Bloghound

The greatest impact of Web 2.0 on our culture is that people expect to have a voice and input into company and organizational decisions. Sure, this has always been true to some extent, but today people are taking action when they feel that management is ignoring them. (Note to executives: while you may feel like you are communicating, that’s different from making people feel heard. How they feel is often more important than all the usual rational communications strategies.)

One example: last week nurses at a local hospital — Kent Hospital in Rhode Island — voted 290 to 214 to join the United Nurses and Allied Professionals union. The reason? The nurses said that didn’t feel like they were being heard.

In a story in the Providence Journal psychiatric nurse  Debbie Almeida said, “Over the years the whole climate has changed here. We felt we no longer had a voice in things.”

Nurse Rose Desnoyers added, “The reason I wanted to see a union here was basically for respect. Money is not the issue.”

With the community and social networking tools available, it’s much easier to open up discussions and invite employees to engage in a genuine way and in a large scale. The only obstacle is management mindset.

We’re working on one project where the senior management initially poo-poo’d our recommendation to set up an online community for employees to talk about the issues. “They hardly use email.”  “They won’t participate.” ” What if someone starts trouble.” “This is more of a working class crowd, they’re not into that Web stuff.”

Instead of taking no, we created a private community using Ning, put up some discussion forums, showed it to management and suggested we invite employees in and try it. Worse case, we close it.  The response from employees has been quite good. People are offering insightful ideas in the community. Others are talking to their friends at work not in the community and telling them that management is really trying and the community shows it.

Our only obstacle: the company’s corporate parent blocked employees from being able to access the community at work. So people have to access the community from home and use their personal emails to register. And, due to hourly employee regulations, we have had to explain to folks that the community is optional. If they felt it was mandatory for their jobs and could only access it at home, the lawyers felt that we would be liable; employees might think, they warned, that looking at the community at home was part of work and demand to be paid overtime.

Fortunately, the CEO we’re working with is a risk-taker, squarely focused on his employees and his customers. The lawyers and corporate naysayers are secondary.

We’re working with another client who has yet to embrace social media but whose employees are also being courted by unions.  This company’s lawyers, too, block employees from being able to access the corporate intranet at home due to the same fears about hourly workers. And senior management and the lawyers worry about what might happen if they open up discussions and forums. What if someone starts trouble?

Seems to me that be trouble is already in the works. The risk of not opening up and really listening to employees — and acting on their often very good suggestions or helping them understand why their thoughtful ideas can’t be implemented — is unionization. And with unionization comes management issues of another magnitude.

In reading about the nurses at Kent Hospital it’s clear to me that they love their jobs and have a passion about the hospital.  Same with our clients’ employees. Most people want to work for successful organizations and most willing to share ideas have good ideas.

So why not learn how to really listen so that people are heard?

PS — If anyone has examples of how to get around legal issues, and open up employee communities and corporate Intranets so people can access from home, please share!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.