Principled Persuasion in Employee Communication

Mike Churchman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351909013
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Principled Persuasion in Employee Communication highlights a new but significant dilemma for organisational leaders. Will they continue on the same track that, since the nineteenth century, has led them to exert increasing control over their employees? Or will they take another path, one that leads towards a new type of working environment where the culture encourages freedom of communication and movement? This book argues for an approach to employee communication that sets out to liberate employees from the stifling constraints that organisations continue to impose on them. Principled Persuasion is so-called because it uses persuasive techniques, based on clear principles, to create new, forward-looking organisational cultures. It sets out to increase employee happiness and minimise the harms done to employees at work. It grounds itself on a strong ethical base composed of fundamental, universal principles. It introduces a new approach to the use of language, not only calling for more clarity and meaning in organisational communication, but also for a more conscious use of rhetorical techniques to change vocabulary, metaphors and internal dialogue for the better. Make no mistake, most organisations have totally underrated the strategic importance of employee communication. Principled Persuaders understand that the key to dealing with the unpredictable events about to unfold in the twenty-first century will be a new way of communicating with the workforce. The flexibility, adaptability and innovation that will be needed to survive and prosper in coming decades can only be achieved by liberating employees, not imprisoning them further in established systems and processes.

PART I

A CONTINUING JOURNEY

CHAPTER 1

Pathways from the Past: The Evolution of Employee Communication

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.¹

What follows is a familiar story, but looked at from a different angle. It’s a story of two mighty forces struggling with each other. It’s a drama that continues to the present day. On one side are employers, intent on controlling their workers. On the other side are individual employees with a strong desire for more rewarding, happier lives at work. This tension between ‘power from above’ and ‘power from below’ will need to be resolved in the twenty-first century.

As you’ll see, internal communication from management down to employees has evolved as an arm of command and control. Feeding off emerging theories about how people think, in the late twentieth century the art of persuasion in organisations took the form of Motivational Communication. In this chapter, I’m going to show you how this happened by looking at the evolution of employee communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Let’s start by taking an overview. On the next page you will find a summary of the evolution of employee communication. You can see the ‘milestones’, the big step-changes that have taken place over the years, the effect they had on employee communication, and a broad timeline.² We’ll use these milestones as a structure for this chapter.

The Evolution of Employee Communication

Milestone	Impact on employee communication	Timeline
Arrival of large-scale production and standardisation	Instruction on how to make products and supervision	Late eighteenth century
Standard products made by machines	Inculcation of the Christian work ethic	Early nineteenth century onwards
Very large organisations begin to form	Paternalistic – company newspapers – works councils	Mid nineteenth century onwards
Scientific management is introduced	Instruction on how to carry out specific actions and supervision	Early twentieth century
The rise of industrial psychology	Understanding dawns that workers have minds of their own	1920s/1930s
Theories of how to motivate workers begin to emerge	Attention paid to ‘management styles’	1940s–1960s
The post-war golden age of full employment and the rise of planning	Communication dominated by unions, the collective voice, ‘us’ and ‘them’	1950s–1970s
Managements begin to use communication to motivate employees and improve performance	Shift from internal PR to internal marketing – missions, visions and the language of empowerment	1980s–1990s
New communication channels expand rapidly	Employee communication becomes strategic – the language of engagement	2000–2020

Command and Control

Before the nineteenth century, the lives of most working people were spent in the fields or the household. Craftsmen and ‘journeymen’, the core labourers, were relatively independent. They were multi-taskers, able to design, make and set tools, and complete the whole job. For most workers, the relationship with the master, whether good or bad, would have been a close one. Communication between them was personal.

All this began to change by the middle of the eighteenth century. Large factories sprang up. In England by 1759, John Taylor’s toy factory employed 600 people and, by 1770, Matthew Boulton’s steam engine works had around 1,000 employees. The world’s first mass consumer markets were beginning to appear and manufacturers were quick to spot the opportunities.

Take Josiah Wedgwood, for example. One of the pioneers of consumerism, he realised customers wanted crockery that exactly matched the products advertised in his catalogue. But maintaining consistency in pottery manufacture was seriously difficult. The workmanship of the individual potters varied considerably. Specialisation³ had already taken hold in the potteries. One craftsman no longer had responsibility for all stages of manufacture; jobs were split into specific tasks. Yet the workers still had some control over the final appearance of the product.

Wedgwood took this control away by splitting the work into even more separate tasks. The craftsman’s freedom to influence the final form of the pottery was completely eliminated. Designers determined style, colour and ornamentation. Men had to work to exact sets of instructions, carefully watched by supervisors. So by the late eighteenth century, a basic template of employee communication had been established. ‘This is what you should do, this is how you should do it, and I’ll be keeping an eye on you’. This is pure command and control – a simple formula that still applies in millions of workplaces across the world today.

Indoctrination

The next big step in the quick march of industrialisation was the manufacture of standard products by machine. The first products to be manufactured by machine in their entirety were ships’ pulleys, in 1801.⁴ The arrival of machines intensified the working day. Human beings became extensions of the machine. Masses of men, women and children were used up like raw material. In the nineteenth century, many employers had a total disregard for the biological limits of their workers.

Employers, though, were assisted by a form of employee communication that took place well away from the factory floor, in church. Preachers taught that poorly paid and exhausted workers could expect their reward in heaven. Working people were instructed to be obedient to authority for the good of their souls. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a passer-by on a Sunday morning could hear the congregation singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, including the words:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

Even if they could afford to go to the music hall to relax, they had to listen to some cheery chappy singing:

So work boys work and be contented

As long as you’ve enough to buy a meal

The man you may rely, will be wealthy by and by

If he’ll only put his shoulder to the wheel.⁵

The ethos of the time was ‘stay in your place and do what your betters tell you to do’. Max Weber’s identification and analysis of what came to be called the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’⁶ has been criticised for over-stating its effect. But it’s impossible to understand why there was so little active resistance to terrible working conditions without taking into account that the workforce was being indoctrinated with Christian precepts. This ethic was based on the belief that hard work equated with piety, and material success in life could be seen as a sign of God’s favour. By contrast, an unwillingness to work hard, and being in poverty, were seen as signs of a lack of inner grace. Slacking and idleness were deadly sins.

This belief system worked well for employers, who, after all, lived in a completely different world from their employees. Novelist and politician Benjamin Disraeli described the facts of social life. The nation, said one of his characters, is divided into rich and poor:

between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, and are not governed by the same laws.⁷

Employee communication needs to be seen in its broader social context. During the nineteenth century there’s no doubt that religious indoctrination helped to keep workers docile and compliant. Hard-pressed workers would effectively ‘police’ themselves. And before you think this is all ancient history, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that employees are still surrounded by the quasi-religious language of ‘missions’ and ‘visions’. After all, today’s Motivational Communication sets out to ‘align’ employees and inculcate values that will encourage them to be more committed and productive.

Paternalism

As the Industrial Revolution gathered speed and intensity, some employers saw it as their duty to be kinder towards their workers. Prominent amongst this type of employer were non-conformists such as Quakers, Congregationalists and Unitarians. They felt a sense of Christian mission towards their employees, which took the shape of a commitment to their social welfare. But there was a sharper edge to their benevolence. They realised it made good business sense. Looking after employees built loyalty to the company and its owners, as well as reducing absenteeism and staff turnover. What’s more, it fitted naturally into the prevailing class system of deferential workers and superior bosses.

Many employers, large and small, encouraged their workers to feel part of a ‘family’. At Cadbury in England, for example, personal interactions between bosses and workers, gifts and other signs of kindness helped to create an environment in which employees could idealise ‘Mr George’ and ‘Mr Richard’ as generous benefactors, even father figures. Paternalist employers sought to promote good morals and habits of behaviour amongst their workers, seeing them rather like children that needed to be brought up properly.

In 1905, chocolate magnate, B. Seebohm Rowntree, expressed the view that:

Probably much more beneficial influence upon the character of the working classes may be exercised through the medium of their places of employment than is at present exercised by the churches.⁸

There were significant and real benefits for workers in these more benevolent organisations. They introduced profit sharing, sickness and accident insurance and help with savings accounts. As organisations grew larger, the list of benefits expanded to encompass housing,⁹ pensions, paid holidays, savings accounts, maternity homes, ophthalmic and dental clinics, sports clubs, recreation grounds, works dances, science classes and other educational programmes.

In these large organisations it became impossible for the employers to know their employees by name. Gone were the days when they could stroll about the factory floor to show the personal touch. By the late nineteenth century, ‘house newspapers’ appeared on the scene.¹⁰ They were seen as a way of plugging the gap that had opened up between employers and their employees. They were filled with content designed to strengthen the employees’ sense of being part of one big family. Some organisations began to set up works councils to channel communication down to ordinary employees. This process was carefully controlled. There was no opportunity for what we now call ‘upward feedback’. Employees were told what the employers wanted them to know and, no doubt, made to feel grateful that they were being told anything at all.

So, was paternalism a good or a bad thing? Doubtless many employees benefited from a more caring attitude towards them. Equally, the whole system can be seen as one that demanded loyalty, unquestioning obedience to the rules and conformance to certain standards of behaviour in return for those benefits. Anyway, only a small proportion of the total workforce was able to enjoy these privileges. In many workplaces conditions could be positively Darwinian in the worst sense of the term. At the dockyards, for example, brass rods would be thrown into the crowd of unemployed men waiting outside the gates. Only those fit enough to fight off the others and get the rods back to the gate were hired.

Workers as Dumb Animals

In 1915, a stonemason was busy engraving the words ‘The Father of Scientific Management’ on the tombstone of Frederick Winslow Taylor. This American mechanical engineer ushered in the next phase of industrial change by applying the new science of dynamics, the study of flows, to the way people carried out their tasks at work. His method was systematically to measure, analyse and then determine the ideal set of actions for any particular task that would increase productivity and reduce waste. Famous for using his stopwatch to measure the speed of specific actions, Taylor’s new way of managing people sought to eliminate any vestiges of individual initiative.¹¹ A hundred years earlier, products had been standardised, now the actions of individual workers were to be standardised too.

Taylor cared little for the feelings of the workers. It’s not certain that he saw them as human beings. He ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I A CONTINUING JOURNEY
• PART II SIGNPOSTS FOR THE ROAD AHEAD
• PART III MAKING CONVERSATION ALONG THE WAY
• PART IV NEXT STEPS
• Index