Jim Shaffer Group



May 2008 Recession-Proof Your Communication Department! What You Should Be Doing Now The best way to guard against being first on the chopping block during a recession is to become an indispensable part of the business--meaning you're doing something that customers and shareholders think is important. Communication departments today are scrambling to re-shape their work so it adds measurable value to their companies. They're shifting their focus away from merely publishing slick newsletters, making pretty videos and building friendly intranet sites and toward attacking communication problems that undermine the company's ability to compete. Just as HR, engineering, supply chain management, marketing and manufacturing reinvented themselves over the past 20 years, communication departments are finding new ways to add measurable value to their company. Here's what your department should be doing. Measuring the importance, effectiveness and cost of work the department does and then re-deploying resources away from unimportant work and toward important work--work that matters to operating and financial performance. One Fortune 100 company identified hundreds of thousands of communication dollars that were not adding measurable value. They re-deployed the resources to places where they improved the company's ROI. Reducing mixed messages that confuse people and diffuse productivity. One company reduced damage in its supply chain by nearly 70% by better balancing its focus on safety, quality and productivity. Before the re-balancing, the company was saying quality was important but was acting in a way that communicated that productivity was all that mattered. Improving cross-function collaboration to improve system uptime, get new products to market faster and increase sales. A huge shipping company improved export sales by 23% by improving collaboration among sales and operations people and by removing mixed messages that confused people about what was important. Eschewing "gee-wiz" technology fads that may be fun to play with but have no track record whatsoever in improving company performance or generating a return on the technology's investment. Often perceived as corporate second-class citizens, new, refocused communication departments are finding solid footing by attacking business problems that no one else has been able to solve. But it requires a business shift—from disseminating news and information to eliminating communication breakdowns that hurt operating and financial performance. It's a shift from process and output to results and outcomes. Recessions Are Good If You Know What To Do With Them By Chuck Johnston, member of Jim Shaffer Group Partners There's an old saying: "If life gives you lemons then make lemonade". The current economic downturn represents lemons. Some companies are reacting wisely by closing facilities or reducing costs that should have been closed and reduced months ago. Others seem to be acting out of desperation--jettisoning part of the workforce to create short-term cost reductions. Sustainable reductions in expenses come from changing how you do business and eliminating no and low-value added work. You still need profitable revenue growth. If irrational downsizing just creates more lemons, how do you make lemonade? Accept the fact that economic downturns eventually end. Position yourself now for that time while your competitors are irrationally chopping. Reposition based on your business strategy. Rethink the work that's performed and how you can thoughtfully eliminate low value-added and no value-added work. It's there. You need to find it. Retool with improved processes that increase quality, service and speed and reduce costs. Resize as needed to assure that the firm has the skills and knowledge in the right quantities at the right time in the right place and at the right cost. Make lemonade to outsmart and leapfrog the competition. Too Many Companies Accept Substandard People Performance Why do so many companies accept substandard performance knowing that higher performance is available to them if they'd capitalize on their underused people capacity? Here's the issue. We know statistically that engaged people outperform unengaged people. Engagement represents a condition where people are willing and able to help their companies succeed by volunteering their discretionary effort on the job. In other words, they're willing to go the extra mile. Companies with engaged people are likely to have stronger revenue growth, lower costs and higher income. Engaged people are 87 percent less likely to leave the company, so once they're engaged, they tend to be yours. But, only about a quarter of the employees in North America are engaged? This represents a huge underuse of the people capacity in many businesses. During the past year we worked with a company whose numbers were exceptional on the surface. But their engagement scores told us there was a lot of untapped potential within the workforce. Though they were "making their numbers," they were doing so at a huge and unnecessary cost. There's an opportunity in every organization to rev up the internal engines, especially in an economic slowdown when every piece of the organization should be adding maximum value. In most cases the gains come free because you're already paying the people. You're just not getting all you're paying for. Over-Surveyed or Under-Responded? People often tell me their employees are over-surveyed. As in, "we can't do another survey; our people are already over-surveyed." Frankly, I've never met an over-surveyed employee. I've met plenty who don't think anyone paid attention to what they told the company in the last survey or the one before that, but never anyone who has been listened to way too much. When you ask, listen to and respond, employees will view themselves as the beneficiaries of this listening (survey) process--even when they're told why something can't be done. If you think your employees are over-surveyed, don't stop surveying. Just start responding to what they told you the last time you surveyed. Connecting the Dots in St. Louis I spoke recently at the National Gathering of the Games in St. Louis, Missouri. This is the largest gathering of open book management companies. Open book management is a leadership philosophy created by my friend Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome. Open book management is grounded in the notion of creating businesses of business people where everyone in the organization thinks and acts like business owners. People in open book companies are steeped in business literacy, work daily to improve the financials, have huge amounts of financial information available to them (hence, the term open book) and their rewards and recognition are tied to financial performance. If you ever need evidence that open communication environments can cause business performance to skyrocket, benchmark an open book company and start with Jack's SRC Holdings in Springfield, Mo. Click here to see Jim's slides.

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