PEOPLE FOCUS - CIPD

HR MANAGEMENT
PEOPLE FOCUS
You won’t forget 2009 too soon
Effective workplace communication now essential
It looks as if 2009 will be one
of those years to remember
like 1987 with the overdue
moves to address the public
finances; or 1973 for joining
the EEC; or the start of WWII
in 1939; and 1929 for the
Wall Street crash. All years
that had big influences on
the subsequent decades in
Ireland or globally.
We will come through it and some will
look back in a decade at 2009 as the
year in which they got to grips with
organisational reality and shifted their
management styles. An economic crisis
and a downturn provide opportunities to
address issues which many of us were
too busy to get a tackle during the 1998­
2006 boom years.
A key issue will be to either maintain or
build trust which will have been dented
or perhaps seriously damaged by the
approach of recession. Contradictions
will have to faced up to whether that is
in costs which have run out of control
or some sections of an organisation
under-performing and allowed continue
without improvement.
Employee confidence is the key
ingredient in building for the recovery
and in exploiting potential
opportunities which may lie around
the corner. Key to that is effective and
honest workplace communication.
Ask yourself two quick questions: Do
your employees feel empowered and
engaged? Do they use their initiative and
believe in themselves? You know the
answers.
Wage freezes, underperforming
pension schemes and redundancies
have all taken their toll on employees.
Some companies’ employees have had
their confidence and trust further
shattered such as one high profile case
when senior management were found to
have been arranging up to €5m in
golden parachutes for themselves while
at the same time forcing through labour
costs cuts and redundancies.
30
Objective assessment
Imagine how staff in some financial
institutions must feel when their
senior management had been
concealing large and questionable
borrowings or failing to give accurate
assessments of the institution’s
viability and exposure to high-risk
asset-backed loans.
The first step is to objectively look at the
state of your workplace communications
and its effectiveness in securing buy-in to
ride-out the recession. That is not very
easy as is obvious with the great
reluctance of the one-in-six employees
who are in the pubic sector to face up to
pay cuts or ‘reverse benchmarking’
adjustments despite a government
budget deficit of nearly €20bn this year
out of a total state spend of €60bn.
“effective
HR is a lot
more than
just PR”
Effective two-way communications
enhances trust which reinforces the
psychological contract and usually leads
on to enhanced performance. Now is
the time to assess your organisation’s
internal communications as opposed
to marketing-style public relations
initiatives. HR is a lot more than
just PR.
If you have doubts about the
effectiveness of internal employee
communications then set one task for the
next few months – convince the most
senior management of the importance of
communication. They usually do not take
much convincing; it’s just they often
don’t know how to do it effectively.
After that secure an independent
assessment of organisational
communications especially if you have
not had such a review since before 2007
when the business climate was so
different. CIPD members probably have
a better understanding of the role of
effective communications in enhancing
employee performance and reducing
potential conflict than general
managers. The problem is getting line
managers and specialists to participate
and avoid adopting a narrow focus
often blurred by ‘management speak’
and confused thinking.
Enhanced HR role
CIPD Ireland members who need
advice on effective workplace
communications may contact the
institute’s research and policy adviser,
Gerald Flynn who has decades of
effective communication experience.
He will provide you with initial pointers
to help you assess and implement
improved employee communication by
identifying, adapting for and working
with, key audiences.
Managing effective communications
helps make HR managers play a key
strategic role in their organisations as
both business partners and key players in
aligning objectives and developing an
open culture. Usually it is a low-cost
activity but when undertaken
professionally and sustained by
organisational analysis, two-way effective
communication becomes a major driver
of success.
2009 could be a year to remember as the
one when the human resource
department at last got to grips with
employee engagement rather than the
year of losses, bankruptcies, redundancies
and bank nationalisation ■
Contact Gerald Flynn
at gerald.flynn@
cipd.ie. Have a look
at TURNER, P. (2003)
Organisational
communication: the
role of the HR
professional.
London: Chartered Institute of
Personnel and Development.
Available from
http://www.cipd.co.uk/bookstore