The Best Advice That You Can Get in June

I just got back from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) 2009 World Conference.  The hot topics?  Social media, collaboration and building trust.  How do you address all of those topics in one blog posting on employee compensation? I thought that I would give it a shot, given what is going on out there. 

With 60% of companies reporting salary freezes and 21% reporting salary reductions in Watson Wyatt’s April Update on the Effect of the Economic Crisis on HR Programs, most of us need all the ideas that we can get to help employees feel valued and motivated. So here goes.

Building trust
There’s a lot to be careful about these days, especially since country-wide, trust in executives has sunk so low. Think carefully before you kick an issue upstairs for an executive spokesperson, even when it comes to compensation. Manager-driven and bottom-up communications may be more powerful than the traditional cascade with your employees just now.  (Check in on this topic again in the next section.)

When I got yesterday’s post from Charles H. Green’s blog, Trust Matters, on “Why Trust Improves Your Bottom Line,” I knew I should pass it along. Although he’s focusing on external communications, he captures the fundamentals of building and maintaining employee trust elegantly. Here’s some of the best advice around:

“Tell the whole truth, don’t just don’t lie.  Don’t over-perform, or under-perform — just do what you said .  .  . Don’t try to control others.  Comment on feelings — yours and others’. Do your level best to actually care—don’t fake it  .  .  . If you don’t know something, say so.”

Starting here, starting now
June is an interesting month for HR, although we don’t usually talk about it with employees.  For most companies, June begins the run up to the fourth quarter performance management, pay and benefit implementation. That makes June the perfect time to increase communications to build trust.

I can hear the muttering, “Yeah, right, especially since I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” In my experience, that is exactly the best time to communicate. Not in the traditional, top-down mode of announcing decisions, but in a way that demonstrates collaboration and trust. 

Talk with employees about your decision-making process. Bring it out from behind the curtain. What are the milestones between June and November that lead to decisions about the compensation budget? Who needs to weigh in on the bonus budget and why? How do managers feel about their employees objectives – will they get the company the results it needs?

I have practiced this approach with many companies that are unclear about what comes next. Employees appreciate the insight into decisions that impact them. They find out that leaders are doing their “level best to actually care . . .” And, if you handle your communications like a conversation, instead of popping up on the radar whenever you (read leadership) have something to say, employees will be on your side when you explain that you don’t know yet about any number of things.

Finally, a short thought on the topic of blogging. Wouldn’t it be neat (and really effective) if your managers heard from one of their trusted sources throughout your compensation and performance management decision making processes? A colleague who could give them insight into what’s actually going on between June and November, and share her/his true thoughts and feelings about it.  By trusting your managers, you’ll increase the odds of getting trust back – you might even see it in the bottom line.

Margaret O’Hanlon is founder and principal of re:Think Consulting.  She has decades of experience teaming up with clients to ensure great Human Resource ideas deliver valuable business results.  Margaret brings deep expertise in total rewards communication to the dialogue at the Café; before founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal in Total Rewards Communications with Towers Perrin.  Margaret earned her M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology at Indiana University.  Creative writing is one of her outside passions.

Comments

[working girl]

My topic today was also about trust in the review process. Trust works both ways - management wants employees to trust more but trusting employees is also important.

[Margaret O'Hanlon]

Thanks for highlighting that. Trusting employees is the key -- I agree. Since collaboration is becoming so important to the way that work gets done in many industries, more and more companies are working hard at understanding the relationship they have with employees and evaluating how they are demonstrating their trust. These companies are realizing that trust is empty if it only works one way. (Their insights on trust often parallel work that the companies are doing on customer relationships.)