Earlier in February this year, HR director of The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore, Cecilia Chia, was tasked with a job to do. The economic downturn had seen a drop in the number of business travellers and tourists making their way to Singapore which affected the hotel’s industry. With a newly designed multi-task programme (MTP), the hotel hoped to reduce its reliance on casual labour and safeguard the jobs of its current employees at the same time.
But the launch of the MTP also meant that employees would now need to double-up and help out in areas for a fixed number of hours each week. Unless employees were deemed to be absolutely vital to the job or had medical reasons, employees were assigned to different departments (although they could first opt for the department they would like to work in).
Another measure the company took was job redeployment of select staff, which Chia said was “slightly more permanent in nature”. In this, identified employees were asked to take on another role entirely for a given time frame.
And it was Chia’s job to announce this change to the hotel’s ladies and gentlemen (a term used for their employees) over a Chinese New Year lunch.
The idea about an employee communications article can come across as a little simplistic at times. Compared to other HR aspects such as HRIS or compensation, communication within the organisation and to internal stakeholders comes across as being straight-forward. Party A has a message, message is transferred via selected communication channels to the next party, the recipient receives the message and acts upon the message.
Furthermore, communication is often cited as the antidote to many of HR’s probems. Have trouble raising employee engagement? Communicate more. Have trouble with a particular staff’s performance? Communicate with them. Need to have a transparent culture? Have senior managers communicate and be open about management affairs.
Despite its simplicity, it is often the execution that companies often fail to grasp. Whether it is the lack of communication, the channel used, the timing or the tone, there’s always the possibility of a screw-up and for employees to misinterpret the situation.
And in bad economic times like this when company revenues aren’t as good as stakeholders would like it to be, leaving employees in the dark creates the potential for employee confusion and stirs negative emotions such as fear, stress, suspicion and misplaced worrying, all of which leads to a decrease in employee engagement.
Because NetApp has always been seen as a “small fish in a big pond” and an attractive acquisition target, C.Y. Yau, senior HR director of Asia Pacific for the company says the recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle has only fuelled one question on employees’ minds.
“Are we next?”
The last two times the NetApp senior executives came to Singapore, employees have questioned whether there could be a potential buy-out of the company. However, Yau stresses that the message from top management remains the same. “The key messaging from the CEO is that we are not keen to be taken over. We have our business strategy, product strategy and business plans for growth. And we are not interested in being taken over,” says Yau.
In the case of Ritz-Carlton, Chia says generally, employees have taken well to the announcement of the multi-taking programme due to the company’s strong culture in lateral service, where employees would break away from their usual duties to help perform tasks which other employees on an ad-hoc basis. Secondly, Chia says the company saw this as an opportunity for employees to learn a skill which they would not get to learn in their usual role, thus enhancing their learning and development.
“When they move into another department, there is better understanding of how your colleagues function in another area. When that happens, there is better synergy and teamwork. And lateral service would be enhanced further,” Chia says.
While Ritz-Carlton employees understood the company’s rationale behind the programmes, Chia admits that staff had concerns about the programme involved and whether they would be able to meet the expectations of the new roles they were tasked with. The hotel eased employees’ fears by ensuring they were given two fulls days of intensive training in technical and soft skills before sending them out to their respective departments. Employees doubling up were also buddied with a full-timer as well.
But what is the role of HR in internal communications? According to Heng Teng Teng, HR manager of Hilti Far East, her job in communications is to “wear the employee hat” and ensure that all messages communicated out by the senior management are consistent, fair and justified. “I always come with a people perspective. If you say this [message], how would employees feel? Is it fair to employees to say that?”
Therefore, Heng says she sometimes has to help educate and persuade business-minded managers to see the other side of the coin. One of the persuasion phrases she uses she uses is: “I think you may have to say this in another way, otherwise you may upset the employee”.
At Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&CO), Dina Abastillas, vice president of HR Asia Pacific, says she works with the corporate communications department to disseminate information from the headquarters in San Francisco down to the lower levels. According to her counterpart, Celina Low, corporate affairs director for APAC at LS&CO, whenever there are organisational updates or personnel changes, her job is to work with HR to decide what key messages the company wants to reinforce which align with the corporate office’s strategic decision.
But for subjects and topics that are disseminated through senior or middle managers, Low says her corporate communications division would also provide a toolkit of the talking points, “which they can share with their team, localising and making the topic relevant for the employees”.
Let’s talk business
With the advent of newer communication channels, the one-size-fits-all policy of communicating with employees where a CEO sends out a memo and expects everybody to understand it is long gone. With the myriad communication channels available, Low says, “It’s about finding the right combo set so that you get the content which is relevant to the specific needs of the employees in a way that would help them digest the information.”
One of the most traditional ways senior leaders trasmit a message to all employees is through an all-hands meeting, with all employees present. Especially if the company is small, doing so can help save time and the hassle of having to cascade the information through middle management.
HR practitioners say there is a caveat to this communication method, especially in Singapore and Asia where the issue of “saving face” is embedded in the cultural psyche and staff do not like to voice out their opinions in front of a large group of people. Other times, they run the risk of having a few dominant voices overshadowing the meeting and drowning out the opinions of employees who are less vocal.
To overcome such inertia and encourage employees to speak up, NetApp used to “plant” questions from employees. However, Yau says the company no longer has to do this, as “employees will raise their hands and ask questions.”
At Ritz-Carlton, the company also conducts roundtables where smaller groups of employees have the time and chance to ask questions and raise issues. Previously, Chia says the company used to organise monthly luncheon roundtables for new employees who had joined for less than a year as part of their on-boarding and retention process system. During a typical roundtable, which can hold anywhere from eight to 20 employees at one time, Chia would sit alongside Ritz-Carlton’s general manager to talk about issues, uncertainties and opportunities that these new employees may face.
However, the focus of the hotel’s monthly roundtables has shifted so as to make such sessions more relevant to the current economic situation. Chia says, “Because we’ve put recruitment on the backend, we are focusing now on existing ladies and gentlemen who are line employees,but non-leaders.”
LS&CO. has also conducted similar sessions as well. Since November last year, president of LS&CO. Asia Pacific, Aaron Boey, took time to conduct skip-level meetings with the employees in groups of ten to understand their concerns revolving around the economic downturn. Some of the pertinent issues raised were the recession’s impact on the business and if the company would undergo cost-cutting measures.
In these meetings, some of which went on as long as two-and-a-half hours, Abastillas says the company’s president constantly drove home the message that despite the lagging economy, the company would what we would continue to review the business conditions and do all it can to stay relevant and stay ahead of the curve.
In fact, Abastillas says it was HR that suggested Boey conduct these meetings in groups of eight to ten, in order for the president to establish direct communication and conversation which large townhall meetings cannot replicate due to their sheer size and numbers.
And having a senior executive spend time addressing their concerns made employees feel appreciated, says Abastillas. “People appreciated it [the meetings], and said ‘Wow, for the president to spend a lot of time to address the issues.’ They felt good about it.’”
And with the advent of web 2.0, companies are now embracing the speed and ease afforded by new technology. NetApp and Ritz-Carlton both produce audio and video podcasts that have the CEO and president conveying their messages directly to staff.
For instance, video podcasts of Ritz-Carlton president and chief operating officer Simon Cooper are broadcasted in the hotel dining area and outside the HR office. In a three-minute vodcast in May, Cooper recognised and congratulated Ritz-Carltons in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai for clinching the Hewitt Employer of Choice title. He added that despite the downturn, customer engagement levels in the hotels have increased.
However, the tone in which the messages are conveyed matters as much as the content itself. Heng recalls several years ago when she had just joined Hilti and the company was still recovering from the financial crisis. Times were tough because results did not match the effort that employees put in. She says, “Every month when you don’t achieve your plan, you start questioning: ‘Is the strategy right? Are we going in the right way?’”
To make matters worse, Hilti’s general manager was fairly new to the company as well. To quell the fears, Hilti’s general manager took on a positive tone and did not lapse into a blame game or pointed fingers at any one employee or team. “As a management team, you need to be seen as one voice and one team. Then it helps, because people see the management team as strong, confident and united,” Heng says.
Abastillas adds that despite the economic outlook, company targets have not slackened. So even as the president reassured that the company would continue to work under its values of acting as an ethical company, Abastillas says at the same time, the targets mean employees will have stretch outside of their work comfort zone. “The bar has been raised. In difficult times, each one of us will really have to stretch. Be collaborative, help each other to be successful because that is the only way the business will be successful.”
The feedback process
But communication is a two-way street, and that in order for HR to communicate effectively, it needs to listen to the sentiment on the ground as well.
For employees who, for whatever reason, do not speak up during townhall meetings, Heng says she relies on the manager feedback when employees break into their own team. Yau also adds that he utilises the survey portal SurveyMonkey.com to understand how employees feel about the content and messages sent out after each quarterly all-hands meeting.
While it is one thing to receive feedback, action upon receiving the feedback is also essential. Chia cites a recent townhall meeting where two employees brought up the issue of a footpath which they must use to get to the bus stop located near the Esplanade. “On good days, [the pathway] is fine. But on rainy days, the pathway gets a little muddy,” which complicates things for female employees wearing high heels.
After the employees brought up the issue at a townhall meeting, Chia says her role as a HR practitioner was to work with employee to understand and identify the location, co-ordinate with the engineering department on the logistics of paving the pathway. She would then update employees on time frame in which action would be taken. “And for whatever reasons, if actions can’t be taken, there will be reasons and alternatives given,” adds Chia.
Having an open culture is also a catalyst for employee feedback, especially when employees can feel that there are “no wrong questions”. At NetApp, Yau says employees can openly speak and even challenge the decisions made without any fear of repercussions. This is unlike a previous company where Yau used to work at, where the CEO made all the decisions and frowned upon employees questioning the decisions made. “If you question the decision of a CEO, the next minute the HR guy is asked, ‘Can you make sure that the guy is no longer with the company?’”.
But to prevent it from degenerating into a bitchfest, Yau says employees are encouraged to raise questions as well as propose alternatives. “If you challenge a decision, then you have to come up with an angle and say, ‘Do you want to look at another option?’ And sometimes we adopt or modify our decisions based on what the employees tell us,” he says.
However, despite having a transparent culture, there are certain topics in NetApp that are off-limits, Yau adds. As employees are given shares and considered stakeholders in the company, there are certain periods in the company whereby senior management cannot comment on questions surrounding company performance and targets.
Somehow, Heng says, information that is meant to be shared with employees always has a way of coming out into the open. This is why Hilti practices upfront communication on topics that have an impact on employees, rather than have employees gossip. “But there is information that when said, can impact other people. Then you’d have to be sensitive about it.”
But in cases where wagging tongues spread false rumours, what can HR reconcile the issue? This is where accumulated trust plays a part, says Heng. “If the line manager and team have a good level of trust, usually the line manager will help to address the fear or strong concerns,” says Heng.
In Chia’s opinion, it is better for rumours to surface and if it is specific to a department, the departmental leaders address it immediately “because we want to be transparent”. While Heng agrees that line managers have a role in addressing their departments, she says the level of trust between the employees and their line managers is an important factor in the effectiveness of the message relayed.
If the rumour involves hotel-wide issue, Chia says the hotel general manager and herself would step in to have a meeting to ask if employees have any queries or issues that they may have, and address it. “We always encourage addressing any issues immediately, or finding a solution to it. What we don’t want is for an employee to bring up an issue and it’s just [kept as an] FYI while management does nothing about it – that’s not in our culture.”
“It’s like our relationship with customers. The more our customers come back and tell us the challenges they face, the more it helps us to continually improve,” Chia says.
Despite communication, Heng concedes that there will be times where employees would not agree with the decisions of the company. “The company is not out to satisfy 100% of the people. If it believes the actions we take are right the thing to do, then we will communicate it and then manage the casualty. We just have to believe that we are communicating the right thing and that the managers will be there to manage.”
But other times, actions speak louder than words and the way companies demonstrate their actions can reinforce or belittle the message. While leaders can write email after email talking about how much they value all their staff, the message will be diminished once the company starts dropping employees at the first sign of trouble. Likewise, companies that say they are on a recruitment freeze and subsequently hire a rash of employees for expansion will be met with quizzical looks.
Hence, Abastillas says when the company had to look at ways to economise, it had to rethink its position on team-bonding activities and decided not to cut back on it because it valued strong bonds between its employees – which she says is even more crucial in these economic times.
The same is true for NetApp as well, who Yau says has one of the most hands-on CEO he has seen in his HR career. While certain top executives fly in just to seal the deal and give a speech at the company’s media conference, NetApp’s vice chairman Tom Mendoza would “go to the battlefield not as a leader, but as part of the selling process.”
“They are actually standing in front of the customer and telling them why they should buy our products.” Adding, “And if I am an employee, I’d think, ‘My CEO helps me’. And the [employee] gets the commission. So the feeling is different.”
And despite all the good work companies are doing to communicate and engage with their employees during this recession, one risk they have to avoid is dropping the ball entirely when the good times return. As Abastillas puts it, communication is an on-going effort – regardless of the economic situation.
And as Heng adds, “Just as it is between husband and wife, the more you communicate, the less guesswork you need to do, and the employee trusts the company more.”
