforce, division by division, location by location, department by department, the internal communicator needs to use that knowledge to communicate what the organization wants communicated—the shared reality that will become the “understanding” between management and employees that Heron prescribes.

So the CEO or the VP of human resources wants employees to understand corporate finances. Short of sending each one of them to business school, fat chance—unless you find a way to meet employees where they live.

“We cannot intelligently assume that employees are interested in the broad subject of wages as an element of operating costs,” Heron offers by way of example, “but we can recall very clearly that John Brown wanted to know why his job pays only $32 a week while the same job at the Jones Corporation pays $38. …

Employee questions and employee interests in information about the business are very specific, very practical, and naturally so. We cannot emphasize too strongly that men and women who work for wages are realists. Their wages must purchase and pay for real things: not only food in general, but milk, bread, butter, eggs, and hamburger; not for clothes in general, but for a new dress for the wife, new shoes for Johnnie, and new overalls in which to work.

We have agreed in the abstract that employees should know more about company costs. But we may not identify this conclusion with the unreasonable desire of the salesgirls to know the real cost of the hairbrush which sells for $3.00 and on which their sales commission is only 18 cents.

We may not, but we must. Heron is saying that anything short of seeking out employees’ questions and answering them—with management’s agenda and the general health of the corporation in mind, it goes without saying—is inadequate and will be ineffective in creating a healthy understanding between employees and management, in getting everyone in the organization moving in the same general direction.

To the employee communicator in 1942, with only the paycheck stuffer, the house organ, the bulletin board and the “employee mass meetings” at his or her disposal, Heron's must have been a daunting assignment.

And to the modern employee communicator, still daunting. But with a communication blog and Twitter, cheap videos and podcasts, it seems possible to communicate with employees with the spontaneity and suppleness Heron’s communication prescription demands.

But that still leaves the intellect, intuition, charm and the drive to be desired.

Communicators: Do you have it?

Note: In the next installment of our series, we’ll make a brief and amusing departure from my general portrayal of Heron as an employee communication prophet. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say those who find Heron a wee bit condescending will have their day. —DM

Sharing Information with Employees: A historical analysis

When in 1992 I moved abruptly from writing poetry about the meaning of life in college to writing prose about the practice of employee communication in Chicago, Hugh Iglarsh eased the transition. He was the editor of The Ragan Report and my boss, and he didn't think having intellectual aspirations and working in the employee communication trade press were mutually exclusive. So he and I explored this business pretty earnestly together for a year, and we've remained friends since. So last week I was tickled to alert Hugh to this series I'm doing on this old book I discovered. Here was his response, delivered to me with astonishing speed, and putting Alexander Heron's book into an important historical perspective that my analysis ignores. Thanks, Hugh. —DM

Very interesting both in its assumptions (e.g., that employers—and by extension, capitalism itself—are fighting for the allegiance of their workforce against strong opponents) and its limitations (I haven't seen a mention of the concept of "upward communication," i.e., communication). It has a distinct New Deal sound to it—that the basic institutions are at risk, and can only be salvaged if the working class gets a bigger slice of the pie—in terms not only of wealth, but also information and the implications of information, participation and dignity. Now that we are coming out of an age of neoliberal triumph, in which supposedly there was "No Alternative" to the rigors of globalization, Heron does indeed seem relevant again. The collapse of the economy shows that a system that revolves around paper wealth and ignores basic human needs can't sustain itself.

The book reflects a historical moment. To defeat fascism, the USA had to produce 100,000 airplanes a year. The workers' productivity was as important as the soldiers' courage. Yet the intense labor struggles and radical consciousness of the Depression years were still very much in workers' minds. The result was a liberal industrial policy, in which classical capitalism, with its naked exploitation and resultant class conflict, would be transformed by broad-minded intellectuals (such as Heron) into a kind of social or high-road capitalism, where workers were (at least rhetorically) conceptualized not as pure costs but as sentient human beings. The bosses were grudgingly willing to accept this arrangement—temporarily —because the alternative was losing the war and hence the whole American empire.

The New Deal vision is a better arrangement for everybody—but the forces of bean-counting abstraction have proved stronger than the counter-forces. Ultimately, the strategy became de-industrialization, creating a society in which people either shuffle money, move information or paint nails. All to maximize short-term profits within hollowed-out, downward-spiraling corporations and to pre-empt working-class power, by turning producers into credit-hobbled consumers. But it doesn't create real wealth—in fact it drains wealth out of productive enterprises into usury—and we see the long-term consequences.

I certainly hope that the crash of 2008 leads to a deep rethinking of what an economy is and what human beings are for. However, both the industrial plant and the local economies are weaker now than they were in 1943, and the New Deal solution of economic stimulus and revamped industrial relations is unlikely to produce the same results. One response to an economic-political crisis of this sort is fascism, the tendency of the Bush/Cheney administration. The other is a movement toward humane socialism—i.e., a broadening of the commons, a strengthening of the social fabric and a rejection of greed as the dominant impulse in life.

Anyway, what interests me about this book—even more than the employee relations angle—is Heron's take on the media. His categories of "reluctant" willingness (comparable to what the CIA calls "limited hangout"), "paternalistic" willingness and "propagandist" willingness perfectly describe the attitudes and purposes of the MSM. Heron's essay opened my eyes to the reality of the corporate media as a kind of house organ -- one less enlightened than the communication vehicles advocated by Heron.

As for Heron's central creed:

"The aggressive willingness to share information with employees is practical because, honestly and wisely followed through, it will induce a constructive co-operation which cannot be bought or forced."

Well, that's saying a lot. What's even more important is an aggressive willingness to listen to employees. Workers will feel like partners when they have real input, when their safety is considered, when they feel secure and respected, when their bosses aren't making more in a day than they are in a year, when the company is concerned with quality and not just profits, when the tone of the enterprise is communal and not sociopathic, etc. Certainly communication is a good start in treating employees like people. But when you begin a conversation you don't know where it will go—that's the whole point—and I wish Heron would focus not just on divulging information but on obtaining it. By writing only from the point of view of the bosses (as far as I can tell, from what I've read here), he reveals his own standpoint of enlightened elitism.

Anyway, thanks for posting these excerpts—they're useful advice for those in the trade, as well as wonderful historical documents. I look forward to seeing more of Heron's wisdom and your commentary.

"The Aggressive Willingness to Share"

I know, I know: This is the fifth installment of our study of Sharing Information with Employees, Alexander Heron's 1942 book, the first ever written on employee communication—and we're still not talking about what kind of information Heron expects us to share with them, or by what means. But I think we're going to find those chapters easier to breeze through, and in a few cases I've seen in a sneak peek, laughably antiquated. I promise, get into all of that in the next installment—but only after we learn Heron's concept of "The Aggressive Willingness to Share." —DM

Heron acknowledges that all management teams are willing to share some information, and many are willing to share lots of information. But their motives for doing so, in most cases, are not sufficiently "aggressive" to affect the kind of "understanding" Heron envisions between management and employees. Most employee information-sharing, he says, is based on one of three inferior types of willingness:

1. The "reluctant" willingness, in which the employer shares information with employees because they'll probably find out about it in the papers anyway or hear about it from union organizers. "All things considered," the reluctant executive communicator reasons, "we should offset these possibilities by giving the information ourselves ...." This attitude, however sound, is "negative," Heron says. "It is merely seeking the avoidance of certain undesirable possibilities." Set to the goal of achieving understanding between workers and management, the "reluctant" willingness won't cut the mustard.

2. The "paternalistic" willingness. I won't burden you with any more information than I think you need to to do your job. Even proffered by the most benevolent boss, this policy puts the sharer of information in the position of "carefully selecting for his employees the information which he knows they should have and giving them no other." Needless to say, this philosophy doesn't create a full understanding between employees and management either.

3. The "propagandist" willingness to share information. "With no distortion or falsehood in its technique, it relies on selection and interpretation. Those facts which tend to create favorable reactions are selected to be given to the employees. ... In the sense in which favorable facts are selected for this propaganda program, it follows that unfavorable facts are suppressed. Because it aims at a specific and desired employee reaction, such a program must be like a government 'information service,' a combination of the functions of publicity and censorship."

If you're like me, you don't disagree that the above willingnesses leave something to be desired, but you're waiting to see what kind of communication attitude Heron expects from organizations who would foster the understanding he's looking for. He calls it "aggressive willingness," and here's how he describes it:

[T]here is an aggressive willingness to share information with employees which has a foundation both deeper and more practical. It reaches deep into the soil of democracy, being rooted in the recognition that John Jones, wage-earning employee, is a sacred human individual. His best achievement as a worker must be voluntary; it must be reached in co-operation with all the other independent personalities grouped into the enterprise of which he is a part. To gain satisfactory performance merely by bribing him with wages and privileges, or by threatening him vaguely with unemployment, is to repudiate the sacredness of his personality. To share with him the knowledge which should enable him to reason his way to willing co-operation is to treat his personality with the respect he deserves.

The aggressive willingness to share information with employees is practical because, honestly and wisely followed through, it will induce a constructive co-operation which cannot be bought or forced.

As far as employee communication goes, that's pretty much the Gettysburg Address, is it not?

And, perhaps like the Gettysburg Address, it's not something all of us really quite believe. I know many, many employee communication practitioners who say they're "passionate" about their work but who do not sincerely believe in the tenets of "aggressive willingness." In fact, I know some to whom these ideas have not ever occurred.

All the time, I hear employee communicators making their best case to management that they might as well tell employees, because employees will find out anyway and "it's better if they hear it from us first."

I know lots of employee communicators who talk a good game but whose real raison d'être in their organizations that they're resident experts on what you can and can't tell employees.

And did you see a few similarities between Heron's "propagandist" willingness and "strategic communicator's" insistence that every word out of the organization's mouth be lashed to a key business goal, targeted at behavior change and measured for ROI?

All people who communicate with employees ought to read Heron's description of "aggressive willingness" and ask:

Is this a creed I will work for? Do I truly believe this, to the extent that I will put forth all the courage, guile, wit and muscle I can muster in order to prove its truth to everyone in my organization?

Ask every day.

Why employee communication is as important to American democracy as public education

Employee communicators who have questioned the importance of their own work or suffered the slings and arrows of others who do—which is to say all of us—should have the following laminated for our cubicle walls.
        These excerpts come from the third chapter of Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on employee communication. Written in answer to author Alexander Heron's plaintive question, "Why not tell them?" these words amount to an employee communication manifesto whose truth I've long understood but never seen put this strongly.
        In the next chapter in our series, we'll get into what good employee communication looks like according to Heron, and I'll take an increasing role in the conversation. But I'd like you to read and react to this section without any more intrusion from me. If we can get agreement on this, we're working from a strong intellectual foundation.
        Heron begins by acknowledging that there are "honest objections to sharing information with employees." The first is that "in spite of the fact that most executives in American enterprises have risen from the ranks, many of them secretly believe that there is a difference between their own mentalities and those of the men today who are in the ranks. They feel vaguely, and sometimes say definitely, that the rank and file cannot understand the information which management can give them."
        Heron, from here on:

This belief can neither be ignored nor denied. It may be sound as to a great portion of the men and women who work for wages. But most of the executives with the superior minds will not argue that things should be so. They will not assert that this general inability to understand is a good foundation for the structure of our democracy or a healthy condition among people who are trying to govern themselves. They will say it is too bad, but it just happens to be true; that we may not like it but cannot alter it; that some people are just born that way. ...

Are some people just born without the ability to understand? Some people? All of us were born that way. We were also born without the ability to walk; but we learned by trying. We were born without the ability to talk, or read, or write; but we learned, by trying as we were given the chance. So did the employees who now work for us. Incidentally, they were born without the ability to do the work for which we now hire them; but they learned that as they were given the opportunity. ...

... in addition to those who believe it true but regrettable that employees cannot understand such information as we are discussing, there are others who believe it true but not regrettable. They say that some people are just born that way, and they will go on to imply that this is in accordance with some divine plan. It seems to them inevitable that human society be classified and stratified, in the same manner as a hive of bees: If all bees were workers, there would be no organization under qualified leadership. If all were queens, there would be no honey. If all human beings were endowed  by nature with keen, alert, understanding minds, none of us would be satisfied to work for wages or at manual tasks; we would all want to be bosses.

This attitude has a lot of history behind it. It is the idea of both ancient and modern tyrannies under which conquered enemies became the slaves of the conquerors. It is the idea of the medieval aristocracies with their ruling classes ....

Every social order in history which has been built on the foundation of such an idea has collapsed because its foundation refused to remain stable very long. The supposedly predestined working class has successively won the right to bear arms, to own land, and, finally, to rule its nation by votes. We have long since learned that the proper exercise of the right to rule by vote involves abundant opportunity to know the facts and conditions with which the ruling and the votes must deal. The deliberate effort to share business information with the great majority who work for wages corresponds closely to the deliberate plan to make education, basic and continued education, freely available to the people.

... we have all of us, every adult citizen, been jointly and equally entrusted with the government of our nation, state, and city. That government is increasingly engaged in the protection and regulation of the economic interests of all of us. It is inconceivable that the forty millions of us who work for wages can do a good job, or even a safe job, of governing by votes, without knowing more and more about our economic interests.

The American idea has no place for a class predestined to be wage earners incapable of understanding a world beyond the workbench, no place for a class which is denied the opportunity to reason its conclusions on facts which it helps to create, no place for a class which is happier because ignorant of anything beyond the daily task. And those whose sense of superiority leads them to believe in either the necessity or the desirability of such classes are themselves enemies of the American idea or ignorant of its genius.

A painting of a meaningful workplace

In this latest in my series on Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on the subject of employee communication, we sit back and behold not a fantastical New Economy future of employee engagement, but homely old vision of how business used to feel to employees—and, in the opinion of author Alexander Heron in 1942 and blogger David Murray in 2009, the way they ought to feel again. —DM

In order to create an "image that will remain with us throughout our troubled study of the misunderstanding in industry today," Heron paints a realistic picture of "a time and place in which the realism of the worker's mind was in contact with the realities of industrial enterprise, in which his innocence of abstract economics did not involve a baffled attitude of misunderstanding."

Gather round:

We might find our picture of the old understanding in a wagon shop, a grist mill, a cotton mill, a pottery or cutlery shop. Let us find it in a furniture shop. Perhaps eight men work there. One of them is the boss. He owns the shop, but he works there, visibly. The other seven receive wages. The work done by the boss is not all done with tools; sometimes he uses a pencil. He draws designs, writes occasional letters, puts down figures about wages, costs, and prices.

The other seven know, quite closely, how much money the boss had saved up from his earnings as a journeyman before he started in business for himself; in other words, how much "capital" he had and how long it took him to save it up.

The shop or factory is on the same lot as the house where the boss lives; he owns it. The other seven know how much his taxes are each year. They helped to build the ten-by-thirty addition to the shop last year, and they know how much that cost. They were all in on the discussion before the new lathe was bought, and they remember the price and the freight. They remember how the boss borrowed some of the money from his wife's sister.

They know that the dining room "suit" on which they are working now is for Jane Winton, [who] used to be Jane Carey, the schoolteacher, before she married Bill Winton, the banker. They know it has to be as good as the furniture she saw in Buffalo, and that if it is good Bill's mother is going to give the boss an order for another lot which will keep them all busy through the winter.

They see the finished job emerging under their skilled hands, day by day. They know how difficult it was to get the seasoned walnut, and what it finally cost, what price is to be paid for the finished job, how much the boss will "make" on it, and how much of that will go to pay off the loan from the sister-in-law.

They know that the boss has gradually built a reputation for honest quality and skilled workmanship and that they are part of that reputation. They know why once in a while they have had to wait a little for their wages—when the taxes had to be paid before the money came in for the new counter and fixtures at the drugstore.

Above all, they know the boss. Their attachment to him is basically not sentimental but practical. He is the salesman who gets the orders which bring work to them. He collects the money which pays their wages. He managers to accumulate the working space and the equipment. They are realistic enough to know that they can get their full and fair share of the income of the business. They laugh at anyone who talks of the conflict between labor and capital, between them and the boss.

They know. Because they know, they understand. And in that full and simple understanding they "put themselves" into every job.

Heron does not hope to break down big organizations and return to the idylic picture he paints. But he insists that "the essential elements" of the dynamic "must be restored to American industry if the free-enterprise system, or even the American level of living, is to survive. ... True, this group in modern industry will not be the whole establishment. But within every establishment, such a group relationship, multiplied or repeated many times, will be the channel of the needed knowledge, the area of the needed understanding."

Join us next week, as Heron explains why companies don't communicate. He acknowledges, "There are honest objections to sharing information with employees ...."

What do we owe an employee?

 This is the second of a series of posts on Sharing Information with Employees, a 1942 book I've found that I believe is the first ever written on the subject of employee communication. In the first post, we discussed the author's familiar sounding explanation of the purpose of employee communication. This post takes us further afield from the current thinking. —DM

Like every employee engagement consultant and entrepreneur boss you meet on today's streets, Alexander Heron believes the purpose of employee communication is to inspire the employees to take "ownership" of their work. But Heron argues that employees inherently have an ownership of their jobs, and it's the company's responsibility to honor that ownership and help make the employee a more intelligent, broad-thinking actor.

And responsibility, as we're about to learn, is not a word Mr. Heron is afraid of. Listen to him describe the difference between what the company owes a day laborer—"He has given us eight hours of honest work as he agreed. We have given him $4.80 as we agreed. He owes us no more; we owe him no more."—and what it owes a long-term employee:

Assume that the second man was twenty-five years old the day he came to work. He "fitted in," he learned our ways, he gained experience, he acquired new skills, he took on new responsibilities. As he did so, his rate of pay was fairly increased. As the years pass he is suddenly forty years old—above the average age of employees in American industry. He has been our employee for fifteen years. His present rate of pay is $1.00 an hour. His average rate for fifteen years has been eighty cents. He has given us 30,000 hours of honest work. We have paid him $24,000, at the successively agreed rates. Can we close the books on him? Can we say he has given us the agreed hours, we have paid him the agreed dollars, and there is no more owing, by him or by us?

Hell yes! cries the modern corporate manager, as he or she has done since corporate America two decades ago blithely declared the end to any kind of contract between employees and management. Be your own free agents, they said. Manage your own career. You're all mercenaries—we're all mercenaries! But Heron responds:

He has put into the job more than the 30,000 hours. He has put into it, into the enterprise, fifteen years of his life. They are not just fifteen years, either; they are the fifteen years which should be the foundation of all his later life earnings. Those years are his investment in the enterprise. We cannot give them back to him. We can pay off a bond-holder, or buy out a stockholder; but we cannot buy out the investment this worker has made. We wanted him to stay with us and put in those years. We want him now, as through the years, to protect and promote the business which is his job, as if it were his own. And it is his own in a way which neither he nor we can change. He is not the same man at forty than he was at twenty-five; the difference has been invested in the enterprise.

I know what you're thinking. So does Heron:

True, he has gained in some ways. He has gained skills, knowledge, maturity. He may have gained some reputation for special expertness in some line. He may have money in the bank, an equity in his home or in a life insurance policy. On the other hand, he has lost youth, adaptability, salability. He has lost fifteen years of the promise of future usefulness to any enterprise. He has risked or staked his chances of employment and income, during middle age and later years, on the future soundness and success of this enterprise. He can take away from him his acquired skills, knowledge, and reputation; he cannot withdraw the investment of the years of his youth. The important question is, has he invested those years or merely spent them?

The case is tragic when a man so invests his priceless years in an enterprise which goes merrily on without him, exploiting the youth of newer, younger men. The case is tragic; but it is very rare. ...

The major tragedy occurs when not one man but many deposit priceless years in an enterprise which they all discover, too late, is unsound. In a year when their habits have become fixed and their heads partly gray, their ages are from forty to fifty and their periods of employment have reached ten, twenty, or thirty years, they find that the enterprise is not the lifetime of security they thought they were buying.

This places on us an obligation, the mutual understanding of which  is the key to constructive co-operation. That is the obligation so to plan and manage the enterprise that it will be the anchorage for middle age which the worker has a right to expect.

What corporate executives were saying when they told employees to be free agents who didn't have a right to expect anything was that they didn't have confidence enough in their strategies to ensure workers an "anchorage" for six months from now, let alone for middle age.

Fair enough. But that's not what they tell investors. They assure investors today just as they did in Heron's day, that they understand the obligation to maintain their faclities, conduct sufficient R&D to keep up with customer demands, stay abreast of the latest business technologies and processes, and created "a personnel in management, production, and sales which has reproduced itself, has trained its understudies."

Employers must, Heron concludes, "render this service to the investor of years as much to the investor of dollars."

And the corresponding employee communication responsibility?

First, we must recognize our inescapable obligation to manage the enterprise in such a way as to furnish middle-age security for those who spend their years of youth in the enterprise as wage earners.

Second, we must encourage them to expect and demand this kind of management as their truest form of social security.

Third, we must share with them the information which will create this attitude and which will continuously show them whether or not their long-time interests are being conserved.

Then and only then can we expect to find them shaping their attitudes and actions in terms of the future security of the enterprise in which they have such a priceless stake.

We can dismiss all of the above as hoplessly old-fashioned only until we realize that it's merely an exaggerated, absolutist-sounding version of the values of the companies—how they dwindle!—that we still most admire.

Southwest Airlines, for instance, wouldn't shrink from this basic philosophy. Neither would S.C. Johnson, with which I've had long and happy association, or Northwestern Mutual or Wegmans, for which I've also worked. You think Bill Gates would think of all this as so much sepia-toned silliness? No, he'd say: I did my best. Ballmer, you're up next.

In our next installment, Heron asks a question whose relevance in the post-meltdown climate shocks the senses:

"Are we, as employers ... ready to see that our free-enterprise system is doomed unless it can be understood by the great majority of our citicizens, constituents, and beneficiaries?"

And he describes quite simply how employee communications people who would go about creating this understanding need only to return to the employee his or her own native economic intelligence by using "the language of ... realism."

Could it really be this simple?