Help Employees Recognize Their Role and Value
Posted by David Murray on Mar 17th, 2010. Related posts: Featured Articles • Influence • Leadership • Team Development.
You communicate with employees for a hundred reasons — to keep them “in the loop,” “up to speed,” “on the same page” — but what is the overarching purpose?
You should try to make your company, your division, your department feel to them like a furniture shop felt to the workers, before the industrial revolution.
“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,” wrote Alexander Heron in a little-known 1942 masterpiece, Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on employee communication.
Read Heron’s description of the shop, and reorganize your employee communication program to create a meaningful workplace where workers know what’s happening, and why.
This kind of workplace:
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 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 manages 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 know. Because they know, they understand. And in that full and simple understanding they “put themselves” into every job.
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