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March 21, 2008

A Christmas story

I know what you’re thinking: I’ve got my Christian holidays confused. But I’m telling this “Christmas” story now because it’s a timeless tale of what can happen when communication breaks down. And since I just heard it this week, I thought I’d share it with you.

It goes like this: Once there was a manufacturing facility located far out in the country, away from major metropolitan areas and a thousand miles from company headquarters.

The company had been acquired about a year before, and the acquiring corporation had quickly swooped into the facility and made some big changes, including laying off about 25% of the workers. So the remaining employees didn’t have warm, fuzzy feelings for the corporation or for senior management.

Right around Thanksgiving, the facility had a tradition of putting up holiday decorations. In the old days, these decorations used to consist only of a life-sized nativity scene, but in recent years the facility had become more multi-culturally politically correct and had added a giant Menorah and Kwanzaa display.

This holiday season, as part of an emphasis on safety, the decision was made to locate the holiday displays not in the center of the lobby, but up above on a mezzanine. But when employees returned from Thanksgiving weekend, they were surprised to see that the mezzanine contained not three holiday displays, but only two. The nativity scene was missing.

Within minutes, rumors started to fly. Was new company management anti-Christian? Did the parent company have something against baby Jesus? Was this some kind of statement about values? Should employees read some darker meaning into this disturbing action?

The grapevine went crazy. For days, in the cafeteria and the hallways, people talked of little else than the missing nativity scene.

Finally—not in any official communication, but once again through informal channels—the truth was revealed: As the maintenance guys were taking the nativity scene out of storage, they broke the section that contained Mary and Joseph and Jesus. It couldn’t be repaired, and obviously it was wrong to display the scene without the main characters.

So crew members decided not to put the nativity out at all, while they pondered what to do.

Nobody involved thought that communication was necessary; it never even occurred to those involved to post a sign explaining the nativity’s absence. And no one ever considered that employees might read sinister intentions into the situation.

The moral of the story is obvious: Communication is essential, especially in times of change.

Happy Easter.

Posted by Alison Davis at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2008

Is less, indeed, more?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several conversations with clients about the amount of information communicators send to employees. My advice is always the same: Send less.

By “less,” I mean in every category: fewer in number, shorter in length, less lead time. My advice is based on feedback from employees in which they express how overloaded they feel, and their strong desire to reduce the amount of information they have to manage. Just say less, employees say.

This is consistent with how consumers feel about product information, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Iowa.

The study found that people who only have a little information about a product are happier with that product than people who have more information. There’s a paradox here: people want the ability to get information (if they want it), but they don’t want so much information that they second-guess their decision.

As eMarketer analyst Karin von Abrams notes, “The predicament for today’s shoppers is compounded by the world’s complexity, and the surfeit of choice, as well as the increasingly fast pace of life, leaves many people in a state of perceived pressure or stress much of the time.

“As a result,” she adds, “the need to make a choice is felt as a burden.”

I experienced this phenomenon this week: For a weekend house my husband and I are building, I had to select medicine cabinets for the master bathroom and powder room. I Googled “medicine cabinet” and was rewarded with thousands of hits, at such web sites as simplyvanities.com, faucet.com and medicinecabinetshop.com.

Each of these stores had hundreds of medicine cabinets to choose from, in every style from plain to ornate and at every price point from $75 to several thousand dollars. The possibilities made me dizzy. I bookmarked dozens of potential medicine cabinets. I kept revisiting saved shopping carts. I was paralyzed by having too many good choices.

Finally, the only way I could break the logjam was to add a criteria: The medicine cabinets had to be available to ship immediately. Suddenly, the selection narrowed to just a few, and I was freed by the tyranny of information.

In medicine cabinets as in employee communication, less is truly more.

Posted by Alison Davis at 04:39 PM | Comments (1)

March 05, 2008

Borrow this idea

PR News, the company that helps “build the bridge between public relations and the bottom line,” publishes a weekly newsletter sent via e-mail. Since PR News would like me as a subscriber, the company has been sending me sample issues with special-rate offers. (See a sample issue.)

Since I’ll read anything, I’ve been looking at the issues, which are nicely organized and well-written, but don’t contain a lot of content that interests me (After all, I’m not in PR).

However, the weekly newsletter has one front-page feature that I would recommend you leverage for your own publication: “Seven things you will learn in this week’s issue of PR News.”

Instead of simply offering a Contents box with page numbers, the “Seven things” brief offers short synopses of content—one-sentence summaries that capture a salient fact from pertinent articles.

For example, in the February 18 issue, the second item reads, “57% of surveyed execs ranked Tuesday as the most productive workday (p. 3).” And here’s #6: “It only takes five to seven seconds for one person to make a judgment of another. (p. 8)”

It’s informative, it’s provocative, and it makes you want to read more. And it acknowledges that readers won’t necessarily read every article, but they will appreciate the opportunity to quickly skim and learn something valuable.

Borrow (okay, steal) this idea for your own publication.

Posted by Alison Davis at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)