Recently one of the team sent round a request for feedback about internal communications and how we could make our new office a great place to work. This hit a nerve and I sent this back...
I know this exercise is about posters round the office and stuff like that, but I'm going to hi-jack to get serious for a moment.
Comms in a large company is about management "delivering a message" to the staff. Whether we hear it or agree with it is irrelevant: the job is done when the words are spoken. We're a publicly-quoted company and Stock Exchange regulations mean that management can only tell is what they have already told the Stock Exchange. Unless it is has no market significance. I like (our senior manager's) weekly note, but the rest of the printed comms and the articles on the Intranet are internal PR and describe a world where everything is good and the sun always shines. Not the company I work in.
Can we make this a great place to work? Not when so many other people seem to be busy making it frustrating and irritating to work here. In the short time since the takeover, the bureaucracy has run completely out of control. I am far from the only person who feels this way. Here are just some of the irritations:
I have 10 passwords for internal systems from logging on to my laptop to making travel bookings. I could get more but simply don’t use the additional systems. The existing systems have out-dated organisation charts, names and job titles. Every time we want to use a new system, we have to tell it our details.
We have managers who have been in post for six months and more and are still not registered with the bureaucracy for their relevant sign-offs.
The data security measures come across as distrust. We are not the enemy, hackers and and organised criminal are, but we are treated as if we are going to steal and misuse data at every opportunity. The security is also at times farcical: we sat through a DVD about data security that told us to shred newspapers! We had internal comms written by someone who didn't know the very important difference between deleting and shredding a file. When I asked why the company had introduced lock-down on its computers, the answer was that most of the staff could not be trusted to use their computers sensibly.
We have an IT support desk that doesn’t know what software it supports. We have restrictions on the size of e-mail attachments but no company-wide way of sending large files to each other. We have no collaboration software – which you can get for free from Google Docs!
We have no documentation for the databases we use – even the Group Data specialists say they would talk to the person with product knowledge to find out which tables are the “good” ones. We have no official support from Group Data.
We have an integration process so out of touch with the business it was going to implement an unworkable solution to providing Brand information – until we found out by chance and raised hell. That's just one example and I have no doubt I will find others as I get more involved. Never forget that the grand plan dismisses the people now, but integrates the systems in two years' time. There is no world in which that is a sensible decision.
The Balanced Scorecard process took a senior manager two hours to complete, of which thirty minutes was spent on a helpline. He asked us to bear with it and fill in the forms. How about that he said that we were not to waste our time on it until HR made it useable? It shouldn't be as unthinkable as it sounds.
How many hours are wasted by all this? How many managers have decided that their job is simply to engage with the bureaucracy and have given up trying to do any productive work? How much goodwill does the company lose and how much morale does it damage?
These details add up to a feeling that won't go away because someone puts cookies out every day.
What it feels like to work here is that we achieve what we do despite the organisation, not because of it; it feels like we are here for the benefit of the “support” functions, not that they are here to support us; it feels like the organisation sacrifices productivity and morale for the appearance of compliance and it feels like we are not trusted. Above all it feels like any request to change anything will be denied because there are no resources, and any complaint will be spun right back as if it's a good thing. This is why the majority say they do not think that management will do anything about the results of the staff survey.
Could this be a great place to work? Let's get real - this will never be Google. Could this be a better place to work? Start by fixing the air conditioning before it gets to June and we're all sweltering. Get my managers the sign-offs they need so we don't have to keep going to other managers for signatures. Get us an official Group Data support person / mentor for six months so we can learn all we need to. And while I'm having dreams - make our procurement intranet as easy to use as Amazon. As for decoration? In my dreams we have a budget for some decent art - the Contemporary Arts Society can help there (hell, the guys at the Seven Dials Club did a good enough job) - otherwise I would prefer bare walls to point-of-sale posters.
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