I seem to see HR emails everywhere these days. Remember my June blog, "Ping! Pong! Email! From HR!" In that case, it was the bad vibes of email -- all email -- as a communication channel that I was cautioning HR to pay attention to.
After all, it is time to plan focal review communications. It's no secret that HR is notorious for its emails and I thought that the Harvard Business Review blogger, Sarah Green, provided a valuable caution to those putting together communication strategies.
"Instead of talking with one person and getting something done, we're carrying on simultaneous conversations with hundreds of people and struggling to get anything done."
It's so clearly true, yet we don't want to admit it. HR put so much time into getting the emails right and often takes little or no time for coaching leadership and helping managers overcome obstacles.
This week I read some really interesting research on the subject in a PsyBlog posting called, "50+ Savvy Insights into Workplace Psychology." Here's the savvy topic that got my attention, "Can you get things done without making people hate you?" It's an eternal worry for the neurotic -- er, I mean effective -- leader.
It wasn't the findings on productivity that got my attention so much. As you might imagine, Ames' & Flynn's 2007 research indicated that low assertiveness produced minimal returns. And higher and higher levels of assertiveness produced diminishing returns.
What got me excited was the researchers' visual. It's about how the employee subjects of the study perceived the leadership abilities of the leader subjects. The wording below is obviously not corporate . . . and it is so wonderfully descriptive.
Along the continuum of assertiveness, employees saw leaders as anywhere from "instrumentally impotent" at the low end to "socially insufferable" at the high end. I almost laughed at the truth of the words.
But, stick with me here. Wouldn't employees have the same continuum for emails? From the emails they delete because they are lame, up to the ones they delete because they've heard from the pushy writer over and over again.
The research drew the continuum as a curvilinear form because they wanted us to know that action to perception wasn't a one-to-one relationship. Jeremy Dean, the hunky PhD candidate who writes PsyBlog suggests that we shoot for the assertiveness "sweet spot" at the highest point of the curve, since the research indicates that it is definitely better to be moderately assertive than not assertive.
Same thing goes for HR communications, especially about performance management. As you develop your year end communications strategy, become aware of how you are asserting the issues and shoot for the sweet spot that will make HR influential.
If HR only shows up on the email screen at the end of the year, most anything you say will be considered pushy. If that's so, is HR the best author for these communications?
Do you send the emails out to warn of deadlines, as is tradition, or do you turn to social media for these "mini" issues? Do you create a content landing page on your intranet with links to all the resources and forms for performance management, compensation and development? If you do, why send repetitive reminder emails when you can expect everyone to "pull" the information they need from one reliable place.
This is obviously not an exact science but it is a sensitive issue with real impact. You don't want HR to be perceived as either impotent or insufferable.
I mean, do you?
Margaret O'Hanlon is founder and Principal of re:Think Consulting. She joined Ann Bares and Dan Walter of the Compensation Cafe to speak the unspoken -- "Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communication" -- at the WorldatWork 2012 Conference. Margaret brings deep expertise in total rewards communications and change management to the dialog at the Café. Before founding re:Think Communications Consulting, she was a Principal in Total Rewards Communications and Change Management with Towers Perrin. Margaret is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Pacific Plains Region. She earned her M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology at Indiana University. Creative writing is one of her outside passions, along with Masters Swimming.
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