By Paul Waadevig
Senior Consultant, Unified Communications
Frost & Sullivan
February 2009
Most companies try to "fix" perceived problems by addressing the parts of the corporate culture that are easy to see. Some quick-fixes include holding Friday beer bashes and company picnics or adding fringe benefits and perks. None of these actions will have a powerful or lasting effect on a company's culture.
So, if the powerful part of culture is invisible, how can you affect it? Through conversation. Conversations have the power to make the invisible visible. Language is not merely descriptive, it is generative. Language and conversations have the power to generate a new, powerful future and to create a cultural energy field that will support and sustain this future.
http://www.culturebuilders.com/understanding_corporate_culture.html
As described in Part 1 of this article, the virtual workplace, with its advantages in an increasingly globalized and dispersed world, is not going away. In fact, it's likely to become more pervasive, and any company trying to fight this trend would be at a disadvantage. Technology has enabled the virtual workplace but now it also needs to step in and help companies maintain the corporate culture that has been severely compromised in the process.
A comprehensive conferencing services suite with audio, video and web capability is the only communications technology that fully incorporates many of the subtle relationship building queues normally associated with face-to-face contact while providing a sustainable ROI for the company. It is relationships - not written vision statements, corporate shirts or golf tournaments - that foster a strong corporate culture with all its advantages.
The Conference Board released a report on February 28, 2005 stating that "Americans are increasingly unhappy with their jobs. The decline in job satisfaction is widespread among workers of all ages and across all income brackets." The report showed that:
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25% of American workers are just "showing up to collect a paycheck"
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40% of workers feel disconnected from their employers
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Two out of every three workers do not identify with or feel motivated to drive their employers' business goals and objectives.
They also found that money cannot buy satisfaction. Job satisfaction has declined across all income levels and only 14% of workers earning $50,000 or more are "very satisfied" with their jobs. The report says that, "Rapid technological changes, rising productivity demands and changing employee expectations have all contributed to the decline in job satisfaction."
There are two ways to address these issues: 1) increase pay and/or benefits so it essentially forces the workforce to perform, or 2) address the root cause of the problem. Clearly, the overall cost of the first option is not sustainable over the long term. Also, a number of studies have shown that pay and job satisfaction are only loosely correlated and the effect of pay increases is short-lived.
This leaves us with addressing the root cause of the dissatisfaction. One way to do this would be to centralize the enterprise into a functional campus with activities and culture that foster loyalty. This was popularized by companies like Microsoft and Apple in the 1980's and '90's. Unfortunately, those days are gone due to changes in the marketplace or were never an option due to the dispersed type of business many companies are engaged in.
As we have seen from the Google example in part one of this series, in the virtual workplace, conferencing services can tie the worker to the organization in ways that cannot be done by any other means, short of the single-campus option above. Conferencing services provide a low cap-ex route to improving communication during these difficult times. However, a comprehensive change in how communication is conducted in the enterprise must accompany the technology to make it effective.
One extreme example is a company I visited a few years ago that had an executive video camera aimed at everyone's workspace - basically, from the perspective of someone coming into their space. If you wanted to talk to someone, you simply looked on your monitor to see if they were sitting there, initiate the link and say, "got a second?" This was a small and very decentralized company, and I'm not saying this would be a good option for most companies, but it does illustrate how conferencing technology can be integrated with the work flow to increase worker affinity.
So you're not Google, and the executive video camera idea seems a little over-the-top for your company - where can you start? Here are some practical ways to integrate conferencing effectively to create a more "sticky" organization:
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Set up an organization wide schedule of "all hands meetings" with different formats. For example, audio on a bi-weekly basis and video every quarter.
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Perform all human resources evaluations via videoconferencing. Annual or quarterly evaluations are important to your employees. By moving this to video, it shows that you take it just as seriously.
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All cross functional teams - that is, workers from different departments on a special team with a high value goal - should kick off with a video conference and then set up a variety of web, video and audio calls over the life of the team.
Clearly with conferencing, presence, IM, and UC, the above example can be approximated in most companies so that even the most decentralized can be more "sticky" while maintaining productivity and morale in these difficult times.