Three years ago, as part of a company-wide “transformation initiative”,
I took part in a Potemkin Village exercise involving tiger teams supposedly
working toward building strategies in three new areas.
My focus was on “internal communications”, a much-needed function.
(Although, tbf, most organizations are completely crap at this.) My team and I
spent about 6X the amount of time we were told to commit to the project, and
presented recommendations for implementing employee communications—hiring a
director, comprehensive framework for multiple touch points, comms calendar, the
whole megillah.
That was before executive management decided that we really didn’t
need no stinkin’ transformation. There was quite the bun fight over who should
control such a function; the (now-departed) HR director insisted we didn’t need
to hire anyone—we could use existing resources. But in any case, HR should own
the operation. Yeah, right.
Eventually they assigned the job (not at the director level) to
someone in the executive office, put up a monitor with HR announcements in the
lobby and reduced the amount of information shared throughout the company by an
order of magnitude. Problem solved, eh?
Well, aside from various emails from HR and whatever goes on that lobby
monitor that I don’t even notice, the most frequent form of communication we’ve
received has been photocopied announcements of various lectures and panels taped
to elevator walls.
Until a few weeks ago, when one of these appeared in each car:
I suppose that tape wasn’t good for marble
walls. Or maybe someone decided that taped flyers looked tacky. Or maybe they
just felt there was too much communication going on.
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