Are you one of those people who goes into the office party and thinks ‘great, free food, free booze, let’s get stuck in’?
Or perhaps you are the life and soul of the party, telling jokes loudly and laughing heartily at each one. You don’t care if some of them are politically incorrect. After all its Christmas and a time for people to ‘let their hair down’. If they don’t get the joke or find it offensive then tough – it’s only a joke after all.
No doubt you arrive early to the party, ‘do the rounds’, make sure that your glass is constantly topped up and don’t leave until you are thrown out. What a giggle.
Then again, you might fancy your chances with the girl you have been eyeing up all year. Let’s face it, they are all fair game at Christmas. Never mind that you might spoil her party with your persistence and cheap comments – ‘perhaps you’d care to use the photocopier’.
It is possible, of course, that you are one of the more sensitive types. Not great at socialising, prefer to linger on the edges and watch others having fun. You might have a few brief conversations but avoid plunging in for fear of making a fool of yourself. Or you may latch on to someone the moment they come up to you and try to keep them in conversation until it’s time to go.
Funny old thing drink. In a hot room full of noise the alcohol catches up with you quite quickly. Amazing how it loosens the tongue and releases your inhibitions.
We all know you didn’t mean to tell that old hog Mr Robinson what you thought of him; well at least what you thought you thought of him, but it was pretty funny at the time.
And as for the dancing on the desks!
Go on, have fun this year at the office Christmas party. Let your hair down. Have a good time.
But remember that how you behave and what you say will be remembered long into the New Year – and not everyone is as forgiving as you would like them to be.
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As we approach the time when most people take their summer holidays, it might be worth considering what effect this has both on the holidaymaker and the workplace.
Increasingly people ‘work to live rather than live to work’. This means that holidays take on a special meaning. As the holiday approaches we start to lose concentration on work, out comes the holiday guide and down goes the productivity.
Equally, as we return from holiday, instead of feeling invigorated many have a feeling of post-holiday blues. So what can the manager do to ensure that work is disrupted as little as possible and the team member is re-integrated back into the workplace smoothly?
Pre holiday
First the manager needs to consider when each member of the team is taking their holiday. Who remains and how can the workload be staggered?
Then it is worth calling the team together, looking at priorities and seeing how the most important tasks can be carried forward collectively or delegated to those who remain.
Meanwhile the manager should sit down with each team member and work through the issues that might arise. At the same time the team member should be encouraged to write a short schedule of all work in hand, their current status and anything that might arise during the holiday period.
If possible the team member should be encouraged to ask another person to look through their daily e-mails and remove the trivia. There is nothing worse than coming back to find a full e-mail box to have to work through.
So far so good. Your team member should leave knowing that they have fully briefed the team, that certain tasks will be carried forward in their absence and that mail of whatever variety will at least be checked and the trivia removed.
Post holiday
Upon return from their holiday the last thing a team member will want to do is to think about work. They will want to tell everyone about their holiday and may even be thinking about the next holiday. Indeed the motivating factor of thinking about the next holiday should not be ignored. So again there are things that the team leader can do to ensure normality returns as soon as possible.
First give them time to talk about their holiday. Encourage them to bring in holiday snapshots, perhaps even have an informal get together where those returning can show their photos to the rest of the team. In other words allow the team to share the experience collectively. This will not only help build team spirit but will move the process forward.
Then encourage team members to plan and to book their next holiday. This gives them something to ‘look forward to’ and creates a sense of moving forward.
Having dispensed with these issues the team leader should then dedicate some time to briefing team members about issues that took place in their absence. A formal hand-back of any projects that were delegated along with any progress made.
After a stress free few weeks it is best to ease team members back into their work. Do not expect them to take on high pressure work immediately. Instead it is better to give them lighter tasks and let them work back into the routine gradually.
Taking time to think through the effects of holidays is well worth the effort. It will lead to better scheduling of work, higher productivity in the medium term, more motivated team members, and hopefully, employees who develop a sense of company loyalty.
Have a good holiday.
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Recently I have been working with some people from a large international American blue chip company. Inevitably, as we talked about internal communications the discussion turned to the general approach of senior executives.
One person expressed deep frustration when she said that they received frequent requests from ‘Head Office’ to dicuss certain problems and then come up with recommendations. This they would do, their recommendations would be sent back to Head Office and the response would come back that they were not going to do it that way, but a completely different way – a reason was never given.
On one occasion they had sat for five days in a series of workshops only to find that all of their recommendations were ignored.
The manager present in our meeting pointed out that when it happens once or twice there may be a good reason but when it happens every single time it suggests that the consultation is nothing more than a cosmetic exercise and the decisions have already been taken.
This reflects some of the other examples I have come across recently where employers about to make redundancies go through a consultation process. Usually it is anything but a consultation process and it can only lead to ill feelings and discontent among the employees.
The moral of the story is very simple. Unless you genuinely mean to listen to the views of your employees and then show them that you have listened, do not enter into a cosmetic consultation exercise. Senior executives who treat their employees in such a way will be rewarded with cynicism, contempt and resistance to any change; productivity will fall as will morale and motivation.
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The MacLeod Review, which was the subject of a previous blog, carried out a lot of research and in depth meetings with a range of small, medium and large businesses. They discovered that there were some very clear reasons why organisations blocked employee engagement.
Ignorance. They found that a lot of employers were not aware of or did not believe in the benefits to be derived from engaged employees. One of the statistics that comes out of the review is that 75% of leaders have no plans to improve employee engagement
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When you first do something new the novelty of it impacts on people, their attention is raised and positive results should follow.
However, if you fail to find new angles to the same thing and keep repeating the same message in the same way then it becomes the norm. When something becomes the norm it becomes part of the background noise. People fail to notice the message anymore and their attention levels fall.
That is one of the reasons why so many internal communications campaigns are not sustained. Building a strategic internal communications plan is good. Integrating it with your external communications is also good; but in addition you have to create a series of waves of activity.
With each wave of activity, or campaign, you are creating high initial impact which can be sustained in the short term, but not for long. That is why people who are serious about their internal communications should be on the look out, all of the time, to find new and innovative ways to keep attention levels high.
It is also why your strategic plan should have a timeline which allows for a carefully created series of campaigns over the short to medium term. One campaign should be timed to follow the previous campaign so that attention is retained.
Once internal communications becomes part of the norm you are working hard creating material that will have no material impact.
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Last night I was at a reception and met the CEO of a growing company with more and more sites springing up both in the UK and across Europe.
Her main concern was that she wanted to be visible to all of her staff. To this end she had organised an intranet where she placed regular blogs and media clips. Her other big effort was to try and get around all the company sites and meet all of her staff.
Of course, as a small company this would have been an important and useful exercise, but now that the company had grown into a multi-million pound business with lots of sites this was becoming less feasible.
This is not an unusual situation. Good bosses will want to be visible and accessible. However, there comes a point where visibility has to take other forms. My suggestion to this CEO was to pace herself, accept that she could not achieve everyhthing that she would like and that a planned approach to site visits was needed.
My other advice was to ensure that she established ‘Meet the CEO’ events where she could sit down over a breakfast or lunch and talk with up to ten of her employees. The key here is to let them do the talking. Partly to tell her what was going on and give ideas about how the product or service could be improved and partly to feed back ideas about the more strategic direction of the company.
Yes, I know this means that she doesn’t get to meet every single employee, but engagement is about listening and being seen to be listening. The word soon gets round and visibility takes on a new meaning.
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The Macleod review on employee engagement was published this summer and looked closely at all the issues around this crucial approach to business.
Whilst many will see employee engagement as a HR issue I would beg to differ. It goes to the very core of internal communications in that employees will not be properly engaged without a very good communications policy.
The report is a hefty 157 pages long and contains a mass of case studies from a wide range of public and private sector employers. Over the coming week or two I will highlight some of the more interesting areas of the report from a communications viewpoint.
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