Professional Communication: project an image, don't be creepy

How to create an image? How to communicate professionalism? Are there standards which can help us enhance the communication strategy?

Study Case

The answers to those questions are correlated and almost impossible to find separately. However, there are quite a lot of companies out there trying to cut down the communication costs while making efforts to score high on image rankings. I have in mind a recent experience from a big international corporation operating in the office space renting business. The experience included both online company research and visiting the local office. The research phase showed non-existing CSR policy, non-existing employee benefits, accusations of careless behavior in connection to the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center a few years back, and company-produced marketing videos. The visit at the local office revealed a high rate of employee turnover, very unusual hiring policy (hiring only for lowest hierarchy positions with no requirements for education and experience, on minimal wage), and deceiving job descriptions.

When walking through the door you are greeted way too eagerly by the staff which makes you almost uncomfortable. What they pride themselves for is great flexibility in services and high level of professional customer service. The only customer feedback is available through the corporate marketing videos though.

Communicational no go

What was observed at that company is an absolute communicational no go. The non existing CSR policy and the lack of personnel benefits in a country as Denmark where CSR is becoming more than a standard and employees are treated with special care as assets is a sign of unprofessional management. The smile of the receptionist is not enough to make up for corporate mismanagement or irresponsible behavior. It also needs to be in line with services, surroundings, corporate culture and needs to be rooted in a thorough policy. Otherwise it comes across as insincere and creepy. Smiling while doing your job needs to be just as professionally distanced as your work style. Are you flirting with the customer or servicing them? Make it clear.

Image: communication standards and guidelines

Image management, even though there is such a discipline, sounds very wrong as image management is nothing but the tip of the iceberg. Hiring a professional to work on your image does not make a lot of sense if you have not clarified what the company stays for and how it wants to be regarded by your stakeholders. Stakeholders are all individuals and groups that are or can be affected by the operating of your business and/or have an interest in your business.

You need therefore to start from identifying your business’ core characteristics and analyzing the strategic stars for your brand. After clarifying what is desired and what is possible you need to get very practical and analyze in what ways your vision and mission can be embedded in your culture and business operations.

While you make considerations about communication practices, image building and communicating your values outside of and inside the company you need to get acquainted with the professional communication standards which will be your guarantee that your communication strategy is not going to backfire by earning you critics or even lawsuits in connection to unethical behavior.

 

After you manage to create a thorough and working communication strategy completely aligned with your business operations you might want to go one step further and consider CSR. There are countless studies showing that a CSR policy is considered a plus and sometimes a definitive criterion for choosing your company as a partner, provider or employer. For the policy to work though, you once again need to be consequent. Just as you need to make sure that you have implemented a communication policy that fits your business profile you also need to do the same when engaging in CSR. If you are not careful about this you might end up being accused of using CSR as a promotional tool instead of as a sincere expression of your concern for your stakeholders and the environment. You might for example decide to fund poor children in Africa but you have to explain why it is the poor children in Africa getting your support and not the local caner organization, for example.

After completing your communication strategy you need to make sure that it covers as a minimum mission, vision, development strategy, internal communication and employee management, HR policy and benefits, corporate culture, online and traditional marketing activities, branding, crisis communication, media relations, external stakeholder management, customer relations specifically, community care and involvement, and CSR.

When you are ready you will find yourself under a stack of thick guidebooks addressing the separate topics. You will have to always make sure that they are aligned with strategy and updated regularly. Among those guidebooks you will find the one describing how you need to treat customers in order to communicate the desired corporate image.

Do you now understand why smiling a lot is not professional but creepy?

 

DIDI

Leadership

Leaders and pseudo-leaders

In the Danish reality show Robinsonekspeditionen this year there was a guy who said that he had been watching the show in the last 13 years preparing his strategy for when he would be on the show one day. The strategy seemed pretty simple – be a leader. However, it seemed that being a leader was not equal to shout the highest and regard others opinions as useless and unnecessary. He finishes his stay on the show the very first time the others had a chance to vote somebody out.

The lesson here seems pretty simple. And yet somehow it is not. As we all have witnessed some individuals in the hierarchy – higher or lower – trying to act as leaders. In doing so they might disregard others, insult them, demonstrate way to high self esteem, take the credit for others’ work, or act in one of thousands different ways a pseudo-leader might act in.

Pseudo-leaders are people who have made their way up in the system not because they have the qualities and qualifications for it but because they have made a career out of leeching of others. They are good leaders in the eyes of their superiors and very destructive leaders for those underneath them. It is simply because they know how to play the role of the carrying leader without necessarily being one.

If we concentrate on what kind of damage pseudo-leaders can cause it sums up to several main consequences:

v  Employees who are not willing to cooperate with the leader for the company’s success

v  Employees who do not trust their superior

v  De-motivated employees who do not work at their maximum as they do not see a point in doing so

v  Employees who try to silently fight the system which might seriously damage the company

v  Angry employees whose reaction cannot really be accounted for

Then one should wonder why and how it is possible for pseudo-leaders to be given the leadership? And why they themselves do not see the damage they cause?

From one point of view it comes down to competences. The pseudo-leader has also some competences, it is just not the right ones. From another point of view it is all about intentions. The pseudo-leader is egoistic whereas the real leader concentrates on the common success.

As it is essential for every company which honestly strives towards excellence to employ the right kind of people, especially when it comes to leaders, it might prove to be a very good idea to never forget the “low layers” of the organization. It is not that difficult to recognize the real leader who helps the organization from the pseudo-leader but you need the help of your employees in order to do that. Some companies have therefore found practices as motivation level research and other evaluation tests as being helpful in order to identify issues. However, what happens if those evaluations land into the hands of a pseudo-leader?

Dealing with those issues is not easy as their identification might sometimes be almost impossible. However, an option for management should be education. It has always been considered that education is the path towards best practices.

If you today want to figure out how much of a pseudo or a real leader you are, you can take a look at the table here and decide for yourself whether maybe also you need a leader education. It is after all only admirable to become better at what you already are good.

Pseudo-leader	Leader
Talks	Listens
Orders	Discusses and advices
Requires obedience	Grants freedom
Disregards others opinions	Has an open mind
Takes credit for others’ work/ideas	Gives credit
Does not allow employee advancement	Encourages employee advancement
Destroys self confidence	Nurtures self confidence
Principle: separate and rule	Principle: lead to consensus

 

The list can be continued almost indefinitely as the different situations offer different possibilities to demonstrate leadership. However, what is more important is to highlight the benefits of being a good leader. Among them are:

v  Loyalty

v  Higher productivity

v  Innovation

v  Respect

v  Company growth

v  Better working environment/lower employee turnover

v  Less absence days

Normally, if it goes downhill for a company the leadership is the first to take the blame. And normally if the company is driven by pseudo-leaders, it will go downhill. Maybe not straight away but in the long run. Therefore it is good for everybody that pseudo-leaders are rooted out of the organization.

Most companies nowadays use personality tests as tools in the recruitment process which should keep the right people in the right position. However, every now and then a mistake is made or somebody’s dominating side is underestimated and pseudo-leaders are found many places and even worse – it seems they are impossible to remove from the hierarchy.

That is why with the warning that bad leadership carries more than one threat with itself, companies are advised to control the quality of leadership by regularly going down to the lowest organizational layers and trying to ensure the organizational image is the same from bottom to top. Most companies state that their employees are their greatest asset and there is a good reason for that.

Take care for your employees and they will take care for you.

Motivating or demotivating employees

Internal Communication and HR: Employee Motivation

Many companies nowadays focus on innovation or customer contact or competitors and often forget to take care of their most valuable asset: their employees. It is not a secret that without employees no company could ever exist. Yet we have to keep in mind that an employee present does not equal employee contributing.

In order to research what would drive employees to contribute maximally in the work process several scientific fields have been developed, some of them adopted by HR-specialists, some of them – by marketing and communication professionals. One of the most salient fields is concerned with motivation and in this case – employee motivation in particular.

Employee motivation is very important because it not only helps enhance performance; it also contributes to image management, prevention of and reaction to a crisis. Employees are essential when it comes to productivity and innovation. But employees can just the same popularize your company as a company with a great working environment and standards, etc. The stand of employees is also critical when it comes to overcoming a crisis. Keep in mind that the media will be more than happy to find that one unsatisfied employee ready to trash you and be sure they will find them.

Those reasons seem more than enough to stress the importance of keeping employees happy. Whereas there is a whole field researching different employee satisfaction factors, motivation is that factor which more or less encompasses every perception connected to work and translates it into readiness to work harder tomorrow than today.

Given the number of studies and the importance of the issue recognized by scholars it is difficult to understand how come so many companies overlook this crucial element of success. Sometimes mistakes in that area could be so big and with such visible results and still nothing happens.

In my experience, most often and biggest mistakes management can make are excluding employees of decision making, not recognizing and rewarding efforts and results, allowing disagreement in goal setting (the set goals are not supported by employees), being dishonest or trying to play employees when it comes to salary or benefits, and creating a stressful environment where the stakes are too high and the efforts are not enough or not channeled correctly.
 

The results here can vary from zero motivation to conscious sabotage of the company. Management should not make the mistake of underestimating the seriousness of the issue. Therefore it is crucial to monitor employee motivation and to work proactively for its enhancement.

Monitoring employee motivation is usually responsibility of HR as they have a whole toolset for that starting with surveys and personal dialogues and including monitoring results, number of days off work, sickness, taking initiative or part in discussions, etc. HR has also the ability to create a diverse and complex motivation program fitting the need of most employees.

However, there is still that element dependent on management: management should allow for inclusion of employees in decision making and should ensure fair employee management before starting to think about HR.

Communication professionals in most of the cases are educated in management and HR. Their role is to be connecting link between departments, between employees and management, between the organization and the outside world. They will be the first to notice problems in the organization and that is why you should take their warnings into consideration and act accordingly and timely.

DIDI