Workplace Communication and Management

Does your company or organization have good, or at least adequate, workplace communication? Do you get the information you need, and do managers get information from you the way they should? In this article we'll take a look at management's responsibility for setting up and maintaining workplace communication.

The British Broadcasting Commission showed a unique business documentary a few years ago, called Back to the Floor. If you're not familiar with the series, it featured real-life Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) who leave their comfortable offices and go work on the front lines of their organizations for a week. Cameras followed the CEOs and recorded their interactions with staff, and their responses to those interactions.

In one episode, the managing director of London's Heathrow Airport took the plunge and worked in customer service for five days. That meant facing customers and dealing with their problems, including problems created by the airport's own management team. As is often the case in other business stories, the critical issue in this episode was workplace communication.

At Heathrow, we saw a CEO taken by surprise, over and over again, as he learned about work life at the front lines. The employees on the front line, and customers too, let the CEO know they were dissatisfied. Employees tried to convey to him the difficulties they experienced because no one at head office was listening to them.

And, that gap in workplace communication was a fairly constant refrain in all episodes, as one CEO after another found out he or she doesn't know much about what happens when the organization comes face-to-face with real customers and their needs.

Heathrow is hardly an exception. When I published a communication newsletter, the most frequent reader feedback involved management's failure to listen. Readers made it clear that managers in their organizations did not know what happens in their world, and even more importantly, felt management did not care.

There was also a feeling that individual managers were to blame. However, in my research and experience, it's not a 'moral' failure on the part of individual managers, but rather an institutional failure. In other words, the mechanisms that allow or facilitate workplace communication simply don't exist.

To establish and maintain these channels and procedures, management must first take responsibility for them. Unless management takes the initiative, there can be no channels for workplace communication, whether up or down the hierarchy, to flow.

After all, employees can -- and often do -- express their ideas and emotions. But nothing can happen unless someone in management allows it to happen.

For example, in the Heathrow program, the managing director spots some trash in an out-of-the-way spot and calls in a cleanup crew. The customer service manager, who supervised the managing director for the week, chastised him for incurring an expense that wasn't in the budget (an appropriate response because the customer service manager would be chastised by his immediate superior if he had done that). The CEO responded by making an important policy change on the spot (another no-no for management); yet what he really needed were mechanisms to get and give information about such problems, and a then policy that stipulated when exceptions could be made.

By creating a mechanism that allowed workers at the front lines to communicate about that kind of problem (trash), he would get both better results and greater employee loyalty.

In summary, effective workplace communication is only possible when mechanisms exist to move information both up and down within the organization, and only management can establish and maintain those mechanisms.

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