Communication Where it Matters Most: The Factory Floor

Last week I spent some time with a manager who is responsible for communication in the manufacturing center of one of my clients. We were talking about her plan to communicate upcoming changes to the product packaging — why they were happening, but more important, what was happening.

It’s important for the people who work on the line to know what to expect with the changes. Lack of awareness could lead to confusion, which could lead to disruptions in the manufacturing line, which in turn could affect the bottom line.

It reminded me how much I love working on communication with manufacturing employees. It also reminded me how difficult “factory floor” communication can be.

I love the manufacturing environment because that’s where the action is. Sure, it’s easier and more comfortable to develop and implement communications with office workers. But when it comes right down to it, for a company that makes things, the factory floor is the most important place and manufacturing employees are the most important audience. What they make brings revenue to the company.

If everyone knows what to do and how to do it and why the business is being run the way it is and how their actions affect customers, the company thrives and people throughout it keep their jobs. If nobody knows or cares about what’s going on, if decisions and changes aren’t explained and customers are nothing more than a faceless entity out there, the motivation to be productive disappears and job losses are sure to follow.

I spent 10 years working for two manufacturing companies, eight of those years in a factory and two of them in a headquarters position. I can tell you that when communicators in manufacturing companies lose touch with the needs of people on the factory floor, they do so at great risk to their companies’ success.

Yet it happens all the time. Here’s why:

• Many communicators for manufacturing companies never work in manufacturing facilities. Spending eight years in a factory immersed me in that world. I gained not only a deep appreciation for the unique communication needs of manufacturing employees, but also a working knowledge of the processes so that I could develop communication programs that made sense for that environment. If you work for a manufacturing company and are assigned to a headquarters office, you need to get out and spend significant time — not just a day here or there — learning as much as you can about the factory and the people who work there.
• Communicators who work at headquarters or in an office building adopt a headquarters mentality. I realize I’m generalizing, but my observation is that office dwellers get so caught up in their own worlds and their own work that they lose sight of what the company is in the business of doing. This is natural tendency and I’m not suggesting malicious intent, but it calls for intervening action to get out of headquarters mode. Again, visit the floor.
• Business leaders don’t understand or appreciate the unique communication needs of manufacturing employees. Communicators often take their cues from business leaders. If the higher-ups don’t look at factory-floor communication as a priority, communicators probably won’t either. To be fair, sometimes communicators are sensitive to manufacturing communication issues, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. Communicators need to continue raising the issues with senior management. If we don’t, nobody else will.
• Manufacturing communication is difficult, messy and requires an investment of time and money. When your audience is sitting in an office or cubicle, with easy access to the intranet and social media and face-to-face meetings, it’s relatively easy to communicate with them. To communicate with factory employees requires more work and usually more resources. Face-to-face meetings are time off the floor, which is lost productivity. Print is an effective channel for factory workers, but it can be expensive and time-consuming. There are ways around these challenges, but it takes creativity and hard work — and a commitment from senior management to make it happen.

I was the first professional communicator in the factory where I started my career. It was also my first corporate communications job, so it took some time for me to figure out why communication was important to that audience and how to do it efficiently and effectively. As I learned, I educated my senior management.

By the time I left that job, communication was an integral part of the facility’s culture. It took time and a lot of patience. It also took persistence on my part. I didn’t just fold up and let it go when I met obstacles. I persevered because I understood how important it was to communicate with manufacturing employees. If you are a communicator for a manufacturing company, I urge you to do the same. Effective communication at the factory floor level is worth the effort. The impact is potentially huge because that’s where communication matters the most.

Failure is Never Fatal

As part of a church study group, I’m reading a little book right now that has caused me to do a lot of deep thinking lately. That’s good because that’s what these study groups are designed to do — get us thinking about things that matter to us and examining how we might live an even more fulfilling life.

The book is called One Month to Live: Thirty Days to a No-Regrets Life by Kerry and Chris Shook, and it’s about how to live a passion-filled, purposeful life. It’s written from a Christian perspective, so much of its context would be meaningless to non-believers, but anyone can embrace the basic message of living a life with no regrets.

One of the chapters, which is about acknowledging mistakes we’ve made in the past and learning from them, brought to mind one of the most significant events — and now, I see, a critical turning point — of my life.

“Failure is never fatal,” the authors say. “We have the God of the second chance, and He wants to give us the power to begin again.”

This year marks the 10th anniversary of my self-employment as a communication consultant. The circumstances that marked the beginning of this journey illustrate how you can take what appears to be a defeat, learn from it, and grow beyond that point to experience even better things.

I was fired from my last corporate job on May 1, 2000. I suppose it didn’t come as a complete surprise because my relationship with my boss had been steadily declining for several months. I was fired because I didn’t follow orders. My boss, who was director of the employee communication department despite having absolutely no experience or expertise in communications, had told me to do something that compromised the integrity of not only my work, but also the work of the people I led. I refused to do it. I have no regrets about standing on that principle, despite the fact that it led me to disobey orders.

Was I blameless in the chain of events that led to my firing? Of course not. Looking back, I see that at times I was belligerent and even a bit cocky. I’ve since been humbled, not just by being fired but also by other slings and arrows that life threw at me, and I’ve mellowed except where it’s beneficial to be feisty.

While not really surprised, my termination still hit me hard. I felt like a failure. I believed I had let my family down. I was afraid my professional colleagues would look down on me. And yet, somehow I reached deep down inside and found the determination to move forward — and it was necessary for me to do so immediately. I decided the next day to start my consulting practice. I had no experience as an entrepreneur and no idea where to start, but I knew I had a healthy list of friends in the communication business from whom I could learn.

The first person I called was my mentor and best friend, Les Potter, who was still in the consulting business. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I said. “I don’t know where to start.” I’ll never forget what he told me.

“You start by getting up in the morning, showering and shaving, getting dressed and going into your office,” he said. “Then do something. Anything. Make phone calls, send e-mails, read, write. But be productive and the business will follow.”

He was right, of course. I followed his advice — day after day, month after month, to this day. OK, sometimes I don’t shave when I know I’ll be working at home, but for the most part I have used that formula to grow a business that has served dozens of clients all over the country. It has not always been easy. Many times it has been downright scary. But 10 years and several recessions later, I’m still in business and I like what I do.

The main lesson I took away from that experience is just as the book says. Failure is never fatal. As a Christian, I believe God is the God of second chances. I could write 5,000 more words on the role of my faith throughout this and other challenges in my life, but I won’t do that here.

Instead, I’ll simply encourage you, dear readers, to look differently at the circumstances in your life that appear to be failures. View them instead as building blocks that will get you to the next place in your life or career. Learn what you can from them and then move forward. There is life – exciting, fulfilling, passioinate life – after failure.

It’s a Mad World

I was 18 in 1981 when I learned a hard lesson that serves me well to this day. That’s the year I began contributing editorial cartoons to my hometown newspaper, a gig that lasted 13 years. The lesson I learned is that when your work is published, a lot of people will disagree with it, they’ll be pretty harsh in telling you so, and you can’t take it personally.

I kept the thick skin I developed as a cartoonist and it’s a good thing, too. Because whether you’re drawing editorial cartoons or publishing an employee magazine or writing a blog, a lot of people will tell you that you suck.

The Internet takes that fact and puts it on steroids. It was bad enough back in my newspaper days when folks who hated my cartoons sat down, wrote hate-filled letters to the editor, signed their names (the editor wouldn’t run anonymous letters) and mailed them. Sometimes they’d pick up the phone and call or even drop by the newspaper office to tell me how much I sucked.

On the Web, anybody can write anything and they can hide behind the computer screen. Anonymity emboldens people and leads them to say things they might not say in person. Or maybe they would, in which case I fear for civilized society.

After I wrote my previous blog post on the Facebook bra-color campaign, someone on an Internet discussion board posted a link to it along with his response. I won’t dignify it by reprinting it here — besides, this is mostly a G- or PG-rated blog and this guy’s rant is filled with obscenities – but he ended by calling me a “sad waste of space oxygen thief.”

I’m not bothered that someone I don’t know feels that I’m robbing the universe of oxygen. I’m bothered that there is someone out there whose tinderbox of a soul was ignited by a blog post that, let’s face it, was read by a few hundred people.

I’m far from being the only one who is the target of such wrath. One of my friends sent me this link to a bit by stand-up comedian Russell Brand in which he responds to hate-mailers. And the funny website The Oatmeal compiled the “Retarded Emails Hall of Fame” in response to angry readers. (Warning: Both of these links contain coarse language.)

Kind of gives new meaning to “It’s a mad world.”

Bra Color Campaign Makes Boobs of Us All

Thanks to a widespread movement that took place on Facebook yesterday, I now know what color bras many of my female friends were wearing.

That, apparently, was the purpose of the viral campaign in which women were instructed to post a one-word status message indicating their color of the day. It was a successful campaign, too, because it managed to engage women who were unaware of its purpose (“Fuchsia. We’re posting our favorite colors, right?”) and women who were otherwise disengaged (“None.”).

It nearly engaged me — until I googled “bra color on Facebook” and learned that most people believed the purpose was to raise awareness of breast cancer. Then I, like many men, felt left out. I suggested to my friends that we guys post the colors of our boxers or briefs to raise awareness of prostate cancer. I also read tweets from men who suggested we post our favorite beer. One guy suggested something to raise awareness of colon cancer, but I won’t go into that here.

For a moment I feared the worst — that it was a campaign on what color bras women should wear to get around airport scanner detection. If that had been true, who knows what kind of explosives could be hidden in those things?

The truth is, as of the day after the bra color campaign, nobody is sure what the campaign’s purpose was or who started it. So, as a public relations effort, it was a failure. If one of the cancer prevention organizations was behind it, it missed the opportunity to clearly communicate its message to the millions of Facebook users who participated. It also missed the opportunity to actually do something with all the energy behind the effort — like attach some sort of fundraising goal or even to impart some knowledge to the participants.

One enterprising blogger – a woman battling breast cancer — took it upon herself to urge some action on the part of all the women who were showing their colors. “So, while you’re peeking inside your shirt to see what color bra you are wearing so you can post it in your status update,” she wrote, “go ahead and feel around in there, make sure there are no lumps. And if there are, call your doc for a clinical exam!”

As it is, we can only chalk this episode up as another Facebook fad. It had no more value than FarmVille or Mafia Wars. In fact, it made boobs out of all of us.

Are social skills silently fading away?

A few months ago I made a list of what I believe to be the fundamental skills every professional communicator should have in order to succeed. It’s a good list, but now I feel that I left out a skill that’s not only crucial for communicators, but for people in all walks of life: Social interaction. In real life. Not online.

A few things caused me to realize the importance of social interaction as a business and personal skill.

One was a holiday conversation with members of my family, some of whom have Facebook pages and use them regularly and some of whom do not. One of my sisters questioned the value of Facebook and said, “I don’t have the time for it. I’m busy enough trying to keep up with my life as it is.” As a regular Facebook user, I pointed out that it helps me manage my friendships and adds a certain depth to them that I otherwise would not experience.

But I have to admit that it would be very easy to slip into what author and “lifetyle expert” Judith Wright calls a “soft addiction” to Facebook — or Twitter or e-mail or any other electronic media, for that matter. An interesting article by Melissa Ruggieri in Sunday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch looked at this phenomenon. She quotes Wright as saying a soft addiction is a seemingly harmless activity that negatively affects the way we live.

So if you find yourself constantly checking Facebook, Twitter or e-mail or if you feel anxious when you can’t do so, you might have a soft addiction to them. If your participation in social media — or in any other activity — keeps you from developing and nurturing real-life, face-to-face relationships with friends and family, then things might just be a bit out of hand.

Another holiday conversation brought this point back to the communication profession. In a much-too-rare visit with my mentor and best friend Les Potter, our talk turned to the future communicators he teaches in the Department of Mass Communication & Communication Studies at Towson University. Les continuously reinforces the importance of “face time” and the interpersonal social skills that his students will need when they join the workforce — even as they use social media tools in their profession. Nothing replaces real-life interaction for quality of communication. Body language, tone of voice and human warmth simply cannot be replicated online.

Les also bemoaned his experience at last year’s IABC World Conference – not because the program lacked quality, but because the hallway conversations, the impromptu discussions at the hotel lobby bar and the camaraderie that once were highlights of the annual event were missing. “Everyone was buried in their cell phones, texting and tweeting,” Les said. “People didn’t pay attention to the other people around them. I felt invisible.”

Anyone who knows Les knows that he doesn’t require constant attention or validation. But who can blame him for feeling walled out of his professional colleagues’ electronic worlds?

I believe social media have great value in the new communication landscape. They are changing the way business is transacted and they are changing the way we communicators do our jobs. They offer many benefits in terms of creating niche communities and bringing far-flung people together. I love keeping in touch with family, friends and business colleagues through social media.

However, I fear the art of social interaction is being lost as a result of too much reliance on social media. And I believe instructors of the next generation of communicators — and of business people in general — and stewards of our profession have an obligation to ensure social interaction skills don’t silently fade away.

Snow as a Diversionary PR Tactic

Everyone in my hometown of Richmond, Va., is buzzing about the sale of Ukrop’s Super Markets, Inc. – a local, family owned business — to the U.S. unit of Denmark’s Royal Ahold NV.

Meanwhile, we here in Richmond are awaiting the arrival of a winter storm that might dump 10 inches of snow on us.

Given Richmonders’ propensity for rushing Ukrop’s to stock up on milk and bread at the very mention of a snow flurry, I’m wondering if Ukrop’s public relations consultants — who are friends and professional colleagues of mine — didn’t orchestrate this snowstorm to cast Ukrop’s in a more positive light.

Hey, it could happen. The Ukrop brothers have a lot of pull in this town.

Pay For Communication Now or Pay For It Later

I thought about getting my son a cell phone for Christmas. Thought about it, but not doing it. A communication breakdown led me to change my mind.

I know my sons are probably the last two teenagers in America who don’t have cell phones. Part of the reason is that my 17-year-old son has never wanted one. He eschews many of the trappings of teenagerdom including electronic gadgets. Until recently, I didn’t believe my 13-year-old was responsible enough to care for an electronic device, but he has taken pretty good care of his iPod. Well, until it went through the wash, but the Apple store replaced it for free.

Another reason — and probably the biggest one — that my kids don’t have cell phones is that I’m too cheap to pay for them. I live a pretty thrifty lifestyle and I have a hard time doing anything that will add to my monthly bills.

But this year, after much thought and input from others, I decided the time had come to give the 13-year-old a cell phone, partly for practical reasons. He’s not always the easiest kid to track down.

I went to one of those big-box electronic stores that advertised a selection of free phones. I went to the big sign that read “Wireless” and talked to the kid who was working there. I asked lots of questions and ended up believing that I could add this free phone to my cellular service for only $10 a month. What a deal! I picked out a cool phone — did I mention it was free? — and the kid called the service provider to add the line. I was excited about giving this gift to my son for Christmas.

Then, a few days later, the service provider sent me information that explained what I had done. Somehow, my brain had not absorbed all of this information in the store. Rather than adding $10 a month, adding the new line would increase my monthly cellular bill by $35! That would nearly double my bill each month!

I called the service provider and a customer service rep explained that I had switched from an individual plan to a family plan, plus there was an access charge for the additional line each month. But the phone was indeed free.

Last night I took the phone back to the store to return it and cancel the changes to my service agreement. The same kid was working there. “Wow,” he said. “I didn’t know it would add that much to your monthly bill. I really thought it would only be $10 more a month.”

Clearly, this kid either was not well trained or the information he was given was not clear. That’s the fault of the big-box store, the service provider or both. Someone somewhere had failed to communicate with him so that he could communicate clearly with customers.

As a result, not only did the big-box store and service provider lose potential new revenue, but both had to take the time to undo what had been done. Now, I know most customers who found out about the higher price would have shrugged their shoulders and said, “Oh well. It’s Christmas. I’ll pay for it anyway.” But I bet even those customers would be left thinking the companies involved deserved a lump of coal in their stockings.

Between the rework and the reputation damage, the failure to communicate up front with employees — especially those who are on the front lines of customer service — can be high. It’s too bad more companies don’t invest in communication now in order to avoid paying the price later.

Mr. Squiggles Has Real PR Pros on His Team

Twitter friend Lisa Newkirk of Tampa, Fla., posted this link to Cepia LLC’s statement regarding the safety of its Zhu Zhu Pets, one of the hottest toys this holiday season.

As she noted, the statement — especially the quote by CEO Russ Hornsby — is clear, direct, lacks jargon and even includes a personal touch that comes off as sincere.

Indeed, there is not a “leading edge” or “innovative” cliché to be found. The headline and subhead are descriptive and active. The press release states the company’s position, describes its testing and inspection procedures and says what the company is doing about the crisis. It gets in, takes care of business and gets out. Public relations students — and professionals, for that matter — take note: This is what a press release should look like.

Now if they could just do something about the toy’s name. Mr. Squiggles the Go Go Hamster? Really?

IABC Chapters Need Help — Now!

My communication career flashed before my eyes last night. No, it wasn’t a dream or a momentary panic attack that caused the flashback. It was a reception sponsored by IABC/Richmond.

I’m a member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). Nothing against PRSA — the Richmond chapter is a fine group that offers great programs — but IABC holds a special place in this communicator’s heart. In some ways, however, my heart is breaking. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Last night’s reception was like a class reunion. Some of us who grew up in IABC/Richmond had a wonderful time recalling our first meeting and many memorable events since then — certain speakers, chapter leaders, interesting meeting venues, international and regional conferences, long-time friendships.

I thought about the milestones of my career so far and how IABC is a common theme among them:

• I remember the first person I met at an IABC meeting — Dawn Stuart, ABC. She remains a friend today, though she now lives in a different state.
• I met my mentor and best friend — Les Potter, ABC – when he came to speak to our chapter as vice-chairman of the association in 1991. That first encounter with Les changed the course of my career in numerous ways.
• I became an Accredited Business Communicator in 1992. It served as a significant barometer of my career up to that point and led me to learn skills and gain experience where I needed to.
• I served three years on the IABC Executive Board, which enabled me to meet top communicators from all over the world, to visit interesting cities I otherwise might not have visited, and to learn how to lead.
• I have served two terms as president of my home chapter, which also gave me much-needed experience in leadership and management.
• I have made more friends than I can count — communicators from all over the world, many of whom are the “rock stars” of our profession.

My membership and participation in IABC has opened countless doors for me and prepared me for the work I’m doing now. I owe a lot to the association.

That’s why it breaks my heart that my home chapter and many others like it are struggling to retain members, much less grow, and to attract more than a handful of people to monthly meetings. Even more heartbreaking is that the leadership of IABC — both volunteer and staff – don’t seem interested in doing anything to help.

IABC has focused its attention on global growth and services provided at the international level, especially over the last 10 years. This is a fine and appropriate thing for a global organization to do — but not at the expense of local chapters. Chapters are where IABC members live. If we lose the chapters, we lose the lifeblood of the association.

IABC/Richmond once was considered a leader among mid-sized chapters. It was vibrant and active. As we recalled last night, coming to an IABC/Richmond meeting was an energizing experience. Now the chapter is struggling, but it is not because of mismanagement or lack of effort by local volunteers. Understanding the problem — and, more important, what to do about it — requires more resources and experience than IABC/Richmond leaders can muster. And the Richmond chapter is not alone. This scenario is playing out in many other chapters, especially in North America.

It’s interesting that just this week I received a mass e-mail from IABC — over the signatures of IABC Chairman Mark Schumann, ABC, and President Julie Freeman, ABC, APR — that tells of a soul-searching exercise the association is undertaking right now. “We recognize that IABC needs to stay relevant and in touch with its members, others in the profession, and the business community,” they write, and the IABC Executive Board is working on ways to do so, including the administration of a member survey.

I hope IABC members send a strong message that the association should do more to support the health of local chapters. The experience and expertise of IABC volunteer leaders and staff should be focused on helping chapters figure out ways to boost local membership and participation. We need help. I’ve served on my chapter’s board numerous times and have tried to help crack this nut, but it’s time to call in the reinforcements.

It would be a shame to watch IABC die from the ground up, but that is what will happen if chapters don’t receive the support they need and deserve.

The Secret to Working with Lawyers

I’m not really a lawyer hater.

In a recent post about secrets communicators will never tell you, I said that we’ll do anything to avoid getting the Legal department to review our work. This is true probably 99% of the time. When our work gets into the hands of corporate lawyers, it usually returns a mere shell of its previous form.

There is, however, that 1%. And I must admit that I have had the great fortune of being in that 1%.

When I edited the monthly employee publication at Capital One, I had a wonderful working relationship with the company’s general counsel. He rarely changed anything, but he raised excellent questions and red-flagged statements that were unclear or might lead to trouble. (This was more than 10 years ago when the company was just starting up; I can’t attest to how these things work at the company now that it has grown.)

I’ve also had a good experience with one of my clients that owns a number of consumer products companies. This corporation operates in an environment where lawyers must be extremely cautious. Yet, our team — which primarily writes content for the company’s intranet and some executive speeches — has developed a good working relationship with legal counsel over the years.

What is the common denominator in these experiences? What’s the secret to working with lawyers?

It’s really very simple and it’s right before our noses: communication.

I’ve especially found this to be the case with my client. At first, our team and the Legal department had a fairly typical communicator-lawyer relationship. Then, we invited our function’s lawyer to our weekly meeting so that we could understand the kinds of things that cause Legal’s hearts to skip beats. We learned a lot about the laws and regulations governing the industry and about corporate separateness for an entity that owns several companies. We also enlightened the lawyer on how communicators work and how important it is for us to tell a compelling, interesting story in order to get messages across to audiences. We agreed on which issues were non-negotiable and which ones could slide, which ones would expose the corporation to risk and which ones were benign.

From that point, our relationship with the Legal department steadily improved. Now we view the lawyers much more as business partners and less as threats to our ability to do our jobs. This is not to say we don’t still have our disagreements (and the lawyers usually win). But things are much better now.

We communicators  love to complain about lawyers and how they surgically remove all creativity from our work. But how many of us, in the words of Stephen Covey, seek first to understand and then to be understood? My advice is to bite the bullet, bite your lip if you have to, and sit down with your company’s lawyers. It might just be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

OK, beautiful might be pushing it. They’re still lawyers, after all.