There is an interesting article in today’s New York Times (registration required, I believe) that asks the question; do organizations really know what their employees think about their jobs and work environment?  Not surprisingly, the answer is, no, for the most part they don’t.

“Some 86 percent of the 262 employers in a study by Watson Wyatt, the consulting firm, said they believed that their organization was treating employees well, and more than half expected to do a better job of treating employees well in the future. But only 55 percent of the 1,100 employees in the study believed they were well treated, and just 24 percent thought they would be treated better in the future.”

As the article points out, the primary cause of this disconnect is very simply a lack of communication.  Most companies don’t make the effort or, at the very least, an appropriate effort to find out what is important to their employees.  This is not to say that companies aren’t trying to do things to make their employees happy – although this is sometimes the case – but it often means that they are doing the wrong things.

An example of this is a company that continues to offer free daycare to an aging population of employees that no longer requires or appreciates the service.  It costs the company a lot of money and delivers no benefit as perceived by the employees.  Of course, a modicum of thought could easily deal with this specific problem, but other problems (opportunities?) are less obvious – sometimes involving subtle differences between the value of pay increases versus the addition or change of benefits.

How does one root out what’s going on?  The old fashioned way . . . ask.  Sure, it’s sometimes difficult to get straight answers, but if you ask often enough, eventually well-thought out responses begin to flow.  Why waste time and money on programs that end up failing to achieve their goals?

The subject of this article and its conclusions only refer to hygiene factors in management, not motivation.  Motivation is a much more difficult beast to slay and asking rarely gets you very far in doing so.  Nonetheless, optimizing hygiene factors is critical to running a productive organization and, like many management solutions, can be pretty much taken care of with a high levels of communication.

As a CEO, almost nothing drove me crazier than being surprised.  And I don’t only mean being surprised by bad news, I mean being surprised by good news as well.  That latter part may sound a bit absurd and I can promise you that hypocritically, my reaction to good surprises was never as negative as my reaction to bad ones.  Further, there were plenty of times, when things weren’t looking particularly good that I prayed to be shocked with an upside surprise or two.  Nevertheless, the reason I have such disdain for surprises is that I strongly believe that being surprised by something happening in your business is often indicative of not knowing what’s going on or not having thought through the likely outcomes of your actions.  It’s ignorance which, in my mind, is inexcusable in business.

Surprises will happen, of course.  Unless you run your business in the most conservative fashion, no one has the ability to predict everything that can take place.  As a manager at any level, though, you should focus on trying to reduce the number of surprises that occur in your organization.  If you do so, your organization will move faster, respond better and work more fluidly.

In order to minimize surprises in your business it’s important to understand the root causes of most of them – people don’t know what’s going on or they know, but for one of several reasons, they don’t act on or communicate the information.  The former problem is basic; training or replacement will fix it.  The latter problem is more complex and has to do with politics and power.

There are three primary reasons why people don’t pass on information:

• They’re afraid of the reaction they’re going to get from the person they’re delivering it to
• Information is perceived as power, which they want to hold on to
• They want to get credit for the information so they only deliver it to certain people at at certain times

Fear of the reaction

Some managers shoot the messenger, whether they’re responsible for the surprise or not.  If the manager does this enough times, the entire organization gets trained to shut up and keep things to themselves.  For the most part, information, especially if received in time enough to do something about it but in any case, should always be appreciated.  Good news, cherished and bad news, gratefully acknowledged.  If a manager creates an open environment where people feel that they are encouraged to speak up, more information will be available to base decisions on and the organization will work more smoothly.

Information is power

This one drives me into a homicidal rage.  There are those in almost any reasonably sized organization that want to use information to maximize their power and influence.  Perhaps they hold back information from certain individuals so that it can be revealed in a public forum with the boss.  Perhaps they keep such information in their pocket as a “told you so” when the shit hits the fan.  Whatever the reason, it’s bad and managers have stomp it out quickly and publicly.

To make matters worse, managers often implicitly reward the bearer of withheld information by focusing on the value of the information and ignoring the process by which it was revealed.  If a manager does this frequently, he’ll/she’ll just encourage others to do the same.  This pattern becomes very difficult to reverse. 

In an organization, knowledge itself should never create power.  The dissemination of it, should.

I want to be a hero

Similar to using information as power, some people hold on to information to be more visible or to save the day.  This can happen in any area of the company where a solution, relationship, sale, bug fix, customer contact, service completion or whatever, is revealed late in the process in order for the hero to appear as a savior of the period.  It’s difficult, of course, when such an action actually does pull the corporate ass out of the frying pan to keep from celebrating such a disclosure and the bearer of it.  A good manager has to, though.  Rewarding and, therefore, encouraging such behavior will only perpetuate the desire for people to hold back information to be a hero themselves.

Surprises happen when people in an organization don’t have information or don’t communicate it to the appropriate people.  In either case, the manager needs to stay on top of the problem and constantly be searching for ways to make sure that all possible knowledge of what’s going on pertaining to the business is understood and communicated in an open environment.  Only then can the business’ execution start to be optimized.