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June 29, 2010

Terror at the Town Hall

I’m in San Diego Airport (where, by the way, they have excellent free wi-fi), waiting for my flight, after speaking at the Society of Human Resources Management conference. While I was in town, I got a chance to visit some relatives (I’ll call them Kyle and Karen), who both work for large well-known corporations.

Somehow the subject of town hall meetings came up. I told my relatives that I just held a series of web workshops for a client to help company vice presidents improve their town halls.

“I wish you’d come to our company,” said Kyle. “Our town halls are terrible.”

“Ours, too,” said Karen. “I’ll bet our town halls represent the worst practice in employee meetings.”

Naturally, I wanted to know more. What, in their opinion, made their town halls so terrible? Here’s what they told me:

“When our most senior executives hold an employee meeting, you have to submit questions in advance. Otherwise, you can’t ask a question.”

“Our leaders cram our town halls full of so much content, it’s difficult to make sense of it. It’s just a bunch of data.”

“Even though we use web meeting technology, it’s all one-way. They don’t use chat, or polling, or any of the other features to get people involved.”

“My department head (who’s located in another city) tries to hold web sessions for our group, but as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have an agenda. So he’s all over the place.”

“They allot 10 minutes for questions, but the presentations always run long. And by the time you even get to the Q&A, you’re so overwhelmed and bored that you just want it to end.”

“My company takes attendance at town halls. So you’ve got to be there. But what they present means nothing to me. So I just look at my watch waiting for the hour to be over.”

Does this sound familiar? Are your town halls terrorizing your employees instead of engaging them? I’ve got lots of ideas on how you make town halls less terrifying. If you’re interested, let’s talk . . .

Posted by Alison Davis at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2010

Good sandwiches . . . and great writing

I was in New York City last week speaking at a conference, and, since I needed to grab a quick lunch, I was delighted to find a Pret A Manger right around the corner from my hotel.

Not familiar with Pret? It’s a chain of sandwich-and-salad shops that originated in London in the 1980s and has recently expanded to New York and Washington. As a foodie, I’m a fan because everything Pret sells—even a simple tuna sandwich—is delicious.

And as a communicator, I’m also an admirer of Pret’s writing. For example, here’s an excerpt from my sandwich (Chicken and Bacon Club. Yum!) box:

“What on earth is Pret? We’re different, that’s for sure . . . We make slow food and then sell it fast. We steadfastly avoid the obscure additives and preservatives which plague today’s food. Our salads and sandwiches are ‘Just Made’, organic when we can and always preservative-free.”

Isn’t that great? It’s got everything right: Distinct point of view. Friendly tone of voice. Simple, direct use of language.

Visit the Pret web site and you’ll find more. For example, “Basically, we are a cross between a good restaurant, an Italian coffee bar and a bullet train. (Hey, multiple personalities are better than none at all.)”

Or: “It’s important our sandwiches and salads taste better than everybody else’s. To achieve this, we build a beautiful sandwich kitchen in every Pret. Every night we receive good, natural ingredients and our chefs get cracking early in the morning.”

No matter what you’re writing about, you can learn from Pret’s approach. Choose simple words over complex language. Have a clear point of view. Use specific descriptions (I love the “bullet train” reference) instead of abstractions.

And, above all, eat well. It makes for darn good writing.

Posted by Alison Davis at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2010

In change, perfect is the enemy of good

As you may know, I love this expression: "Perfect is the enemy of good." Too often, in organizations and in life, we're so consumed with the notion that something has to be just right that we get stuck in our own quest for perfection and never make any progress.

That's why I love this column by Ralph Keller in Industry Week. His topic is continuous improvement, but his advice applies to so many situations.

Here are a few highlights:

"If your . . . leaders . . . think they have to get it 'right' when the team works on a process, they will get caught up in 'analysis paralysis' instead of 'Just Do It' and take forever to implement anything."

"The truly outstanding organizations . . . are great at celebrating the efforts and the small wins, not insisting on achieving the goals set by management and punishing those who fail to achieve them."

"If you want something that will do exactly what it's told to do and will repeat the process exactly each and every time, get a machine, because people don't and they introduce process variability. Along with that, however, you get creativity, problem solving and the ability to improve and make the process better."

"Always remember that good is better than nothing, and it's not the end."

Great stuff!

Posted by Alison Davis at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2010

Are you suffering from e-mail bankruptcy?

I spent a lot of time over the holiday weekend trying to clean out the messy overloaded closet that is my e-mail. And, ironically enough, one of the messages I came across was a MediaPost blog on how people manage their e-mail.

According to blogger Kara Trivunovic, senior director for the e-mail and social media marketing firm StrongMail Systems, every e-mail user falls into one of three categories:

Filers, who immediately put everything away in a relevant folder, to be accessed later.

Pilers (that would be me), who hoard e-mails in their in-boxes because they “might need it someday.”

And dumpers, who periodically do a clean sweep, deleting everything when messages pile up or get too old. Kara calls this e-mail bankruptcy, although I would apply the term to any time your message goes kaput.

Kara maintains that all three styles present problems for marketers: the filer, because he doesn’t really read anything, just stores it; the piler, because messages get lost at the bottom of the stack; and the dumper, whose nuclear strategy mean everything gets blown up.

These styles have implications for anyone who wants to get an e-mail message across. But for me, they add up to one piece of advice for anyone creating e-mail: If you’re writing a text e-mail, you need to make sure your subject line and first few sentences get your whole point across. If you’re creating a graphic e-mail, it’s all about the subject line and the headline and visual in the graphic.

Whether you’re dealing with filers, pilers or dumpers, you’ve just got a few seconds to get your message through. After that, communication is over, and you (the sender) is bankrupt.

Posted by Alison Davis at 06:36 AM | Comments (0)