Driving Corporate Culture: The State of the Art

Mainstreaming Communications to Achieve Business Results
Bob Matha

We need to tell our management team that they must take more risks in their decisions. We need to explain our vision to employees so we can get the company headed in the right direction. We need to tell our employees to pay more attention to quality. We need to make our employees understand that customer service is the most important thing in this company. We need an Intranet so we can improve communications.

According to Bob Matha, these are the "cries for help" that he (and every Page member, for that matter) has heard repeatedly. "People who run organizations always need help," Matha said. "Eisenhower was floored by the fact that when he became President he would give an order and people wouldn't do it. Czar Nicholas said, 'I don't run Russia, 10,000 clerks do.' CEOs who are trying to tell employees about quality might just as well be telling their teenage kids to do something; they don't listen."

But Matha has learned during his two decades in business communications, both in consulting and in company roles, that you can achieve results, answer those "cries for help" so to speak, if you approach the need or problem in the right way. Now a partner in Matha MacDonald, he had spent many years working on workplace issues and leading communications efforts to drive changes in corporate culture and strategy.

"My job today," Matha said, "is to talk about mainstreaming communications and how that technique can help your company achieve the business results they want." As he explained it, mainstreaming is the transformation of the communications department from a staff function into a line-like function that has responsibility and accountability for operating and financial results.

"We've seen a lot of that in investor relations, human resources and marketing," Matha said, "but communications is just starting to get there. And we're getting there because the CEOs are demanding it."

While corporate communications has been an effective player in crisis management, reputation management, even marketing communications, Matha said, a lot of internal communications is still focused on articles and videos and brochures and posters. "We do a lot of stuff, but we don't make things happen, we don't get results."

Based on his experiences with a number of companies, Matha offered what he described as "some practical ideas" for beginning to mainstream your internal communications staff, a process, he said, that will take two or three years to accomplish. "It's not a short-term process."

The first thing Matha suggested is "send your staff to the business plan. Try to get them involved in the planning process, but if you can't, at least make sure they understand what's in the plan." What is the company really trying to achieve? What are the strategies for reaching their goals and objectives in profits, sales, quality improvement? Who is responsible for achieving those objectives?

Next, sit down with the people who are responsible for a particular objective and ask them three questions, Matha said. Does your plan require employees to do anything new or different than they did before? How have your employees performed in the past in this area; how have they handled change and did they get results? Finally, what are you going to do to get the performance you want out of employees?

Past performance is important, Matha explained, because it tells you what is at risk. If the employees only performed at 75 percent last year, it suggests that something has to be done differently in order to get closer to the 100 percent needed to reach an objective. This risk factor can be translated into dollars, he said, and that dollar figure can become an opportunity for the internal communications staff.

"Go to the guy in operations and tell him you want to help him pick up the $7 million shortfall he's facing," Matha said, "and I assure you that he's going to listen to you in a much different way than if you come in and say we're going to build understanding of the strategy or we're going to create awareness about the brand. They don't care about that. They care about the $7 million."

If the line manager isn't getting what he needs from employees to hit his numbers, Matha said, "Show him how communications can help. Go into the field and identify the real causes why employees are behaving as they do. If you're going to fix quality, for example, you can't do it from the corporate office. You have to go to the plant, the airport, the loading dock - wherever quality is made or not made."

To get results, Matha said, you will probably have to change behavior. "But that is not a simple thing. The only way I found we could do it is by creating cross-functional alliances. If we're going after quality, we get together all of the groups that are interested in quality and organize them around a desired result. They've got the budgets, the organizations, the know-how, and by leveraging these things we can make things happen."

Recognize that you can't change the whole company at once, Matha added. Start small - one plant, one department - and demonstrate the possibilities. "Attack the beliefs, the thinking, the results in a very local, very specific way," he continued. "Coach supervisors to listen to their employees, build rapport with them and recognize their values. Hold discussions so that what you're trying to accomplish makes sense to the employees and they understand it. Listen to their suggestions. And make sure you show your appreciation for their support."

Build on your successes. "After we had worked with a unit of one company for about nine months," Matha said, "it became obvious that quality had improved, to the point where it was much more cost efficient from a production standpoint. The success of that effort was attributed to communications, and we were able to use the process in other parts of the company because people had begun to understand that communications can be an important part of operations."

Communications made a difference, Matha said, because "it wasn't communications just to communicate. It wasn't communicating about visions and values. It was communications about operations, about getting the defect rate down. In this instance, the communications department really stepped in and did a lot of work. But they were providing information that the employees said they needed to know to do their jobs."

As part of this effort, Matha continued, the internal communications staff helped redefine some of the metrics of the operations, coached the management to model the right behaviors with their people, helped get the union to buy in, recognized people who had never been recognized in their lives and leveraged all of the channels to help change behavior in the department.

"All of these actions were driven by communications," he said, "but implemented through the cross-functional alliance we had formed at the beginning. Communications was the thread throughout the whole organization that helped pull it together."

Wrapping up, Matha said, "When we talk about mainstreaming, it's about getting communications people into the mainstream of the organization so they're pursuing the same results that the organization is pursuing. We never created a new newsletter or magazine. We weren't pumping out information and messages from corporate. We were simply down in the bowels of the organization, working on the things that mattered and helping to create results that made a difference."

So when the next "cry for help" comes from the CEO who says we need to tell employees to pay more attention to quality, your response can be much different, Matha said. "You can say we're doing more than just telling them. We're helping them improve it."