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Ian Buckingham

Ian Buckingham

12 Jul 2011 | 10:41

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I’ve recently been helping a couple of organisations find ways to re-connect with their employees following record falls in employee confidence and pride in the brands they work for.

The conversations we’ve been having with employees at all levels have centred around prevailingly negative public perceptions about the way the organisations they work for conduct business, especially the way they market their services and their direct sales techniques.

At the core of the employees’ issues have been:

• a growing sense that, while there are theoretical two-way channels in place, they aren’t being listened to

• a growing cynicism about the values the organisations publish to all stakeholders and the way the leaders talk about customers

• an innate insecurity about the notion of a career with them, given there is a perception that a growing number of new recruits are either locum workers or job-hopping every 18 months or so.

Of course, we’re trying to substantiate their comments with some hard facts but, regardless of how the statistics stack up, these issues were echoed at all levels when we investigated the sliding engagement figures.

Our last meeting was on 4 July, a date when there’s much “hootin and tootin” about US Independence. Regardless of your own ideological leanings, it has to be said there’s a certain pervading clarity about the American way that is rooted in Thomas Jefferson’s work in crafting the Declaration of Independence.

This single document became a powerful manifesto for the creation of a nation and has become a totemic rallying point for US ideology ever since. Whether you like or agree with American culture, you have to respect the foundations on which the culture is built.

Given the investment every employee makes in terms of the time they devote to the organisations they work for, and the role those organisations play in meeting so many of an individual’s basic and higher order needs, it’s only natural that the relationship between people and their work is going to be an emotional one. To fail to recognise this relationship, to treat people like numbers, to give them an official message about how to behave but unofficially expect them to “win at all costs”, or to patronise and dump messages on them using internal marketing and spin, is ridiculous.

Values are the fundamental building blocks of a brand. They set the tone and the basis for the emotional contract between employees and their employer. In a week when yet another brand, this time The News of The World, implodes on the back of another values and culture-based brand disaster, isn’t it time we started valuing values again?

Comments

1. At 08:57 on 13 Jul 2011, Andy wrote:

Ian; I agree with your analysis and yet I feel there is still something missing in the deeper analysis needed in order to get true knowledge of what is going on in organisations today. I think there is growing disaffection in a multitude of organisations and societies around the globe that could now bring on even more implosions. Perhaps this is exactly what is required so that there will at long last be the necessary change people want to see. Nevertheless, I think in many organisations people feel powerless to change anything, they continue to comment and complain and yet the leaders aren't listening (they think they know best), and the result is that the ordinary employee and citizen often comes off worse when the implosion occurs. Depressing!
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2. At 11:10 on 20 Jul 2011, Karen Goold wrote:

Ian; I also agree with your comments. And I think its vitally important that leaders listen to their staff, find out what really is happening at the frontline and canvass their opinions before making final decisions on the direction of the organisation. So much can be gained from really understanding what is happening at all levels of the workplace, but unfortunately only a few make the effort to find out.
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